Nobody knows when they will die, but everybody knows how much longer they won't live.
Now of my three-score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
So realizes the young narrator in "Loveliest of Trees."
I've been watching the series "Vikings" on Netflix because I've exhausted all other options for the moment and because it came recommended from several sources. It is not the great show it was touted to me to be, I think. The dialog and the acting are stilted at best. Much went into set and costume design, and there are a great many "action" scenes so that it might appeal to the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, but the cinematography is just O.K. I almost didn't watch anymore after the first episode, but being bereft of anything better, I did, and as I watched, I began to realize it is a show about Gods and religions and people's faiths and beliefs, and, perhaps, the absurdity of it all.
Because I do not believe in the tablets or in magic rocks, I'm often questioned about my moral order, etc. O.K. Not often, at least not as often since I left the factory and entered the world of Covid lockdown and the resulting fallout from that time. But I have been lately. And you who have been here before know my reply, I think, an Existential World View, of sorts, where one must make one's own moral order. And yet. . . that does not rule out the existence of God. And so, when asked, especially by youth, "Do you believe in God?" I give the answer I received from my old Indian book buyer a long time ago:
Why yes. I believe in God. I believe in all the Gods. God is Everything and Everything is God!
He jumped and clapped his hands, and, in that moment it occurred to me that God was our greatest metaphor for all things known and unknown, for all the molecular and sub-atomic particle interaction in the entire Cosmos that we cannot possibly perceive or conceive of, and that the unknown is much greater than the known.
I have a good number of educated friends who believe in things that seem mystical to me, chakras and energy fields and vortexes and the like. It surprises me. But it makes them feel better, I think, to believe in the powers of the unknown.
I have friends who concern themselves with feelings as well, professors who ask their students, "How does that make you feel," or some iteration of that question, to which students respond, "Personally, I feel as though. . . ."
And somehow, that is valid.
And perhaps as an Existentialist, I shouldn't argue.
There's only three things that's for sure
Taxes, death and trouble, oh
This I know, baby, ooh, this I've known.
Trouble Man.
Trouble, man.
Trouble. . . man.
Last night washing dishes, I found myself unexpectedly singing "Somebody to Love." Crazy, for I am not a huge Grace Slick fan and haven't really listened to her music since it was en vogue.
When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the joy within you dies.
Well, I thought, that is curious for I don't really believe in big T "truth." At least, I've seen no evidence of it.
But there are many who do.
I was sitting in the Cafe Strange a couple days ago next to two young women who were discussing a paper or an upcoming presentation they were preparing. They were quite articulate and passionate as they discussed how Western Ideologies had corrupted other cultures. I was eavesdropping rather than writing at the moment. It turned out they were students at the Country Club College where once I taught. They were enamored of their professor, gushingly so, and they couldn't wait to take more theory courses from her. I wanted to interject, but that would have been intrusive and wrong and too many other creepy things to list, so I sat in a quiet agony wishing I could interrogate their argument. They were bright kids and I am sure I would like them, but at the time, I was reminded of Sherwood Anderson's most wonderful first chapter to "Winesburg, Ohio," "The Book of the Grotesque."
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible[. . . .]
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it [. . . .]
[I]n the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. . . . It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
And I was reminded of Robert Frost's ideas that sometimes the least beautiful apples are the sweetest.
I wanted to tell those young women, "That is good. Now go further. You must go further."
And I thought of the university and how it has changed and how many ideas students are not introduced to any longer.
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