Doubling

Write your life story in 6 words. Then, write your life story in 12 words. Then 24, 48, 96, 192. 

Caveat: once used, you cannot repeat any phrase. That is, you are not simply revising, adding, filling. Each piece should be unique. And try not to repeat your “style” or “voice” from one to the next. Mix them up. Take chances. But meet the word count. Focus on making each word a vibrant contributor.

I am grateful, not fully great.

Born Gordon Fritz Rohler: genxer, philosopher, beside HER, never sure, unsure.

Gordon? Rohler? How many words do I get again? No! He was sensitive to a fault but man, sometimes, he could make you laugh.

Mistakes were made.             Success is a subjective measure.
            Talent was unrealized.           Wherever you go, there you are.
            You can’t explain it away.       One can’t derive an ought/imperative from an is.
            Opportunities were wasted.    Walk a mile in my shoes.
            Nothing was ventured.            Judge, lest ye be judged.

What does a man have but time? Time is the constant in a universe of variables. In any biography, the usage of time is the essence -the matter at hand. How have I used my time? Asking why when how is what you want to know. How is where it’s at. How makes money and everybody needs it, money that is. Why doesn’t cut it, why doesn’t bake bread; no one cares about why anymore! So I’m persona non grata. Or at least ignored. Time will tell which is worse. How or why? But why...how?

Think of the way it feels when you hear your voice on a recording. Most of us bristle, even if a little. “Is that what I sound like?” Autobiography asks a similar question: Is that what I’ve lived like?” Autobiography tosses your lump of a life onto a steel-cold table in the gross lab, where with razor sharp scalpels and muscular forceps and probes, tears apart your judgement and character and personality with unceasing fire-breathing criticism of your horrible decisions and gnashes teeth at your incessant laziness and wrings hands raw due to your pathological sensitivity and erodes all possibility of contentedness or serenity or self-actualization at best and at worst births institutionalization, to produce the same face piercing cringe when you hear your voice through your ears and not through your head. Autobiography is not some mild self-sadism akin to a sauna what with its relaxed muscles finale. Nor is it torturous introspection to show the glass is half-full and “just look at all you’ve accomplished from such modest beginnings!” Honestly and authentically, factually, it exposes existential pain reaped from a life lived not through the ears, but through the head.

Dispatches

Dispatches finished with me last week; I can't say I'm finished with it.

Though it came out in 1977, it is simply alive; still breathing and kicking and still wrecking people to existential and artistic crisis. 

Case in point:

But then this tidbit from an old interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: I think it took around 10 years for "Dispatches" to be published after you returned.HERR: Well, it took about nine years. That's because it took about eight years to write it.GROSS: How come it took so long?HERR: That's a long story, you know? It just took a long time. It took what it took, you know? I was afraid to finish the book.

Afraid. 

Books like Dispatches hold up a mirror to humanity.

And sometimes the abyss looks back.

The Death Problem

I read this

And, you know, it was fine.

Given that death is my favorite topic, I really latched onto:

Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. 

But I ask you Mr. Sullivan, how exactly does christianity solve death? How does christianity protect us from THE existential moment?

By unrealizing it. You never die. You are eternal. He that believeth in me...

I like my solutions a little more solution-like.

You might say don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

But the bath water never cleaned the baby and christianity NEVER solved the death problem.

You die. we die, he dies, she dies, they die...all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal...

Death is your own-most possibility and it cannot be outstripped.

How are you going to LIVE with this possibility?

By unrealizing it? This has epistemic-health consequences.

What you believe matters.

What you think matters.

A lot.

Pinker's progressivism and all it entails doesn't deny death; it has that going for it. Which is more than I can say for christianity.

psst: http://www.pewforum.org/2018/11/20/where-americans-find-meaning-in-life/