November 15, 2012

• Vesuvius

  Isn’t it weird how we’re picking the content of our distant future thoughts? Let’s say I choose to hang out with someone named Bert. This is choosing to have a friendship with Bert. Then in five years say Bert asks me ‘Do you think I should put a toolshed in my backyard?’ and I summon all the things I know about Bert and Bert’s yard to answer that question. In those moments that is what the content of my life is made up of. But those moments are contingent on that decision to hang out with Bert five years ago.

  Your decisions aren’t as local as you think; you are currently deciding what the possible worries and questions and appreciations are going to be in your mind in ten years.

  The content of our lives is also dictated by how long we think they’ll be. If your life lasted for ten minutes you would think it was a whole different sort of thing. Who knows the things you’d shout and the places you’d run. If lives lasted for a thousand years maybe we would care much less about how they go; we have so long to live them after all. But as it is the care we have is compressed into what we think we will be seventy or eighty years; we thus have passion for it, but the passion is smeared across some time, such that we still talk about trivialities, we are still living in slow motion, we can still be tempted into believing that we are eternal, that there will be always be time later to do what is important.

  Every moment is your death; don’t you know?

  I like that there is a democracy about the things that happen. Every thing that happens happens just as much as any other thing that happened. Me writing this sentence has the same status of ‘being in reality’ as Obama’s dreams last night or the last supervolcanic eruption on earth 600,000 years ago or when Kofi Annan last brushed his teeth. They all happened to the same degree; no moment happens more or less than any other moment. Moments are a democracy where every vote stains reality to the same infinite degree.

  You can’t really experience that there are other people. In physics there is a problem about observing some electrons that they try to fire through slits in a panel. They want to know where the electron is going but to see where it is going they have to shine light on it; but once the photon of light hits the electron, the electron’s course is altered. Thus it impossible to see the exact course of the electron; the observing undoes what there is to be observed. This is how people are in all your relationships; you want to know them, but in getting to know them you are affecting their status as a person totally independent of you. Even if they weren’t reporting their life to you, but you were just spying on them with cameras, your interpretations and thoughts would distort them out of their natural shape; every person you see you cannot really see.

  There is something sad about being a perspective, about inhabiting a specific four-limbed location of reality. That you already have your thoughts and can’t unhave the ones you have. You’re stuck.

  There’s a moment when you’re reading or watching a story that it suddenly isn’t a story any more. It’s a moment where you are drenched with the reality of the experience. In that moment you see far away from your life of mere dreams into a world that exists as much as anything ever could.

  Have you had that moment about your own life yet? Or are the stars still just lines in a shelved book to you?

  Write down what you worried about today. In ten years – all new worries.

  We are skaters on thin ice. Every person you see is skating along, no matter where they are – in a telephone booth, in a dance club, at the dinner table. We are skaters on thin ice. Along we skate, until the ice breaks and we fall into a river that is either rushing towards eternity or is a simple sinking into a black oblivion. We are skaters on thin ice. That is all we know, and whether the river is flowing somewhere or not, it will be cold, so cold.

  I don’t want to die! is it real yet? a democracy of moments. a death in every one. who do you love?

  I will cry at so many graves.

  She asked “what changes people?” and I said “everything.”

  Time is so sad. Earth is such a tiny planet but it’s where I drive to work every day. Isn’t that weird how we answer the question of ‘where is your home’ differently depending on what we’re thinking about? We might say a street name and number, or a city, or that planet earth is our home planet. But what if you think about the entire universe? Do you feel this is your home? Or are we strangers? We are strangers. But where did we come from? It does not matter. What matters is that you cannot have a home in a place where you settled. Remember the last thing you learned? Why did you have to learn it? It is because this is not your home.

  Do you know that if you forgot something really important you wouldn’t know it? I was in front of a big window at night and I sat there and I hoped I wasn’t forgetting something. I hoped really hard. But once you are older there is no way of knowing. I think I have forgotten something. Maybe that moment where it was all real. But there is no way of knowing; if something is forgotten it is nowhere. Give me a list of things you are forgetting. “Get the socks on my dresser, call my parents, go Christmas shopping.” Why don’t you do them? “I’ve forgotten them.”

  You can see as little in a person as you want. But you cannot see as much in them as you want. It is sadly asymmetrical – we can hate everyone as much as we please, but our capacity to know and love eventually hits a limit. Some people simply cannot see each other.

  Notice how everything I think about is all the same? I think about this too. But didn’t you read how it’s sad that we have to be a perspective, that we stain everything we see with our thoughts? I get really happy when I get intoxicated with some activity or some person, so much that I stop thinking all these things. In those moments I forget all these things; which you would think I would think is a bad thing because I think forgetting is such a bad thing, but in those moments, I’ve forgotten how bad I think forgetting is.

  Sometimes I wonder about a person, ok, how seriously should we be taking all this? You seem to be saying a lot of things, but is it all that serious? If I followed you around, would I notice you trying to harmonize everything in your life toward truth and life and that you care about that a lot? Or in the future are you going to look back on this time in your life and think ‘wow, I was such a fool’? Because I’m working really hard on the whole life-friendship-suffering-death-God thing, so I need to know exactly how much I should factor in everything you’re doing and saying.

  Maybe that’s why I like reading Kierkegaard so much. You can feel him trembling from behind each word.

  Why does it have to be so hard!

  Some things just punch me, they punch me real hard.

  Like what?

  Like everything in here -

  you know what this is?

  Sentiments. You always put sentiments into words. That is how you know it is a sentiment.

  But what are people? People are things with moods.

  You – no, I – I am a big conflicting mess of moods and sentiments.

  My moods contradict my sentiments.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could believe we were only our sentiments?

  But we’re not – we’re also our moods.

  And gosh,

  Apologizing is so hard.

  • 12:58 am
  • 2 Comments