LIFE IS SHORT -

LIFE IS SHORT - LIFE is short, they say. No doubt a reflection originating in their own discontent, and encouraged by the popular habit of reducing human existence to a series of stale platitudes - rather than from the mildewed pages of a 17th century British dragon.

But that life is short is no cause for despair.

Here's a pretty picture: Life making a joke of itself, issuing upon every birth, straight from the desk of the Head Bureau of Abiogenesis and with the notarized seal of The Powers That Be, a sworn affidavit assuring each individual born that his existence will only cease after he has satisfied every last, possible, and most far-fetched desire. I can just imagine the Sui Generis, in his powdered wig and rouge, snorting out several pinches of snuff at that one.

Life has made no such promises. In fact, life has made no promise at all, except to be as it is: not courteous, not civil, not long, and not lavishing upon us the many opulent gifts of an Ottoman prince. We who are disgruntled at this are so because in large part we expect life to (be like us and) hope ultimately for happiness. But life has other things on its mind. It remains to be discerned exactly what life is after, but one can say with a great deal of certitude it's not that.

We who see in life's brevity a fine excuse for extreme license, we will have our fun for a time, accumulating mountains (and consequently cliffs) of gluttony and mischief, until we finally swell ourselves to such extent that life must make room for us and shrink even more, accelerating the eventuality of what perhaps we are most trying to avoid.

The majority of the human race succumbs neither to extravagance nor spiritual sickness. They will handle the conundrum of life and death simply by propping themselves upon a vast and intricate array of affirming supports - propagandas such as 'People are good,' 'Home is where the heart is,' and 'Life is what you make of it.' This last is by far the most misleading of them all, since life is in its nature an incomprehensibly obdurate hunk of stone in which, hew as we might, we cannot effect the minutest scratch, for it renews itself second by second with the coldness of an unimpeachable truth. Surely, there's a fable in this: We don't make of life anything it will not be. At best, we can merely live alongside it for a while and at some point, sooner for some of us, further on for others, we will live beyond it.

No. Most of us will never be brilliant, powerful, wealthy, attractive - all that most of us are afforded is a few rare moments of inspiration (mostly in our youth) and some flimsy diversions to take our mind off the fact that we are but filling our time with continuous eating and crapping, eating and crapping, until that final day when we will shovel in our last meal and fart out our last turd.

Consider that the better lot of man will, by the age of 40, have become so calcified in the history of their habits that it will prove a near impossibility to step very far out of their close circle of conservatism and accomplish anything faintly revolutionary. Consider that most of us before our time will become spiritually immobile and do nothing at all but wait for those great heifers of entropy to lick away the pillars of salt that have become our bodies, and make of our bones another world entirely, not of our choosing.

Consider all this, and you may indeed find that life is much too long for our benefit.

I have great admiration for anyone who is able to keep afloat, whatever the method, but my respect requires much more from people. In my opinion, perhaps the only respectable coping strategy is to somehow squeeze just one ounce of comfort into the raging and adverse sea of discrepancy we all must drink up if we will not die of thirst - but NEVER forget the absurdity of doing so!

More or less than this, life is probably without meaning.