Life In HD

Because life should be lived in hi-def.

Love and Desire

'We're talking about love. There is no "why". That's the point'

'There is always a "why" because there is always something that the beloved wants. It might be that he protects you. It might be that he makes you feel special. It might be that he is a way out, a route to some shining future away from the dreary now. It might be that he is the father of your unborn babies. Or it might be that he gives you prestige. Love is a big knot of whys.'

'What's wrong with that?'

'I'm not saying anything's wrong with it. History is made of people's desires. But that's why I smile when people get sentimental about this mysterious force of pure "love" which they think they are steering. "Loving somebody" means "wanting something". Love makes people do selfish, moronic, cruel, and inhumane things…To be in love means to be at the mercy of your lover's desires. If someone put a bullet through your lover, they'd be releasing you."

- Ghostwritten, David Mitchell

The Challenge

Elena's desire to seduce a homosexual was a common error among women. Usually there was a point of female honor in this, a desire to test one's power against heavy odds, a feeling, perhaps, that all men were escaping from their rule and that they must be seduced again. Miguel suffered from these attempts every day. He was not effeminate. He held himself well, his gestures were manly. As soon as a woman began to display coquetry toward him, he was in a panic. He immediately foresaw the entire drama: the aggression of the woman, her interpretation of his passivity as mere timidity, her advances, his hatred of the moment when he would have to reject her. He could never do this with calm indifference. He was too tender and compassionate. He suffered at times much more than the woman, whose vanity was all that mattered.

- Elena. From Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.

Hello, Young Lovers

For Desole Boy, and others who have not yet taken the leap of romantic love.

"It is also good to love; because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being; that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love; it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is-: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. 

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future?

And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that -), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer -.

But how can they, they who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?

They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is - convention. Whenever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, however unusual (i.e. in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit."

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Memento Mori

Père Lachaise, Paris, 2011

"There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does."

Hazel Grace Lancaster, The Fault In Our Stars

I recall reading somewhere that we die three times.

First, our actual physical death. 

The second, when everyone we ever knew have all died, too. 

And the third, final death is when our name is uttered for the very last time.

People share a natural fear of mortality, but where we differ lies in the reasons why we fear annihilation. Some of us simply fear the unknown; Death, of course, being the greatest of these. 

Others fear being forgotten; indeed, the thought of no one ever knowing or remembering you once existed is terrifying. To experience and be experienced : that's what make us alive. And therefore to be forgotten - to spend an entire lifetime on this earth without anyone even knowing or remembering you existed - is a particular kind of annihilation. 

That is why people who have been reduced to vegetative states or have suffered some sort of damage that prevents them from knowing, sensing, and experiencing the infinite stimuli that make up existence are considered dead - brain-dead, anyway. For without the "consciousness" of existence - the knowing that one is alive - then one may truly just as well be dead.

To be forgotten is to be reduced to nothingness.



On this Day of Remembrance, I must remind myself that.