Excerpts from Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes as taken from Michael Dirda's article in The Washington Post and my reaction to them

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"As Phillip Larkin said in his mortality-haunted poem, 'Aubade,' 'Most things may never happen: This one will.'"

:(

"'For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever--including the jug--there is not context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.'"

i showed this quote to a few friends and they all brought up the argument that in keeping an awareness of your mortality, you will ruin your enjoyment of life waiting for death. i could not disagree more. a western mind set creates distinctions in the order of things in order to assess things as concrete or abstract. so we have dark vs. light, joy vs. sorrow, planet vs. industry. our physical and conceptual environments consist only of conflict. but i think an more eastern --and not necessarily buddhist, but also hebrew and islamic-- accepts the duality of forms in the sense that often both concepts dovetail each other, essentially completing each other. how is death vs. life different from joy vs. sorrow? how can something die if it does not exist? for some reason, humans refuse to accept the terms of this particular dichotomy. i feel that accepting it and moving on will give someone power.

"'I don't believe in God, but I miss him.'"

i miss feeling good and nice about god.

"'Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn't it -- doesn't it? This is our chosen myth, and almost as much of a delusion as the myth that insisted on fulfillment and rapture when the last trump sounded and the graves were flung open, when the healed and perfected souls joined in the community of saints and angels. But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious.'"

i am mostly interested here by the words 'chosen' and also 'myth'. the word 'delusion' is a difficult word to grasp only because of how violent it is here.

"Barnes notes with approval Somerset Maugham's view that 'the best frame of mind in which to conduct life' is that of 'humorous resignation.'"

i feel like this is the kind of frame that a lot of internet writers i read write from, or at least from a struggle to reach this frame. from the top of my head i think sam pink, noah cicero, brandon scott gorrell. noah cicero wrote something a few days ago here: "I am powerless and will never have power. That is why I am able to write these things, because I know and view myself as a nothing, and in that nothingness I can objectively kind of look at things." i think a person saying they are powerless is funny. it is funny to me because there is a social tendency to keep up with the jonses, to build yourself up pretty, to constantly search for power. but when you say 'i don't give a fuck and i'm just going to laugh', then you are free and no one can hurt you.

"'A few hours before dying in a Naples hospital,' the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller 'said (presumably in Italian) to a male nurse who was cranking up his bed, "You have beautiful hands." ' Barnes calls this 'a last, admirable catching at a moment of pleasure in observing the world, even as you are leaving it.' Similarly, the poet and classicist 'A.E. Housman's last words were to the doctor giving him a final -- and perhaps knowingly sufficient -- morphine injection: "Beautifully done." '"

i have nothing to add.

"A friend once summed up Julian Barnes's own daily existence: 'Got up. . . . Wrote book. Went out, bought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.' Some might say: Not much of a life. Yet the philosopher Epicurus maintained that quiet routines like this offer our best response to death: Work hard at what you care about and enjoy moderate pleasures. It's really very good advice, but probably just a little too sensible for the unruly human heart."

i think it's interesting that barnes's routine is something you could read on zachary german's blog, for instance. just minutia that was never validated in patriarchal literature before. but with the perspective of life as absurd and with the 'humorous resignation', meaning can be assigned to almost anything and i find value in this.

this 'unruliness' of the human heart is learned and developed instinctively. it is also dumb and stupid.

i have been very attracted to epicurus since a college professor who i secretly admired but was too shy to approach, spoke on his philosopy in class once. basically, epicurus says 'enjoy good things and good people and be happy with yourself and your family and friends and take care of things. but remember that this is it, there is nothing more.' when i heard this i was struggling very much with myself as a human being in relation to the metaphysical. i'm not completley sold on epicurus, but i feel like it is something i can hold onto at least for now.