Gradual School

John Irving has it right: we all die, the trick is to live some beforehand. Watching "The World According to Garp" reminds me of the importance of adventure in life; the journey is the destination, and all that. It has been a tenant of comfort to me this last year, undertaking an unexpected adventure that might elsewhere be called a detour, or simply 'suck'. But it is more than consolation in tough, passing time - it is a philosophy worthy of consideration.

I do not mean to be macabre, but many of my posts are about death, and will continue to involve death and its avoidance our of necessity. One of my favorite philosophers, Kierkegaard, calls death the cause of all anxiety and angst, and thus all sin and evil acts, and ultimately he suggests that it is itself what Augustine called Original Sin. We humans are both blessed and cursed with an imagination of infinite potential, but a finite ability and time to act because of mortality. This conflict makes us wish to have done something else, to see the grass greener on the other side, to take both roads diverged in a yellow wood. And that anxiety after choices, an unavoidable angst, eats its way to become jealousy and lust and pride and fear and all causes of hurtful actions.

This does not explain why, when faced with two roads diverging, we should take the one less traveled by. I don't know if The Dane would enjoy adventure. I think he would - the implicit and explicit criticism of formalism at the heart of much of his work suggests a mind comfortable with long walks. He respects the process of coming to understanding. And, in a way, that process mirrors the process of coming to death. We cannot be mature or adult or accomplished or elderly or dead without living the hours between, experiencing unusual circumstances and making tough choices.

Exactly what does the passage of time give us? The ability to coordinate and interact with others whose schedule of decisions is their own. The experience of various conditions, in terms of environment and peers. Aging, physical change in the self. Changing seasons and tastebuds. So to say, many factors of life depend on the passage of time in ways that our infinite imagination may not appreciate. So we should engage the process.

We must engage the process. What are our other options? Time will pass, and must pass, regardless of our wishes otherwise. Same as with other persons, time asks for an intimate relationship as it goes to work graying our hair and updating our months. And, as with other persons, we are free to reject time at our loss. But the rejection is vain, impossible, and the mark of insanity.

Plastics are a symbol of the eternally new in our world, but they themselves are a metaphor for time. They are formed from petroleum, which has itself been grown from the remains of carbon-based life in the dinosaur age. Animals lived and died, mostly died, and have now become clam-shell packaging and car interiors. With time enough and heat, our plastics today will become fuel for a new star system, just as the plastics of our parent solar system were re-forged in a supernova to become us. That sun died when it radiated the elements from which we make lip injections and sweaters.

Our sun will die, too. But I like to think that, in the meanwhile, the Earth will have been pretty interesting, creating an inner universe and interconnected web (Teilhard's noosphere) of a complexity rivaling that of the stars themselves.