Two human absurdities

 

In my irrational youth, I’d sometimes have a feeling of how impossible – literally incon­ceivable – it is that some old wise person with an ocean of experience and a universe of depth should die with all that . . . life . . . in his or her head. The quotidian, clock-ticking end of irreplace­able mean­ing. I’ll admit: It still seems absolutely insane to me, while I know this is a child’s feeling. A similar but less lofty quirk: I’ve come to see that a person – a walking ocean and universe of her own – loses all that depth immediately upon utter­ing a thought, conceiving a subjective truth or an opinion. When someone says: “It’s a beau­tiful day,” look at everything they’re not saying. That their definition of “beauty” means things that no one else’s definition means. That they have survived the loss of love, the loss of self and find that “beauty” applies, in some recondite way, to what they see. Beauty may feel terrible to them. Someone says: “I feel fine.” We know they may be saying nothing at all, possibly only that they are not suicidal. We should be aware that when­ever we ask someone that question, “how are you?”, they should extemporize a several-stanza poem. And they should not put it to music because that would be a reductio of the com­plex feelings of her fineness.

We reduce everything to an opaque thought, which is generally going to be based in a feeling that we don’t understand. This is to compound degeneration with ignorance. Even people in therapy press down only on phenomena. This is why I may prefer silence to talk in sessions.