O mon âme, n'espere pas la vie immortelle, mais épuise le champ du possible.
This essay begins with something partiularly mundane. Commercials. Living in the United States, they're hard to avoid. But more and more, I feel infected by the dull shallowness they promote. I recently had the strange experience of watching a Burger King commercial, followed by a commercial for some weight-loss drug, followed by a health insurance commercial. What bothered me in particular however wasn't the products, but what was being sold. Friends eating and laughing together, playing sports with friends, and an implict warning that without their service, none was availble to you. In truth, I'd happily drink tap water, throw a ball at my friends, and let my cuts heal themselves. Yet, I feel the weight of their chatter all around me - this synthetic reality where strangers assert their own importance in your life.
It is an impossible thing, to express experience in words. We may preseve parts of it. Perhaps we can express common patterns understandable to others. But, I connot express to you the beauty of watching the sunset over the Black Sea. The pain of hunger in Africa. The moment of acceptance when a gun was pointed at me in Georgia. This impossibilty of full expression is the only things which makes these experiences assuredly mine and mine alone. That in these moments, I existed in a place where there was no chatter. By no persuasion implict or explict, I came to my own understanding of priority.
In the pursuit of life, it seems inevitable that one must, at some point, dispose the idea of an orderly, sequencial existence. An idea which Fear whispers, reasonable and self-assured in its own common acceptance. The Shadow of the Valley of Death, fears the knowledge that every reason to live is a reason to die. There is no room to cling to a life which is only yours to borrow. Perhaps I am alone in imagining myself waking up from the dream only to learn I had never dared to dream in the first place.
Pindar is said to have lived three-thousand years ago. His worlds translated from Greek to French and translated again to English. An idea kept live long before Pindar and evidently, well after him. Living is not the only goal of life.
Oh my friend, aspire not a life unending, but exhaust the field of possibilites.
-Warren