Tantalizing perdition, barely out of reach
For your fiery torment I yearn
The damned suffer without nuance
In flames; only flames
Comforting in their consistency
Serene in their simplicity
The agony a mindful reprieve
Cooking flesh a catharsis from the hell
Of living.
A young boy dashes through the park, trampling through the flower beds. He stops to admire his handiwork, trying to memorize the patterns of dislocated petals and frantic insects. Weary of play for the moment, he collapses onto a bench.
He sees a group of children come up with rules to a new game, devoid of any reason. They scream and run about, tagging one another then arguing over new sets of rules to replace the old ones which allowed them to be tagged. Their laughter rings across the park, the frivolity creating an ambiance of innocence.
He witnesses a young man let his dog off the leash. The young man throws a ball down the field, and the dog bounds after it. With the ball retrieved, the dog jubilantly takes off across the park. The young man yells out after the dog, and begins a slow lope to chase it down.
A couple walks past the bench, hand in hand, talking quietly among themselves. The words are meaningless, but the conversation between their eyes and the dialogue of their bodies express a mute intimacy.
He looks further across the park, and sees a man with a stroller. The stroller is surrounded by a cooing group of women, while the man sheepishly stands by, feeling awkward with the attention. The group of women carry on their way, waving their high-pitched goodbyes to the infant, while one waves only to the man, who waves back with a grin.
Hearing a commotion, he turns to see that the couple, further down the path, have erupted into an argument. They remain mostly hushed to avoid public embarrassment, though passion elevates the occasional phrase before a scrutinizing stare quiets it down again. The words maintain their meaninglessness, however, while tone conveys everything they didn’t intend to communicate.
He sits back in the bench and observes the environment surrounding him. The lives of so many blur together to create a primordial vision of human existence. A flurry of sound and colour wash over him, engulfing him in their emotions. The world spins around him while he sits in the centre, calm and unmoving.
An old man struggles to his feet, and walks slowly toward the gate. As he reaches the old iron bars, he pauses. He pats at his pockets, and turns slightly, as if to look back. Shrugging his shoulders, the old man raises the collar of his jacket against the bitter cold and crosses the threshold, certain he’s forgotten something.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had recently broken up with her boyfriend. It was a fairly short relationship, but it was still long enough for her to develop feelings for this person, and the reason he gave for their breakup was somewhat vague. She felt that the relationship had been a good one, but since it ended for what she perceived to be little reason and she didn’t feel as though she could learn anything from the experience, she described it as completely meaningless. If it has no value after the fact, how could it have had value at all?
I want to cycle through a bunch of thought experiments, and I want you, dear reader, to think about these examples and decide their worth.
What has greater value? A person who gets married at 25, has a great, healthy relationship for 30 years, and then the marriage ends. It doesn’t matter how, maybe their partner dies or whatever, but then that person is alone and miserable for another 30 years and dies at the age of 85. Or: A person who has a relationship for two years, then is alone and miserable for one year, then a relationship for two years, then alone for one, etc. again from the age of 25 to 85. So that’s essentially 40 years of relationships to 20 years of isolated misery. Assume that these multiple, brief relationships are mostly healthy ones.
Next, let’s look at addiction. Say someone has been an addict for 20 years, and then after 40 years of sobriety they finally slip, and overdose and die. Compare this to someone who has been an addict for 40 years, then they sober up for 20 years, and then die a non-drug-related death.
Lastly, consider success. Say a person garners great success for themself fairly early on in their life, and then accomplishes little during the rest of it. Compare this person to someone who achieves great success near the end of their long, mediocre life. Assume equal amounts of success.
What value has temporality? I think most people would agree that the 30 year relationship has more value than the sum of 40 years worth of many relationships because more meaning can be built with a single partner. Children could be born and properly raised, many great trips could be shared, etc. It’s not necessarily the length of something that gives it its worth, but the value that one finds within it.
Secondly, the end of something doesn’t necessarily determine its worth either. I think the more obvious choice regarding the addict is that the length of the sobriety trumps a sober death. It is a tragic end to be sure, but I don’t believe that the end invalidates the 40 years of a healthy life that was lived prior to it. If the addict had been hit by a bus on their way to buy the drugs, and never got the chance to overdose, would that have invalidated his life? Of course not. The end of something cannot negate the meaning of something because all things must end. Even if, for example, one were to find out that their partner had been lying to them about an affair for years, that would still not negate any happiness one had felt because in that moment that happiness was real. Being miserable and betrayed now does not make you less happy when you initially felt it.
Meaning is in the moment. And whether that meaning continues or ends is irrelevant to the worth of that meaning when it takes place. We as humans, however, can only live in the present. And looking at it in the abstract, we might think that the greatness achieved at the beginning of one’s life is equal to greatness achieved at the end of one’s life, but you also have to remember that when Robin Williams killed himself, all the fond memories his fans had of him were from over a decade ago.
Living in the present means that we don’t normally appreciate the value of meaning that we once had. If someone tells me that I’m living in the past because I’m sulking over an ex-girlfriend or something, that is untrue. The joy of the past that I am currently focusing on is not living in the past because I’m miserable about it; not joyful. I am using my present moment as a judge of past meaning, even if, when taken in the abstract, we can see that that is not its true value.
Speaking of ex-girlfriends, I have one that grew up in poverty. One of the things she told me about poverty was that when things were good, even though frugality might make things a little easier financially later on, their family would still splurge a little bit because when things were bad later, they had those good times to look back on and appreciate. They chose to bank their meaning rather than their finances, and while it may not be conventional wisdom, they still survived and probably had more enriched lives because of it.
Can we extract ourselves from the present? Can we appreciate the past as it is meant to be appreciated, and recognize the infinite uncertainty of the future which could very well hold our greatest success? Well, we can certainly try.
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