The Library

Ninth Scene

Life doesn't give you time to actually look at it except during extraordinary circumstances.

It's in those gaps, those experiences that don't fit, that you see its inherent strangeness.

You notice then that things are never clean cut: the laws of physics have exceptions, moral imperatives have exceptions, even life and death have exceptions.

One doesn't see that when things are normal, whatever that means, within the range of possibility, and one forgets that very unlikely outcomes are well within the range possibility as well.

We understand freedom as the ability to control our fate and we're so proud of our marketable skills, our net worth, our physical attractiveness, our fitness, in every sense of the word, and we fail to see the gigantic mechanism we're locked into, the much larger drift of social dynamics that runs our lives and to which we blind ourselves to maintain our illusion of control.

When all our social ties are cut, when we're thrown out of humanity and denied the facilities of civilization at first we're overwhelmed by dread.

Even the most hardened misanthrope is stunned by how much his or her life depends on the well workings of society.

It is a loneliness unlike any other to no longer have a purpose in the collective human effort.

At first one tries to keep up with the goals and aspirations one was raised to value, imagining those will keep him or her from devolving to an undesirable state, only to realize with the passing of time those goals were put in place in the larger context of a group and make no sense to an individual, they make no sense at all.

At the same time, completely unexpected goals and aspirations emerge, which make sense only in the current context, and only to the person who originated them.

In solitude there are two paths to freedom, and they both involve the abolition of fear: abandoning yourself to darkness or to absolute love. What would you do if you found out, when after much soul rending torment you finally dare take that leap into the dark abyss that at the bottom of it you find love too? There is no place in existence where love is not. If there is one absolute to the human condition, it must be that.

Three hundred years! The thought made Gwen so anxious her mouth went dry. Forget about surviving that long. What was one to do with so much time? We're all taught unless we do something with our time, it doesn't count, that our lives are wasted, as if doing trumps all other considerations.

Even contemplatives feel compelled to plan out their soul gazing, worried that unscheduled introspection won't get credit in life school.

But what if everything worthwhile is already being done by the machinery of reality itself?

What if, for a human, doing is just another form of entertainment?

The removal of activities must be externally imposed, by circumstances beyond our control, for us to realize most of the things we dedicate our lives to are as relevant in the larger scheme of things as those of people who died a thousand years before we were born.

They thought their goals and plans were very important, too.

If somebody told Gwen only a month ago her most important task would be to herd chickens every Tuesday so they don't get swept in the mudslides, she wouldn't have wasted her time listening. We never listen to the truths we don't understand and the less we know about reality, the more confident we are we have it well in hand.

We are then shocked when so called unforeseen circumstances arise, making a little pile of debris of our hard earned achievements and our carefully calibrated plans, and the strangest thing is, those circumstances are never unforeseen, reality is not that creative, we just label as such the things that happen to other people, who were definitely foolish, or irresponsible, or deserving of them, or just plain unlucky.