"Pass me a bottle, Mr. Jones. Believe in me. Help me believe in anything."
"It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree."
-Stevens
I find that I cannot force myself to go to bed at a decent hour. Renee usually goes to bed hours before I do, and she and I both miss being able to fall asleep together like we did early in our marriage. Occasionally, I will give in to her requests and join her in bed around ten o'clock, but usually, I cannot pull myself away from this computer or my books. I can't shake the feeling that if I look hard enough on the internet or through my volumes of poetry and literature, I will find some core truth about human existence that I have so far missed.
I have been searching for this truth for a long time. My childhood, while certainly not the worst, wasn't the best that can be hoped for. I was born to one stable, well-adjusted, loving parent and one unbalanced, depressed, often unloving parent. Such a generalization, of course, doesn't do justice to either parent, but it will suffice for the moment. We were always poor, always living hand to mouth (though I never went hungry and I always had clean clothes), and even as a child as young as six years old, I knew about our family's financial difficulties. My mother, frustrated with being a farmer's wife and no doubt troubled by my enthusiasm for the occupation, told me when I was five that if my father didn't pay his bills the police would come and take him to jail. For a long time after that, I lived in fear for my family's future.
Of course, I was constantly teased in school for not wearing the coolest clothes and shoes. That affected me, but not as much as seeing my father work very hard for not a whole lot of money. For a while, it seemed to me that the whole point to being alive was to make a lot of money so that you didn't have to worry all the time. Gradually, though, my family's financial situation improved, and I became exposed to the upper classes and finer things in life through community theater and, later, academic excellence. My experience with people who had plenty of money taught me very quickly that making money was not the point of human existence. I met people whose souls were dying of boredom. I met people whose only occupation was to make people feel inferior to them. And so, I sat down and actually thought long and hard about what I would do if I had millions of dollars. I thought of a lot of fun things I would like to experience, and then that would be it. Once I'd done those things, I'd be bored.
So once money was ruled out, I began my search for the purpose behind our existence. The initial answer that one comes to on such a search is that helping others is the one thing that gives true satisfaction. But what are you supposed to help others do? Make money? No, they'd only end up being bored. The answer is that you're supposed to help others survive.
And there you have it. The next answer one comes to on a search for the purpose of life. Survival. The whole point to our lives is mere survival. Our duty is to pass on our DNA. We work our whole lives just so we can stay alive and our children can stay alive. My father seemed to confirm this view when he told me, "A man IS his work." When I came to this conclusion, I decided I didn't want to play anymore. It's a stupid game. There's no point to it. We're just going to die anyway. Better sooner than later.
But I couldn't bring myself to take my own life (though I tried). I kept discovering things about the world that filled me with wonder and leveled me with their beauty. These things centered around the world of art and literature. Art and beauty seemed to be things to live for, so I asked myself, "What is art, really?" And I came up with the only possible answer. Art is merely an expression of the way we see the world or an expression of the way we think the world should be. In other words, art is communication.
Communication! If art is something to live for, then communication is something to live for. But what is communication? Communication is, by definition, a connection between two or more human minds. When I communicate, thoughts in my brain are transferred to the brains of other humans via some medium. This brings us to my current understanding of the purpose for human existence (or, at the very least, a reason to live).
Human connection. We are supposed to form human connections before we die. The connections we form are the only parts of us that will survive in this world after we die. (I cannot speak for the next world, as I have not been there yet.) We influence the people with whom we connect, and they in turn pass some part of us onto the people with whom they connect. Those parts of us will still be passed on long after we are dead. I am a mix of the personalities of my two wildly different parents. My parents' personalities were influenced, one way or the other, by their parents.
The more people we connect with, the better we understand the world around us. The more we understand, the better people we become. The better people we become, the more the world becomes a better place. The more the world becomes a better place, the easier it becomes to survive. The easier it is to survive, the more energy we have to form human connections. Problem solved, right? Wrong.
And now, after all of that, we come to why I stay up late searching for a truth.
When I look at the world around me, at human society and culture, I see a world where people actively avoid forming human connections. The music they play on MTV praises meaningless sex and superficial human relationships. TV commercials try to convince us to buy trivial luxuries so that others will be envious of us. Our politicians lie to us and cheat us. We are ruled by greed. Our conventional wisdom tells us, "Don't rush into love." (That's the worst advice I've ever heard.) There is a sub-culture underneath the surface of society in which "respect" is the currency of life. In prison or in the ghetto, if someone disrespects you, that is an excuse for murder. What lunacy! I was watching some documentary on the Discovery Times channel the other day, and a journalist asked a 'no holds barred' fighter, "Do you want people to fear you or like you?" The fighter answered, "I don't care."
"I don't care." That could be the motto for the MTV generation, except that it's really been the motto for every generation the world has ever known. "I don't care. I'm going to do what I want and take as much as I can, and I don't care who it hurts." Such a philosophy might well have been in the minds of record producers, U.S. presidents, CEO's, Nazis, slave owners, feudal lords, Roman Senators and Egyptian pharaohs. Despite our incredible scientific advances, human behavior is little better today than the day when we first walked upright. There is a famous quote by Henry David Thoreau. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That statement is just as true today as the day he wrote it. In Anchorage this summer, a man shot and killed another man over a dance-off that turned sour. He was immediately arrested. At his arraignment, he was dragged from the room while excitedly screaming his apologies to the victim's family. The last thing he did before they managed to get him out of the room was throw his hands up in desperation and scream to the heavens, "Now I killed somebody!"
Why do we do these things to each other?
That's the truth I'm looking for. I want to know why we try to close ourselves off from one another even as we are dying of loneliness. There's another quote by Thoreau. "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." I'm looking for the truth about this self-destructive aspect of human nature so that I can be one of the people striking at the root of evil. I want to know why we hate each other so much, even in our loneliness. I'm looking for the insight to be able to address this part of ourselves and fix it. Once I find it, I will shout it as loud as I can for as long as I can.
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree."
-Stevens
I find that I cannot force myself to go to bed at a decent hour. Renee usually goes to bed hours before I do, and she and I both miss being able to fall asleep together like we did early in our marriage. Occasionally, I will give in to her requests and join her in bed around ten o'clock, but usually, I cannot pull myself away from this computer or my books. I can't shake the feeling that if I look hard enough on the internet or through my volumes of poetry and literature, I will find some core truth about human existence that I have so far missed.
I have been searching for this truth for a long time. My childhood, while certainly not the worst, wasn't the best that can be hoped for. I was born to one stable, well-adjusted, loving parent and one unbalanced, depressed, often unloving parent. Such a generalization, of course, doesn't do justice to either parent, but it will suffice for the moment. We were always poor, always living hand to mouth (though I never went hungry and I always had clean clothes), and even as a child as young as six years old, I knew about our family's financial difficulties. My mother, frustrated with being a farmer's wife and no doubt troubled by my enthusiasm for the occupation, told me when I was five that if my father didn't pay his bills the police would come and take him to jail. For a long time after that, I lived in fear for my family's future.
Of course, I was constantly teased in school for not wearing the coolest clothes and shoes. That affected me, but not as much as seeing my father work very hard for not a whole lot of money. For a while, it seemed to me that the whole point to being alive was to make a lot of money so that you didn't have to worry all the time. Gradually, though, my family's financial situation improved, and I became exposed to the upper classes and finer things in life through community theater and, later, academic excellence. My experience with people who had plenty of money taught me very quickly that making money was not the point of human existence. I met people whose souls were dying of boredom. I met people whose only occupation was to make people feel inferior to them. And so, I sat down and actually thought long and hard about what I would do if I had millions of dollars. I thought of a lot of fun things I would like to experience, and then that would be it. Once I'd done those things, I'd be bored.
So once money was ruled out, I began my search for the purpose behind our existence. The initial answer that one comes to on such a search is that helping others is the one thing that gives true satisfaction. But what are you supposed to help others do? Make money? No, they'd only end up being bored. The answer is that you're supposed to help others survive.
And there you have it. The next answer one comes to on a search for the purpose of life. Survival. The whole point to our lives is mere survival. Our duty is to pass on our DNA. We work our whole lives just so we can stay alive and our children can stay alive. My father seemed to confirm this view when he told me, "A man IS his work." When I came to this conclusion, I decided I didn't want to play anymore. It's a stupid game. There's no point to it. We're just going to die anyway. Better sooner than later.
But I couldn't bring myself to take my own life (though I tried). I kept discovering things about the world that filled me with wonder and leveled me with their beauty. These things centered around the world of art and literature. Art and beauty seemed to be things to live for, so I asked myself, "What is art, really?" And I came up with the only possible answer. Art is merely an expression of the way we see the world or an expression of the way we think the world should be. In other words, art is communication.
Communication! If art is something to live for, then communication is something to live for. But what is communication? Communication is, by definition, a connection between two or more human minds. When I communicate, thoughts in my brain are transferred to the brains of other humans via some medium. This brings us to my current understanding of the purpose for human existence (or, at the very least, a reason to live).
Human connection. We are supposed to form human connections before we die. The connections we form are the only parts of us that will survive in this world after we die. (I cannot speak for the next world, as I have not been there yet.) We influence the people with whom we connect, and they in turn pass some part of us onto the people with whom they connect. Those parts of us will still be passed on long after we are dead. I am a mix of the personalities of my two wildly different parents. My parents' personalities were influenced, one way or the other, by their parents.
The more people we connect with, the better we understand the world around us. The more we understand, the better people we become. The better people we become, the more the world becomes a better place. The more the world becomes a better place, the easier it becomes to survive. The easier it is to survive, the more energy we have to form human connections. Problem solved, right? Wrong.
And now, after all of that, we come to why I stay up late searching for a truth.
When I look at the world around me, at human society and culture, I see a world where people actively avoid forming human connections. The music they play on MTV praises meaningless sex and superficial human relationships. TV commercials try to convince us to buy trivial luxuries so that others will be envious of us. Our politicians lie to us and cheat us. We are ruled by greed. Our conventional wisdom tells us, "Don't rush into love." (That's the worst advice I've ever heard.) There is a sub-culture underneath the surface of society in which "respect" is the currency of life. In prison or in the ghetto, if someone disrespects you, that is an excuse for murder. What lunacy! I was watching some documentary on the Discovery Times channel the other day, and a journalist asked a 'no holds barred' fighter, "Do you want people to fear you or like you?" The fighter answered, "I don't care."
"I don't care." That could be the motto for the MTV generation, except that it's really been the motto for every generation the world has ever known. "I don't care. I'm going to do what I want and take as much as I can, and I don't care who it hurts." Such a philosophy might well have been in the minds of record producers, U.S. presidents, CEO's, Nazis, slave owners, feudal lords, Roman Senators and Egyptian pharaohs. Despite our incredible scientific advances, human behavior is little better today than the day when we first walked upright. There is a famous quote by Henry David Thoreau. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That statement is just as true today as the day he wrote it. In Anchorage this summer, a man shot and killed another man over a dance-off that turned sour. He was immediately arrested. At his arraignment, he was dragged from the room while excitedly screaming his apologies to the victim's family. The last thing he did before they managed to get him out of the room was throw his hands up in desperation and scream to the heavens, "Now I killed somebody!"
Why do we do these things to each other?
That's the truth I'm looking for. I want to know why we try to close ourselves off from one another even as we are dying of loneliness. There's another quote by Thoreau. "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." I'm looking for the truth about this self-destructive aspect of human nature so that I can be one of the people striking at the root of evil. I want to know why we hate each other so much, even in our loneliness. I'm looking for the insight to be able to address this part of ourselves and fix it. Once I find it, I will shout it as loud as I can for as long as I can.