It's a cold autumn night in Sonoma County and I'm sitting here listening to the fire crackle behind me while the still, cool air chills the room. There isn't anything I really want to do, anything I really want to say, and there isn't really anything I want to do. I've reached a point in my life where I simply have stopped caring about things.
Some people would say it's depression. Others would say it's a normal feeling for someone of my age who has lived long past the time that my ancestors would have. I don't know that to be true. I have read that a Roman aristocrat could not hold a high office until he was 42. How can both be true?
There is a certain liberation in the feeling of not caring. There is nothing that you want, and nothing that you need. Therefore, how can you be deprived of anything? To die is not bad. To live is not necessarily good. I think Nietzsche said that hope is the most horrible of all things, because it extends your torment. I wouldn't know. I can't think of anything I hope for.
So much of my life appears to be directed toward survival. I have certainly never accumulated anything remotely resembling any measure of wealth. Does that matter? Would I be equally in this place where I sitting in some palatial residence with soft light, shiny glass and chrome surfaces? I can't say. It would not matter if I could.
My only mortality comes ever greater to the fore and though there is nothing remotely resembling and end in sight, it doesn't mean it is not around the corner. After all, we are here one moment, then gone the next. The stars do not need our small ruin.
Sometimes I go out into my back yard, among the uneven ground and patchwork of weeds that grow out there, and look up into the sky past the boughs of the single tree in my backyard, and there are the stars. They don't seem to twinkle much. Rather they sit there in repose, shining in the infinite blackness and not saying anything. There is nothing to say. What is the voice of God saying anyway? I wouldn't know. I don't believe in God.
The patchwork quilt of velvet blackness with the bare branches, leafless and shaking against the cold spreads across the night sky. There is nothing to do but look upon the face of infinity and wonder. That is one thing that never ceases in my life. There will always be a sense of wonder when the universe bares itself.
You ask yourself how many times in your life you will have those moments: enduring moments of bitter loneliness and liberation. This is all there is, and this is all that there ever will be.
Some people would say it's depression. Others would say it's a normal feeling for someone of my age who has lived long past the time that my ancestors would have. I don't know that to be true. I have read that a Roman aristocrat could not hold a high office until he was 42. How can both be true?
There is a certain liberation in the feeling of not caring. There is nothing that you want, and nothing that you need. Therefore, how can you be deprived of anything? To die is not bad. To live is not necessarily good. I think Nietzsche said that hope is the most horrible of all things, because it extends your torment. I wouldn't know. I can't think of anything I hope for.
So much of my life appears to be directed toward survival. I have certainly never accumulated anything remotely resembling any measure of wealth. Does that matter? Would I be equally in this place where I sitting in some palatial residence with soft light, shiny glass and chrome surfaces? I can't say. It would not matter if I could.
My only mortality comes ever greater to the fore and though there is nothing remotely resembling and end in sight, it doesn't mean it is not around the corner. After all, we are here one moment, then gone the next. The stars do not need our small ruin.
Sometimes I go out into my back yard, among the uneven ground and patchwork of weeds that grow out there, and look up into the sky past the boughs of the single tree in my backyard, and there are the stars. They don't seem to twinkle much. Rather they sit there in repose, shining in the infinite blackness and not saying anything. There is nothing to say. What is the voice of God saying anyway? I wouldn't know. I don't believe in God.
The patchwork quilt of velvet blackness with the bare branches, leafless and shaking against the cold spreads across the night sky. There is nothing to do but look upon the face of infinity and wonder. That is one thing that never ceases in my life. There will always be a sense of wonder when the universe bares itself.
You ask yourself how many times in your life you will have those moments: enduring moments of bitter loneliness and liberation. This is all there is, and this is all that there ever will be.
posted by Robert Smith at 7:22 PM
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