The Linearity of Existence
I was chatting with an adversary/friend over lunch the other day, and he told me of an email he got from an old crush. He's married now, and unofficially expecting, and the note put him in a philisophical mood.
"At first I was freaked out, because I remember her being so important to me, like, I had to have her in my life, then it didn't happen and I suffered and now I'm someone else, anyway, and I realized that she's dead to me."
"Dead to you? Really?"
"We'll, yeah, you know, that was a totally different me. That life that I lived, those feelings...they're totally irreconcilable with who I am today."
"...and, therefore, she's DEAD to you?" I probed his thoughts on this, and came up with this assessment: he looks at his life like a series of isolated, compartmentalized lives; these many identities, over a life, become the constitutents of the whole. For him, childhood didn't overlap with adolescence; high school vs. college vs. law school provided sharp divisions of his concept of self; he has been born and died and born again with every love interest in his life.
I respond: "Just because life is made of different chapters, possibly written in different tongues, different styles, doesn't mean it ain't all part of the same book, asswipe. Whether you're inclined to see it this way or not, your life is linear and cumulative and all those "who I used to be's' are undeniably, honestly a part of 'who I am now.' Just because your psychological makeup allows you to make a clean start of things, push the past away to make room for the present and future, doesn't mean you don't have to reconcile and incorporate the 'used to be's' with/into the 'now.' I mean, do I really have to quote Magnolia in this Thai restaurant? We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. You're a fucking enlightened traveller from the east, asshole. Why is it up to me to remind you of these things?"
He concedes the correctness of my proposition. He always does. I conclude: "And don't start talking about people in your past as dead unless they actually are dead, for no other reason than they might actually die and then you'd feel bad, like you were somehow responsible for their deaths. Like I felt responsible for Ethyl Merman and Roy Orbison. I still feel bad about that."
I was chatting with an adversary/friend over lunch the other day, and he told me of an email he got from an old crush. He's married now, and unofficially expecting, and the note put him in a philisophical mood.
"At first I was freaked out, because I remember her being so important to me, like, I had to have her in my life, then it didn't happen and I suffered and now I'm someone else, anyway, and I realized that she's dead to me."
"Dead to you? Really?"
"We'll, yeah, you know, that was a totally different me. That life that I lived, those feelings...they're totally irreconcilable with who I am today."
"...and, therefore, she's DEAD to you?" I probed his thoughts on this, and came up with this assessment: he looks at his life like a series of isolated, compartmentalized lives; these many identities, over a life, become the constitutents of the whole. For him, childhood didn't overlap with adolescence; high school vs. college vs. law school provided sharp divisions of his concept of self; he has been born and died and born again with every love interest in his life.
I respond: "Just because life is made of different chapters, possibly written in different tongues, different styles, doesn't mean it ain't all part of the same book, asswipe. Whether you're inclined to see it this way or not, your life is linear and cumulative and all those "who I used to be's' are undeniably, honestly a part of 'who I am now.' Just because your psychological makeup allows you to make a clean start of things, push the past away to make room for the present and future, doesn't mean you don't have to reconcile and incorporate the 'used to be's' with/into the 'now.' I mean, do I really have to quote Magnolia in this Thai restaurant? We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. You're a fucking enlightened traveller from the east, asshole. Why is it up to me to remind you of these things?"
He concedes the correctness of my proposition. He always does. I conclude: "And don't start talking about people in your past as dead unless they actually are dead, for no other reason than they might actually die and then you'd feel bad, like you were somehow responsible for their deaths. Like I felt responsible for Ethyl Merman and Roy Orbison. I still feel bad about that."