Zero
Forget for a moment that without intellectual input all things fail. Forget the endless brainwash advertising drone of corporations manufacturing nothing of intrinsic worth. No. Growing old is not today’s gravest sin. We’ll decay. In spite of all our efforts to the contrary, skin is destined to sag and wrinkle, muscles will atrophy over time, and bones will become more brittle, less resilient. We can cry scream moan curse weep sigh whine rail pontificate opine philosophize excuse whimper murmur mumble sputter stammer and stutter, but nothing will discourage time as it sculpts our forms and faces. No plastic surgeon will detain it; no cosmetics corporation will deter it; not an ocean of Botox will derail it. Time works away with its chisels, its hands confident and certain. Its media are you and me. Its only patron is Death, who comes when time’s work is done to purchase its entire exhibition, regardless of how short or long time has shaped each piece.
There is a huge lesson in this: I am nothing.
It was hard to write those words. It was even more difficult arriving at the place where I understood how true they are.
Before you run screaming “train wreck blog!” into the night (or day, depending on your longitudinal relationship to this site at the time you access it), hear me out. My heart may feel today as though it has been split open with a church key (or it may not), but that isn’t the point.
Picture me sitting in a chair in a room in a house in a city in eastern Tennessee in the United States in North America in the Western Hemisphere on Earth in a clutch of planets governed by the Sun in the Milky Way in a complement of galaxies in the vastness we call space. Try to find me from 700 or 7,000 light years away. Better still, look for me from the edge of the curvature of space. I am not even an electron in a molecule in a mote of dust.
Try it another way. I am sitting in a chair in a room in a house typing at this second, 9:17:38 a.m. EST, on Monday, the 4th of February in the year of our Lord (whichever you choose or none at all if you prefer) 2008 in which age of which eon? Time stretches so far behind me that I cannot fathom the initial Great Light out of which all stardust was flung. It will pass me by one day and move on — how far? Into eternity? Picture me from the perspective of eternity. I am less than the clicking of a gear in a stopwatch.
When I was a child, I used to lie awake in bed and try to imagine eternity or the vastness of space and it literally took my breath away. More than Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula, more than serial killers and mad torturers, eternity terrified me.
Now I am resigned to it. What lasts? Nothing. So what if America crumbles if cows are mad if people drop like flies from avian flu and famine and pestilence and pandemics and wars and acts of God and heart attacks and loneliness and madness if the globe warms if there are no weapons of mass destruction if a film ranks in the top ten if your breasts sag if your smile yellows if the shower clogs and the roof leaks if something if something if something. In 100,000 years, not even sentient squid will recall it.
And what will become of this pain in my heart for so many lost causes?
It will finally rest easy.
I’ve come to the conclusion I will never get another full night’s sleep. Insomnia will hound me until death. But 100,000 years from now I will have slept a long, long time.
A cat wants in the door. I let him in. The gesture is nothing. I love the cat.
So what?
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