i was reading shadow puppets by orson scott card today. Pretty good so far-- it's a fantastic continuation of the story of Bean, child genius who helped save the Earth from an alien species and later its own human evil, manifested mainly in the form of this other psychopath of a boy, Achilles. (It's hard to explain briefly-- it's a really really long story, but I highly recommend this extraordinary series.) Anyway, I got to the part where Bean and Petra go to Anton. Anton gets into this entire explanation of being human and why we struggle so hard to survive, only to die a few years down the line anyway. He basically said that humans want to live because they are bound to an innate desire to connect with others, and somehow have a part in the web of life. We create bonds with others, create societies, and even go on to commit ourselves to a partner with whom we cultivate an entirely transcendant level of intimacy. Then we have children, live on immortally through our progeny who in turn pass down their genes to the next generation.
An all this time that I read and processed what Anton was saying, I couldn't help think of Camus's bleak take on life from The Stranger: Some things happen for no reason and the world is often times just a chaotic ensemble of events where humans just try to find reason and order. Somehow I feel like Anton is spot on about people, but another cold, cold part of me just believes that Camus has it right. Sometimes I feel like the universe is just some crazy joke of an organic system that came to be, and humans are the silly little specks who think they're at the center of it all with no other mission than to be immortal through reproduction, when in fact there's no meaning really except to go along with the life cycle and do as nature sees fit, whether it calls for the our existence or not.
In the end, every individual comes and goes, maybe leaving a mark among the human race through accomlishments that are worthy of society's attention, but even that is unimportant if humans all die off due to a huge asteroid hitting Earth by natural chance. Whoever set the world record for eating the most peanuts in 2008 won't matter in the next year or next day), and whoever Mozart was doesn't matter in the same way it did during the Classical period, and won't matter at all maybe in the year 3156. We don't talk about the great General Washington and his service to his country all the time; rather we talk about that clip of Bill O'Reilly blowing up on Inside Edition or that really important job interview or that crazy thing Bobby did that got him expelled. Everything is about what happens to us and interests us individually, and we're all so damn self-absorbed we don't see anything else. We don't see that once we're gone, nobody's going to really care that we existed, eventually.
And that I unconciously fear most I think. Just the notion that I could die today or 30 years from now, but my impact on the world could only be so large. That's how self-absorbed I am, how much I matter to myself. In time, I will fade, and the people of the future (far or near) will have better things to talk about than whatever I did with my life. That's why I want to succeed and make a difference and be remembered. The only way to exist long after my death is to have an impact that makes lasting ripples throughout time and humanity.
While I so frequently look at life in that terrible light, just contemplating it that way makes my pulse quicken. I'm trivializing life that way, telling myself that i'm as insignificant as long as others forget me. It's weird, I try to tell myself that life is significant, just as Anton explained. Life is only as extraordniary as you make it because, existing as a human, you have the power to create significance, whether or not it's significant to others. It's really all mind-boggling to me..
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