Rush (Neal Peart)

“New World Man”

Those who doubt destiny do not think clearly enough.  Your life comes with an expiration date – such is the nature of a mortal existence.  When the ancients commanded, “Gnothi seauton” (“Know thyself”), they understood that it meant, in part: Know your limits – know that you are limited, know that you are not a god, know that your life in this world has a conclusion, one that comes soon and unexpectedly.  Live accordingly.

This defining characteristic is your destiny, the central, inescapable core of it – your inevitable fatality.  Sage Heraclitus taught that all things in this world are in flux, ever changing, never still, never fixed.  We are here a brief moment, as all things are, and then we are as so much vapor and smoke, gone on the breezes, replaced in a moment, forgotten in less.

Life is caught up in death.  Death walks in the midst of life and makes it what it is for us – precious, rare, unpredictable, fleeting, finite.  Death is not so much a dreadful and unnatural beast that destroys us as the line that circumscribes our time and gives it form – assuming we are fully conscious of the limit.

A life lived unconsciously, unaware of our limits and finitude is one where we linger too long with matters with which we can ill afford to become preoccupied.  And this quickly becomes a life with no time for that which is of real value and importance.  One becomes profligate with that which is dear, as if we have the hours left to us to throw about recklessly and freely, with no seriousness, no mindfulness that our sun was already setting the day we were born into this place.

“Carpe diem:” Seize the day – this was the watchword of the Metaphysical Poets.  Your life is so much dust and already the grave is being dug; fill your remaining moments with life and remove any need for regrets when Death comes for you.  Live fully, live meaningfully, because nothing else will truly pass for having lived. 

This attitude is another expression going back into antiquity, a Roman restatement of the Greek “gnothi seauton:”  “Memento mori”—“Remember you will die.”  A conquering Roman general, as he was paraded through the city, at the height of his glory, was given a servant who whispered in his ear, “Memento mori, memento  mori, memento…”  You will die, you will die, you are but a man, for all your worldly fame and power, you are no god; you are limited; remember who you are; do not overstep yourself or waste your time at unseemly pursuits; you are no god, but a man, and you will as surely die as any other.

Memento mori; Carpe diem: A good twin dose of sober reality and command to stop spending one’s life in what the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once called ”the abattoir of lost moments.”   Put things in order according to their genuine value – for things have a genuine value, something more than the idolatrous falsehoods assigned by the masses to allow them the luxury of unconsciousness and automatic responses.

The people sing the praises of love, but how much time do they spend in its service compared to making money or practicing politics?  Our lives are nothing more than what we do, and if we spend more of our lives at one thing than another, this shows what it is we truly value; we define ourselves in our actions, we spell out exactly where it is and who it is we wish Death to find us.  More moments have been bled out over politics than any activity of the soul, any virtue; and love – the real and terrible thing that demands our very life’s blood to exist as anything more than a shadow and a ghost – is praised in the mouth all the day, but rarely with more, and even more rarely with consistency.

Is politics important?  It is necessary.  But my beloved is of infinite value, and at the same moment, is fleeting.  Nations and the affairs of the world will outlast me – and because of that, are only of relative importance.  My beloved, like myself, is here but a second, and then neither of us will be remembered on the earth.  But while we are here together, we are our own world, our own universe exploding into bright beauty. 

Soldiers with weaponry dedicated to the defense of countries abound.  Lovers whose every action subordinates all else to their beloved are the bluest of diamonds.  Soldiers are necessary.  Lovers and their beloveds are what give all else value – what point are soldiers and governments without lovers?  Such is my peculiar faith, something that goes one step beyond philosophy and pure rationality.

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night,” says Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus.”  “The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing…, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go.  The rock is still rolling.”

Death, our inevitable, inescapable night, comes on; yet, because of death, our lives, our human lives are possible – not the lives of gods, not the lives of beings with eternities to make up their minds or refuse to do so, to play at choice as if one were as good as another.  Perhaps we will have other lives, and perhaps we will, in ages hence, as the poets say, have something better than time on our hands to play with.  But this life will never occur again and presently it is all we have and all we are. 

This moment will nevermore arise – it has already died in the writing and the reading, passed over into that abattoir of the philosopher.

“Memento mori,” generals and lovers.  Remember.

(”What do I know?”)

The Motto of Michel de Montaigne 

Do I know the significance of my own experiences?  Perhaps I know I am having experiences, and perhaps I can recount them more or less accurately, at least to myself and my own satisfaction, but does this mean I have the least understanding of their meaning?  

Hardly.

These are two things, experience and understanding – related, to be certain, but not the same beasts and not captured and maintained in the same manner.  It is easy to mistake the one for the other – how often might we understand something in essence or principle, and yet have little experience of it? 

Celibate saints wrote reams on the subjects of lust and the wiles of the flesh and of marriage and adultery, yet had not a moment, or more than a few moments of sheer experience of these.  I am not willing to dispose of all they had to say on these grounds – some of them may very well have glimpsed from a distance an accurate image of these things; there may be some profit to be had in their speech.

And the rest of us wretches, sinful and human as we are – how many of us have actually lived the life of flesh and lust and intense desire, and yet haven’t any understanding of what it is we do or have done?  No, that understanding is something we may have after the fact, and only then after performing the requisite contemplations, the laborious process of thought spurred on by an unquenchable ache… the hope that we might know something about what has happened.

Few of us go that extra step.  It is arduous, it is troublesome, it is odd, and above all it is inconvenient and all out of fashion.  Montaigne, the inventor of the essay – the essai, the “trials” of one’s own mind in the presence of this or that subject – put himself to the test to discover the answer to that question “Que sçais-je?” because he strongly suspected that the proper response is always, “Nothing,” or “Not very much,” as Socrates had grasped in his own day. 

By losing the false complacency born of the fantasy that one knows more than one actually does, a miraculous thing is born: A lack of fear in the face of the unknown.  The unknown becomes ever-present, not quite commonplace but a constant companion; not an occasion for terrors and anxieties, but an opportunity for the advent of wonder and questions born of wonder.  One becomes unafraid of experience; one become unafraid of the audacity required to question the shadowy opinions that pass for indubitable truths in the homes, the streets, the houses of government and the business offices and churches of the world.

There is a sort of losing that is synonymous with freedom from slavery.  To lose ones chains is not really a loss, but a blessing and a gain.

Yet, in the eyes of the world, from the points of view provided by the home, the street, the government, the business offices, and religions, such a person who dares to say with Montaigne and Socrates, “Que sçais-je?” appears to have lost all place in the order of things.  How will such a person, short of winning the lottery or having a good inheritance prosper in this world?  It is a fair question.  Montaigne did have an inheritance and a worldly position, but not long after his death, his fine Essays were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Roman Catholic Church and accused of housing all manner of heretical and dangerous opinions, from skepticism to Fideism and an uncomfortable element of tolerance.  Socrates, dear Socrates, spent a lifetime doing little more than asking questions, and made the rich and powerful of Athens so angry at him for his troubles they repaid him by throwing a rigged trial and leaving him no honorable choice than to carry out their death sentence by his own hand.  And with a smile.

Montaigne’s reputation suffered till Voltaire revived his memory over a hundred years after his death.  Socrates is still maligned in spirit, if not in fact, in all corners of the world.  In the eyes of Earth, losers: Not people one is usually encouraged to spend time with – except, perhaps, to be able to produce the credentials that say one has read a few of the Essays or has perused a Platonic Dialogue or two; and this passes for intelligence and learning.

There is all the difference in having read words and having gone on to live them and put them into effect in one’s life, spending the hours sweating the blood of Gethsemane in search of the deep and personal meaning of those words, the portion wherein one’s own Fate lies sleeping – the light behind the dark shell of the sounds.  This latter thing and this alone is understanding, and it requires a choice – the comfortable life of the world or the life of risk and uncertainty.  Discovery of one’s Fate may involve matters that are hardly the most pleasant to wrestle with.  Fate may send us out into the world of the pitch-black unknown to seek knowledge in the midst of the sheer chaos of raw and wild experience – but to experience with a mission, with awareness.

The life of the intellect, when lived properly, may be a thing of danger and adventure.  To say as seriously as Death, “Que sçais-je?” and risk everything on that question is a challenge to the universe – with those words you walk out alone, beyond the protection of numbers, into the night, throw your arms wide to the stars and say, “Here I am.  Show yourself to me.”  And you have no idea whether a bright Goddess will emerge from the woods to meet you or the One who walks to and fro like a lion seeking whom he may devour.  What do you know?  Nothing, except you are tired of not knowing and that you must know.