The value of life eh?
Perhaps it is from my own bastardized preconceptions that the following stems--what truly is the value of life? I must say this has been sparked entirely from a phrase where Camus was, in quite a sarcastic fashion, proclaiming the old to be useless. It would be a lie to say that I have not subscribed to this mentality on occassion when dealing with the elderly as a professional or merely on the open road, however I think this can even be explained in a way I'll attempt later on...*ahem*. First let us clear a few things up, the basic rules of life: we live and as a consequence eventually we die; although one could argue in regard to either literal (biological) or figurative (essence, soul?) points to this, they're a rather mute point to the end that I'm trying to present, so we'll save that for another time. Why is it that we assume that the old are any closer to death than we are--and yet this tends to be the basis of our arguments against their apt handling of life, merely because they are not able to control life in a way that we are able to, and that they were formerly able to, we jump to the conclusion that, yes, they are at death's door. Yet at any moment death can embed its tattered woes into us, and it is when we do not know death that we do not know of its untimely onset, rather it's only when we have known it do we know it, and furthermore do we know of seizing the day, seizing our lives. Ah, here I will become slightly metaphysical: it is when you live your life for death, when you give up on the day, when you no longer acknowledge life, THAT is when death is yours--that is truly the death of life and the birth of shells! So our old are not useless, they who are with life are alive... ah so age is the trivial element, it is grasping life that provides the pinnacle of a day, month, year, lifetime; those who willingly abandon the privalege of living the life provided for them are those who are useless and dead. Yet even those who believe that they are living life can be misled when chasing dreams that are not of their own design: those whose lives are funded and purchased. In complete seriousness, this is a torture worse than death, by merely purchasing for fulfillment of life, all that one does is purchase the bits and pieces of lives, from the owners of corporations, as wreched as theirs, if not a little more lavish. A gold shell is still a shell. Substance can only be made, it can never be bought. This sort of scorn can also be said for those who submit to the fear impressed on their lives by propaganda and paranoia: lives lived in fear are not at all, fear is a device to be used as a tool for understanding, it is NOT meant to be a credo to follow. Examples continued, and so on, and so on. Quickly, I'll sum up the opinion I'm trying to instill with this: the value of life is life lived itself, it cannot be judged aptly by physical means alone, it is truly about the substance, and not entirely the shell which simply prolongs our exposure to this experience (so stay healthy), enjoy it!