Saturday, July 31, 2004
I have been thinking a lot lately about the exact worth of a human life...or to be more precise, the worth of life
in general, if any, at all.
This is the effect Kundera has on me. There's a reference to a german adage in
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being that's been ringing in my head:
What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? What happens but once might as wel not have happened at all.
And the strange thing is...how perfectly true it is. We humans are such fools, to believe that the things we do echoe in eternity. Because what happens but once and cannot return is little more than a shadow, without form or substance,
dead in advance. And no matter how painful or beautiful, no matter how horrendous or sublime a life is, once it is past and gone, its pain and beauty, its horror and sublimity, fade off into nothingness.
I am reminded of a line from a movie (two nights ago on arts central, i dont know the title):
Immortals, and immortality...to them the lives of ordinary men must seem like flowers; blooming and fading in a matter of but days...
If there is a God, (and I believe there must be one) He must be laughing at the foolishness of humankind, the pompous, self-important roles we have put ourselves in. How we strive for material wealth and social recognition, things which ultimately mean nothing, things which will not last, neither in this world or the next( if any). And if one thinks about it, even the noblest aspirations of this world
will come to pass; goodness and truth and love are concepts conjured by the human brain, they have no concrete reality except against the backdrop of human emotion. Put simply: We do not live forever, and when we die, all that we know, all that we have experienced, dies with us. And while the experiences of
your life may have had profound effects on
you, they have little bearing on the life of anyone else, and even if they did,
in the long run, we are all dead .
This is the unbearable lightness of being: To recognize that by existing within time, the sum of our lives is limited by our mortality. There is no "forever" in a universe where birth is only the forst step towards the grave. For anyone who wants to be remembered, who needs to know that his actions and deeds count for
something , this must be a terrible fate.
Perhaps the answer lies in religion. But that's too easy. Its a convenient answer because no one can really prove - or disprove- it.
I had a lot more to say, but this will do for now.
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