I really should have titled this “Why Live?” If you have tasted existence as I described it, death is no great calamity to you. Don’t let this lead you into the mistake of hastening your death. Staying alive is a sound strategic move. (Ignore any arguments for staying alive based on the claim that staying alive is fun. That is like saying tea is tea.) Death is inevitable. Explore life as much as you can; live it out, if only to check if there’s any value in it. Don’t be in a hurry to die.

It’s not easy, however. Some things that may help: entertaining yourself in the realm of thought by flinging your body down hard on the ground, writhing like a fish out of water, spinning at a very high rate around your vertical axis or grabbing your planet and flinging it away. Such diversions release dangerous accretions of energy. I frequently employ these tactics to sublimate the urge to run amok and shatter myself against some object.

Finally,
A poem about
Things being,
Rather than being
A certain way.
I hope you
Enjoyed it.

The desire to observe oneself from an out-of-body perspective is latent in most people, but once aroused, can be an extremely powerful one, to the point where the person excited with this thought might want to tear his flesh out or claw at his eyes as a result of frustration at not being able to achieve this. It is a powerful want to make a person want.

One day the front page of the newspaper is filled with reports of the most ordinary events in the lives of the most ordinary people, completely devoid of fame or far-reaching importance. Occurrences of minor happiness around the city are reported. Individual appreciation of the great weather is written about. Spontaneous smiles are covered. Pride in one’s offspring occupies a few columns. Insignificant acts of kindness are revealed. The reporting is straight, unemotional and professional. Interviews, photographs and details about names and places have their due presence. Throughout, the first page is infused with its customary quiet sense of urgency and purpose, just like on any other day. The first page conveys the most important news.

One day you will reach the Happy Hunting Grounds. A peaceful Paradise. In the Happy Hunting Grounds, you will see that all our lives are one. All of us will see everything together, and there will no longer be loss, and there will no longer be nostalgia. Travel all the intersecting paths of our lives at will we will. What sorrow? Ah, the knotty constraints of the mortal life, the near-sightedness, the walls between you and I. The fog, the doubt, the drama. The illusions of loss and suffering; convincing, very convincing. But in the Happy Hunting Grounds we will be bound by nothing. All happy and all sad will be laid out, for us to relish and make light of. Friends, lovers, families all together—there will never again be any parting.

The most beautiful times I have lived—drizzle-drenched, sun-baked, mirth-laden, sleep-pillowed, girl-sweetened, girl-softened, girl-saddened times. Times with cool sheets, loyal dogs and mother’s meals. The books I lived. That race I won. The things I built. The proud deeds. Even fever, terror, angst. All my times I will have. Everything I have wanted I will have.

Everything will be together.

This is the end of the road;
It was a nice walk.
I need to kiss
Pillow-soft dusk
And mother-soft grass.
So, gently I creep
Into crystal-clear sleep.

Until then, there are happy and sad times to gather and some friends to make and lose.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA

He held her in a tight squeeze. The voice of a blind, mute Mexican woman saddened everything around them. The Spanish song soaked the air with such hopeless misery and dejection that if you held up your hand and squeezed your fist, tears would flow from it. Waves of loss radiated from the mute singer and became thick, continuous sounds. What a fount of sorrow she was. A gushing release such as this should empty the most sodden heart, but she had truly known sorrow. Who knew if she was mute or if her words imploded into silence with their own terrible gravity. Her empty voice rose and became towering, tottering waves of anger, rage, regret, regret, regret. Tch. And regretfully they crashed, impotent, limp, pleading and blaming on two pairs of ears.

He held her tighter. She hung on to him for life. “I’m scared,” she said. He knew why she was scared. The sadness filled the cosmos, and she thought she was drowning. There was infinity around her. But he knew better than her. They had drowned and survived. They were immune.

They turned their heads, and simultaneously the universe swung around sharply, and they were falling down in every direction at a monstrous speed. Everything seemed still. Thousands of violins and thousands of cellos struck up a vicious orchestra. She cast about in the blackness to spot the musicians, but saw no one because the music was being played on the taut hairs on the back of her neck. But she had made the mistake of looking around. Stretched out in more directions than she could comprehend, illuminating the silhouette of a man and woman holding each other’s hand, laughing a subliminal babble, was the infinite universe. Stars scattered and arrayed themselves in cosmic discipline wherever they looked. On vast murals were laid out unfolded stories. Their denouement had unmasked the sham of their erstwhile tight constraints. Every life lay deflated. There was no direction, nothing to seek, no differences, nothing small, nothing separate, no thought, no importance, no enjoyment, no understanding, no process. All these nothings, as they hurtled crazily through open, bottomless space.

This scared even the man. They were too frozen by shock to hold on to each other anymore. Their hands parted, they started drifting. They had to understand. But everything was around them, and everything was senseless. They both grappled with being unmoored, tried to still themselves, tried to hold on, tried to grasp, tried to fathom. But the vacuum slipped out of their clutching hands. There was only apprehension, for there was none. What to understand?

As involuntarily as they had parted, their hands met again. Like tendrils, they immediately sought out and grew into one another. Clutched each other with relieved desperation. They sank into one another. There was nothing else to grasp.