The Look On His Face
But I am getting way ahead of myself! Hold on a minute, slow down. I don't think I'm quite ready for that part yet, the part that's all mushy and gooey and happy and full of half-truth and doe eyes and all kinds of other sappy stuff. (Though I must say I intend to do a good job of making even that part cut a little more sharply.)
I forgot my favorite part of that story. Or the past two stories actually. This whole death/forever thing. Because you see, the biggest part of the whole moment, the place you see it really start to influence the rest of life is in how it makes everything else just seem so silly.
There I was, six years old or whatever I was, crying my eyes out about not wanting to live forever, and all these other people were just SITTING THERE, listening to music and munching on popcorn or sipping an over-priced beer or whatever. And I just didn't get it. We're either finite and going to be extinguished one day very soon or we're these infinite beings that go on into eternity. Either way...how can you just sit there? This is big, this is huge!
But maybe it doesn't make as much sense from that angle. Let's leave forever for now. Back to the dismal and bleak feelings of my senior year of high school. I can still remember the one time that they REALLY hit me. It was 5th period, just before lunch. And I was sitting in Calculus class. I'd had another one of these awful, mind-blowing dreams about death and the abyss and all that good stuff the night before, and it was still on my mind. I couldn't get it off of my mind. No trick dispelled. Not trying to pay attention to class discussions, not being late on homework, not even sex.
Sex, by the way, is usually your line of last defense when existential questions come demanding your attention and time. This works for men, anyway, I don't know about for women. Not necessarily having sex, mind you. Just thinking about it, or distracting yourself with certain visual imagery. I remember a particular instance when this point was driven home to me, as I was driving home one evening with my cousin, and we were engaged in one of these really deep philosophical discussions we always got into, and then this absolutely gorgeous young woman wearing next to nothing went jogging by on the sidewalk. It was like hitting a reset button on a computer before saving your program. All the files from the previous conversation application were lost.
But as I was saying, although it quite easily distracted me from my train of thought now, during that particular 5th period, it did not. Nothing did. And I was just sitting there, thinking over and over again about the fact that one day I WILL die, I will end, it will all be over. Not only is this true of me, or for me, it is true of and for everyone else sitting there in the room with me. And yet...they're all sitting there staring at this teacher who is making himself busy showing us how we can know at any moment how much oil is still left in this imaginary oil tube with a parabolic bottom with some oil dripping out the bottom. We're all going to die, and we're sitting there learning calculus! At such moments, this seems so utterly absurd. (Perhaps, you might say, learning calculus is always absurd-after all, in this particular example, wouldn't a better problem to solve be how to get the oil to STOP dripping out the bottom?)
I know I'm not the only one to have ever had this feeling. A few years later, in college, a friend of mine came back from class one day only to get a phone call. His grandfather had died while he was taking notes in calculus class. He didn't have to say anything else. The look on his face said it all. A man he'd loved was dead, gone forever, and he hadn't been told about it so he wouldn't worry and could focus on those all-important calculus notes. What the look on his face said was-what a fucking joke.
But he wasn't laughing.
I forgot my favorite part of that story. Or the past two stories actually. This whole death/forever thing. Because you see, the biggest part of the whole moment, the place you see it really start to influence the rest of life is in how it makes everything else just seem so silly.
There I was, six years old or whatever I was, crying my eyes out about not wanting to live forever, and all these other people were just SITTING THERE, listening to music and munching on popcorn or sipping an over-priced beer or whatever. And I just didn't get it. We're either finite and going to be extinguished one day very soon or we're these infinite beings that go on into eternity. Either way...how can you just sit there? This is big, this is huge!
But maybe it doesn't make as much sense from that angle. Let's leave forever for now. Back to the dismal and bleak feelings of my senior year of high school. I can still remember the one time that they REALLY hit me. It was 5th period, just before lunch. And I was sitting in Calculus class. I'd had another one of these awful, mind-blowing dreams about death and the abyss and all that good stuff the night before, and it was still on my mind. I couldn't get it off of my mind. No trick dispelled. Not trying to pay attention to class discussions, not being late on homework, not even sex.
Sex, by the way, is usually your line of last defense when existential questions come demanding your attention and time. This works for men, anyway, I don't know about for women. Not necessarily having sex, mind you. Just thinking about it, or distracting yourself with certain visual imagery. I remember a particular instance when this point was driven home to me, as I was driving home one evening with my cousin, and we were engaged in one of these really deep philosophical discussions we always got into, and then this absolutely gorgeous young woman wearing next to nothing went jogging by on the sidewalk. It was like hitting a reset button on a computer before saving your program. All the files from the previous conversation application were lost.
But as I was saying, although it quite easily distracted me from my train of thought now, during that particular 5th period, it did not. Nothing did. And I was just sitting there, thinking over and over again about the fact that one day I WILL die, I will end, it will all be over. Not only is this true of me, or for me, it is true of and for everyone else sitting there in the room with me. And yet...they're all sitting there staring at this teacher who is making himself busy showing us how we can know at any moment how much oil is still left in this imaginary oil tube with a parabolic bottom with some oil dripping out the bottom. We're all going to die, and we're sitting there learning calculus! At such moments, this seems so utterly absurd. (Perhaps, you might say, learning calculus is always absurd-after all, in this particular example, wouldn't a better problem to solve be how to get the oil to STOP dripping out the bottom?)
I know I'm not the only one to have ever had this feeling. A few years later, in college, a friend of mine came back from class one day only to get a phone call. His grandfather had died while he was taking notes in calculus class. He didn't have to say anything else. The look on his face said it all. A man he'd loved was dead, gone forever, and he hadn't been told about it so he wouldn't worry and could focus on those all-important calculus notes. What the look on his face said was-what a fucking joke.
But he wasn't laughing.