as much as I agree with him, I will admit to being afraid to talk like that at risk of offending all the depressed people. I always have to bite my lip when someone starts telling me about how much life sucks.
I know. I can't tell you how aware of that I am. But I'm still - perhaps naively - convinced that it might be transferred to other people, that it's somehow infectious, and so we shouldn't always hide it. And I don't mean saying "Cheer up! Life is great." to people who are going through terrible things, or trying to convince people who are clinically depressed that it ain't so bad. I just mean highlighting the beautiful things in life, so that someone might see something they haven't seen before. The things that make being alive unique. The things that it make it, for me and for you and for John Banville, impossible to ever imagine leaving.
(If everyone kept quiet about these beautiful things, would there ever be poetry? Song? Other than sad ones?)
I wish everyone could feel this way just once. Like I said: naive. Still.
hmmm. Paul Bowles:
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
I've taken to saying recently that I'm immortal until the very moment I die. It's horribly delusional and narcissistic and solipsistic and all of those other icky -istics, but it helps me handle the whole thing a bit better.
That Bowles quote is oddly comforting in the same way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, maybe he's saying that we *shouldn't* see life as limitless because it isn't. You only get twenty more full moons. But in case he's not saying that, in case he's saying go ahead and think it's limitless, because until you die it might as well be...
I just like it. Thanks.
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