How not to judge our lives

Saturday, September 18, 2021

8 a.m. Sort of unpredictably in neutral. Wouldn’t you think the record of so many conversations – published or not published – would be encouraging? Well, they are, in that they reassure me that I haven’t been totally wasting my time, and they aren’t, in that they show so much work to be done, that I doubt I will do.

[I had just spent half an hour listing chronologically the books I had had published and the manuscripts that I had compiled (completed or otherwise), wondering if it could all be brought together somehow. I concluded, “Can it be done? I doubt it.”]

Well, let’s continue, anyway. You were saying, in effect, “You were created a certain way, so follow your natural bent.”

We didn’t say it would always be easy, but it will always be natural, that is, it will conform to your nature. By definition, really.

Looking at the external product, though, can be discouraging.

It can. Perhaps a good reason not to set your value by the external product. You remember Churchill in his old age.

I do. He was blackly depressed on one of his birthdays, and his daughter said to him that he had accomplished so much. “I have accomplished a great deal,” he said, “to have accomplished nothing in the end.”

If he had looked at how he had lived, he might have felt better about himself. No one’s work amounts to much, if it is supposed to validate his life.

I can see that. The internal work is so intangible, though, and sometimes seems to fragile.

It is as well to retain some skepticism about your own emotional judgments. You in 3D are not in the best position to see how well or badly you did. In fact, it’s sort of meaningless, when you consider that you are there to be you, a task you can scarcely fail at.

Yes, I know that.

We hear: “Fat lot of good it does.”

Well, yes, in a way. In a way not, but we do want to leave something.

Life is not a high school popularity contest. Neither is it a competition of any kind. You will remember Hemingway’s comment?

Can’t remember where or when he said it, but it amounted to, “Young boys think life is a battle (or a war, or something), but it is a morass.”

And that is an accurate perception, minus the implication that it is an undesirable thing. But in fact life does enmesh you as you go along. You don’t live without accumulating consequences. But there isn’t anything wrong with that. It isn’t as if otherwise everything would be fine. The morass is as much the point as anything else is. That is, what you do in your life, what you do through your life, we should say, is what lasts. The non-3D doesn’t have bookshelves or model display cases or trophy tables.

Think of Hemingway, all that devotion, all that work, and it turns out that the devotion and the work were the point, not the books he wrote or the effect they had.

That isn’t quite right. All a man’s work is part of what he is. We know you think of them as separate categories, but if you will consider, you will see that it cannot be. How can you spend 40 years flying airplanes or making machinery or practicing medicine or anything, skilled or unskilled, enjoyed or not, “successful” or not, and have it not be an intrinsic part of who you are? The airplane, the machine, the surgical implements will not accompany you, but your working with them will. And of course it goes for intangibles, no less. Spending time with the sick or the troubled, teaching, policing, anything, it is part of you. And do you think burglars and murderers and drug peddlers somehow escape what they have spent their lives doing? It can’t happen.

So on the one hand we can reassure ourselves that nothing was wasted, and on the other hand we say, “God, I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time,” or “Dammit, it would have been so easy to have done better.”

Graham Greene’s whiskey priest, that Colin Wilson liked to cite.

Yes. Facing a firing squad (I think it was), he thought, “It would have been so easy to have been a saint.”

Yet we predict that if the firing squad were to spare him, he would find, with the best intentions, that it is not so easy to become a saint.

You don’t need to remind anybody here!

Well – maybe we do. Depression often comes from a comparison of oneself against a false ideal, or let’s say an ideal that cannot be lived, only aspired to.

You’ve said over the years that any ideal can only be aspired to: If it can be achieved, it is not an ideal but a goal.

Hemingway’s ideal in writing was forever out of reach, but reaching for it led him to excellence. The question is, which was realer to him, the excellence achieved, or the ideal unachieved?

That pretty much depended on his mood, I imagine.

Think of it as a feedback loop rather than as a one-way influence, but yes, in that context, that’s right. And so with any of you. Who is going to die thinking, “I did perfect”? Who is going to think, “I did everything I wanted to do”?

Maybe we can hope to be like Sulla on his deathbed. He sounded pretty contented. “No man ever did me well or ill but that I repaid him in full.”

You are welcome to take that as a model, if it pleases you. You don’t know that that was his final word on his life, though.

No, of course not. This feels like it has been sort of without real purpose. Not quite kvetching, not quite going anywhere either.

Post if anyway. You never know who picks up what, as we have said many times. Even your listing of your published and unpublished manuscripts will be of interest.

Perhaps.

And take the day off if you wish.

A little late for that! But tomorrow, maybe. Then maybe we can continue with your discussion of the meaning of a given life.

We would laugh, if we could. What do you suppose we have been doing? It may be considered a portrait in negative space, but it is on target nevertheless.

If you say so. Next time, then.

—

Manuscripts published and (in parens) unpublished:

2009    Sphere and Hologram

2011    The Cosmic Internet

2015    Rita’s World

2016    Rita’s World v. 2

2017    (Only Somewhat Real [Nathaniel book one])

2018    (Nathaniel book two)

2018    Awakening from the 3D World

2019    It’s All One World

2019    (The Gospel of Thomas)

2020    (Body, Mind, Soul)

2021    (Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings, part one)

2021    (Life More Abundantly, in process)