Whose Will They Be?

"How can singular personal existence be carried on so that it means more than loneliness and dread? It is difficult to see how Western society can last, or even deserve to last, unless it can answer this question.

The failure of political imagination today lies simply in the fact that it has contributed almost nothing to this end."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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"More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John."

― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)

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"But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

―The Gospel of Luke

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Dear Kate,

You can't possibly let it happen, can you, to waste a day of your life?  Our days are numbered, we know that.  And strange enough, we feel guilty about it.

You asked, Do we?  Did I?

Maybe I shouldn't have done that, speaking for you.  I should speak only for myself, as I've often been told.  My son told me often, You like to make a big deal out of everything.

Like everything is important, has eternal significance.

What he meant was, Yes, not only it can possibly happen that we are to waste a particular moment in life by staying on the surface of it, we can make it a standing order if standing is all it takes to pass another day safe and sound and sporadically satisfied.

Life might be a big deal, but only in conclusion and retrospection, eloquently eulogized.  Seriously, what are you going to point at a corpse and say?  That This guys, like, really fucked it up?

That would be feeling guilty, right, letting yourself fucking it up day after day, year after year, and now lying there listening to your "loved ones" putting a final positive spin on things before burning you for all the bad things you have done and, worse, all the good things you haven't?

But you can't care too much by then, can't you, a deflated balloon?  They'll put stuffs in you to keep your face and backbone straight for the last time.  Your friends and neighbors are saying your life was good enough, so you might as well accept the compliments and die just as agreeably as you have lived.

If I can wake you for one final time and let you speak to your audience, pounding hearts wrapped in muted colors of doom, angels leaning over the balcony of heaven longing for a word of boon, what would you say to them?

Your honor, I have nothing to add?

Is that it, Kate, you have no new wonders to add to your life, no distractions to subtract from it, no giftedness to multiply, no associations with indifference and diffidence to divide yourself from?  Knowing one thing for sure, your own finitude, you can make a final sum of your all just as dishonestly as the ones eulogizing you?

I don't feel much about math, but sure as sunrise I count with my fingers when I can still move them.

Yours, Alex