You Don't Mean

"For a clear-sighted person, mortality blankets our existence."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Fabric of Hope"

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Dear Kate,

What do we mean by it when we slow down to smell the flower?

Its fragrance catches our attention.  We attend to what it suggests.  What does it suggest then?

Philosophizing is boring, but fascinatingly so, because life is full of fragrances proposing ambiguous meaning, if any at all.  We would rather simply breathe in the sweet metaphors that stand for whatever it is and run with them--and, that, I think is not a bad strategy to live.

Because if we are to stop running, we might run out of reason to not start questioning.  So we run, hope against hope that the promise of spring is true, even as the rhododendron grew ugly overnight and the rain wasn't even heavy.

I took an old man to dim sum yesterday and I expected him to be happy.  It was presumptuous of me, as anyone ever expecting anything always is.  The assumption was heightened by months without the pleasure and so ultimately the disappointment.  Maybe he couldn't smell the food any more, and whatever the suggestion the aroma once gave now went with it, his capacity to discern meaning.  The question period has ended, no more chance to cool off and decide for yourself: life has forced its answer on you, that it has no meaning after all.

I read in the news yesterday: "Good news for nihilists? Life is meaningless after all, say philosophers."  The one-line summary of the article says "Researchers underline that this is not bad news."  I felt stupid to have read something so stupid, almost puked when the "researchers" mentioned Nietzsche.  What Nietzsche had we don't, the intellectual and moral rigor to follow through with the philosophy.  "The problem is egotism," that's the alphabet soup these "philosophers" offered for our soul at the end, though couldn't quite spell Übermensch with it.

The article ends with suggesting life is a "common ground" after all, and that "a nihilist can dream (it)."  I am sure they mean common grave.

"What's the worst that could happen?"  As a health care worker you can care you all you like about health but soon enough you can't care even about your own health any more--that's what could happen, that everything ever happened never needed to happen at all, that any semblance of meaning is a misunderstanding "after all."  And if there is a God, he must be the sinister old man we imagine him to be, planting flowers, titillating us with suggestions, but never meaning anything by them, our genuine misunderstanding his willful cruelty.

Yours, Alex