Perish All Thoughts

Roger Ebert is preparing himself I think;

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. "Ask someone how they feel about death," he said, "and they'll tell you everyone's gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that's not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you're really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don't really exist and I might be gone at any given second."

Me too, but I hope not. I have plans.

I suppose it's the prime motivation of religion. What happens after you die? It's true, as you get older (and I'm not old), you do think about it more. The religious have the advantage of pretending they know exactly what's going to happen..

.. and the most important thing to most everyone is that their soul stays intact, and they are reunited with everyone they've ever cared about.

Ebert's essay is very worthwhile reading. I could have.. and actually, I was going to write it. It's been on my mind, but I can imagine it must be in the front of Ebert's mind very often. He's gone through some very serious health problems lately, and while his lifespan my be longer than all of ours, the odds are, it isn't.

The lure of religion is powerful.. that setting aside of fear, and ultimately that's what it's all about.

I've used "Gorak" as the symbol of my own "religious" thinking. The short of it is, whatever the cause of everything is, that's Gorak, and we can't know anything about it. I also understand the chicken/egg problem of Gorak, and I have no explanation.

Ebert describes it as;

I grant you that if the universe was Caused, there might have been a Causer. But that entity, or force, must by definition be outside space and time; beyond all categories of thought, or non-thought; transcending existence, or non-existence. What is the utility of arguing our "beliefs" about it? What about the awesome possibility that there was no Cause? What if everything...just happened?

So while Gorak might exist, there really is no point in trying to figure it out. It's impossible. The nightmare of humanity is the suffering and death that the cause of trying to figure it out has caused.

I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me.

I've always thought of this as the Ann Rice vampire problem.

The problem with "eternal life", as described by most religion, is that you are you.. for eternity. In the Rice novels, vampires rarely grew ancient because being in their own head drove them mad, to suicide. For the most part, I like being in my own head, but I'm also happy for the break from it that comes from sleep. I can't imagine a sleepless consciousness for all "eternity" without going absolutely mad.

As Ebert notes, the only thing I can imagine that is after death is what was before life. I was not unhappy before I was born. I just wasn't... and that's not a particularly comforting thought either.

Perhaps Scott Adams is right.. and that time is shaped like a doughnut and that it'll eventually come back around to the beginning, and we'll do it all over again. That's a horror for those that live a miserable life.. great for those that enjoyed theirs, and maybe a hint to the rest of us that we better do what we can to enjoy it as much as possible while we're still here.

I truly don't feel old, even at 42. I know there's lots of time to do a lot of really cool things, and I will. I have a feeling the better the distractions, the less one thinks about the inevitable.