#meaning

psycho-troped:

I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut

psycho-troped:

I tell you, even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut

(Just a lot of words. A lot of pointless and beautiful and painful words. Isn’t that what writing is?)

(Always is the cruelest world I know.)

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I do not know what happened. I was sitting at a Starbucks with a warm cup of hot chocolate. A pair of children made silly faces at me through the window, and I laughed. For a moment. I laughed. I turned my head back to the work in front of me, typing words into another paper for my writing class—a class I loved, for the professor I admired, for the dragging determination that I would continue on, in spite of everything. Certainly, I was miserable, but that was something to be overcome, to fight against; I would make it as long as hope remained. 
—
How was it then, that moments later I became hopeless?
—
I see myself sitting on the train, watching soft night descend on city lights. Watching apartment buildings for glimpses of lives I’d never know, hoping to catch the shadow of some lamp, the face of a curious onlooker, watching me as I watched them. Life, at its purest essence. Humanity has always been the same.

Always. Was it that word that broke me? That sense that everything should go on? Was it my own determination to continue in spite of everything? What was it that struck that fear so deep into my mind? What was it even—but that concept of always—that I feared?

Half an hour later, with hot water streaming down my face, I slipped into the bottom of the bathtub and tried to chase out the thoughts. Head underwater. The sound of artificial rain on my ears. Eyes closed. Breath held.

I’ll know what it’s like—eternity—in a second.

It wasn’t death I was hoping for, it was paradise. It was a glimpse of the divine and a promise of eternal life—everlasting consciousness. I didn’t want to die, you see, I wanted to make certain I would live forever. I wanted to know what my mother felt when I was born, when she almost died, when she heard the voice of god and knew paradise.
I felt my body plead for oxygen. I felt my heart skip a beat. I felt cold darkness echo back to me the same way it did each time I prayed to god and begged for some promise of hope. I felt the unforgiving silence again, and nothing more.
Instinct took control and I lifted my head from the water, gasping at air the way I grasped for hope.
I still don’t know what happened; I don’t know what made me so afraid of dying that I wanted to risk life.
—
I keep telling them I want to be dumb. If I were dumb, I wouldn’t think about it; it wouldn’t bother me. Like a bird I would live and I would die and would care very little for eternity.
—
What I understand of neuroscience and physics, what I know of thermodynamics, makes me think eternal consciousness is impossible.
—
What I know about religion and philosophy is that this is the ultimate question. Or as Camus said: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that”
It’s the ultimate question because no one truly knows the answer.
—
Is that what made it happen again? Is that why I had to run away? The deepest and yet most absurd question—is that really what made me leave school for the third time?
I know it’s not of course. It was more than that. It was an inability to keep going, it was a loss of hope and an outpouring of fear. It was everything and nothing.
—
I beg god again, for something, really anything. But like all those days, those endless hours sitting, curled at the bottom of my closet pleading, I meet silence and darkness and emptiness. I meet the very thing I fear, and the thing which has taken over my OCD, and anxiety, and led me to the deepest depression I have ever known. I hope for certainty where I cannot have it.
—
There are two things I know:
1. I do not have any reason to hope for eternal life. Death, like every other thing in this world, seems physical, temporal.
2. Without the hope of eternal consciousness, I have no reason to enjoy living, no reason to hope for anything. Hope, at that point, becomes temporary, and seemingly useless.
—
There is no reason for me to say any of this, of course. I am not asking for anything, not looking for someone to tell me to just have faith, not looking for anyone to tell me not to.
—
My obsessions have fixated on ideas of aging and death. (Time is so short. “It is later than you think.”) I sank into depression. I left school again because I was simply, physically unable to continue on, even though this time I thought I would make it. 
Until that moment, that second on the train watching the world go by I was okay.
Now, I need to know that I will be okay forever—literally forever—or I don’t know if I will ever quite be okay again. 
Without a hope for everything, is there a hope for anything?
—
No, I haven’t given up all hope. I hope for a someday (and for an eternal someday.) I hope to find some sense of spirituality, some presence or peace from some god, some little spark of light in the echoing darkness. I hope. But I do not expect—I do not know.

I thought Swidler’s argument about the usage of culture was really interesting. While her writing was a bit dense and the analysis a bit… longwinded… her understanding and investigation of our usage of culture and the role it plays in an individual’s life was really enlightening. Until reading the book, I had more or less described myself as “anti-pop-culture” or “culturally illiterate” but in reality it’s not that I didn’t know any culture, but that the aspects of culture which were popular among my contemporaries were often the parts of culture which I actively rejected or which constituted mydistanced culture. For myself, I had set up a dichotomous story of me against culture, though in reality, I was simply choosing the culture of my parents more often over the culture of my peers. Yet to my mind, I was entirely logical and cohesive.

But it’s always easiest to notice hypocrisy in others, and I felt challenged about my own appropriation and selection of culture in reading the complicated views and reasoning her respondents voiced. Having those responses to her questions was really helpful (even if, honestly, I struggle to understand her analysis sometimes), because they offered concrete examples of real people that I might otherwise not have believed existed - or considered to be in the vast minority. Particularly, Nora amazed me because I’ve always assumed that women thought a lot and were very articulate about love (which Swidler would probably say is a result of my personal obsession for over-analysing and talking about issues of love, etc.) My instinctual reaction was a, “is this woman for real?! does she really never think about these things?”

It was fascinating to consider that the differing approaches was actual a result of settled/unsettled lives, and the proactiveness with which someone was shaping their own life/experience. I always assumed that it was “better” for everyone to be thoughtful and proactive about their lives. But after reading Privilege last term I feel like it is actually a culturing of the elite class. It is a message directed to those who want to be leaders and have the time to consider these facets of their life. It is a very middle-class and upper-class mentality: that we can and should be proactively pursuing our own happiness, that we should be thriving, not just surviving. It’s just fascinating because people with unsettled lives often seem (at least in this survey) to be more unhappy, and to be going through struggle. At a fundamental level, most of us would agree that this is undesirable. Yet using culture is also often a product of a diverse community and the idea of a cultivated identity, which is the ideal, open-minded upperclass elite lifestyle.

But the other people who have unsettled lives are members of minority groups who do not want to remain within given stereotypes and have to select from multiple cultures between race, class, etc. in order to form their strategies of action. At least for myself, Swidler’s examination of the usage of culture to me highlights why I often feel a struggle against society, because although there’s a lot in my cultural toolkit, coming from two different cultures with different ideals about love, etc. there’s also a lot of conflicting emotions about what aspects of culture I can and should use because the two often “contradict” or oppose each other. The dilemma is intensified by the fact that I don’t associate myself particularly with either of the prodominant streams of the two cultures, that is to say, there is nothing that readily fits. So I have assembled a very ecclectic blend of multiple cultures to form an ideology that very few people around me agree with. Which in many ways is not a particularly pleasant place to be, though I actively back myself up with cultural arguments that make me feel justified, as Swidler might have predicted.

Here I am up at 3am, searching for myself. Searching for a meaning, a purpose. Who I am, who people say I am, who my parents think I am, who I’m meant to be, who I should be.