I am listening to music, as is my wont,
and right now I am listening to a full orchestra playing
Canon in D Major by Pachelbel………and I wonder
at the genius of the person who stripped down the canon
into just piano and violin or even just the piano…
To take the richness of that piece and by stripping it down, to
give it even more beauty, more power…….
Life has an existential property that most people won’t acknowledge…
life has an existential aspect that is hard to understand, little less to explain…
Many have attributed to life the question of its being…
Is life “being” made up of suffering as the Buddha said, or is life
the philosophical preparing for death as the main thing or is life the pursuit
of “truth” whatever that is or the pursuit of wisdom or perhaps something
else all together…
The very fact that after thousand of years, we still don’t know, leads us
to wonder if the question is even the right question…
Now one particular theme of life’s being has been stated over and over,
and it goes like this………It is better not to have been born then to be born…
or as the noted philosopher C-3PO said, it is our lot to suffer…
thus meaning it is better not to have been born at all…
And after 40 years of thinking about this point, I still can’t tell………
In reading Plato’s apology, at the end where Socrates says to Critio,
“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please don’t forget to pay the debt”
And Asclepius was the god of medicine and thus Socrates was asking
Crito to pay the debt for being healed from some illness……
Now a rather common interpretation is that Socrates was implying
that life is an illness and death is some sort of cure and he wanted
to thank Asclepius for being “cured” with his death…
That being was an illness and the only cure was death………
and it certainly does seem sometimes that we suffer and that
our time on earth is full of pain and misery and horror and all the
other words to describe our days on earth……
I cannot deny that we suffer and that I personally have suffered…
I was born handicap and have had my fair share of suffering
and misery……… and the existential question is rather simple,
does our life, such as it is, worth all that pain and suffering and misery?
One can see the point of those who claim that it is better not to have been
born then to be born… and one can see the point of life is to prepare for
the inevitable death that is sure to come… and death with dignity is simply
a false idea… there is no death with dignity, in the end, we drool on ourselves
and then unload a pile of shit… and it is over… our last act of being human
is dropping a load of shit… and that seems to me to be very appropriate
final act of life…
and in all of this sound and fury, signifying nothing, what can we find that
will make all this effort worth our while?
We can claim that life is worth the effort because of friends, family, country,
faith, fame, materialism, or any number of combinations of those factors that
we have listed or might list………
And each of these factors has had their defenders, faith and country and
nationalism or some very narrow factors like being white or being a man…
What has given our life meaning and purpose has been fought over
since time began and that battle surely will not end because of anything
I have written…
If life is not an illness that only ends with the cure of death, then
what is this thing we call life?
Kropotkin