Since the dawn of recorded history, something like 110 billion human beings have been born into this world. And not a single one of them made it. There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. Roughly 60 million of them die every year. 60 million people. That comes out to about 160,000 per day. I read this quote once when I was a kid, “We live alone, we die alone. Everything else is just an illusion. ” It used to keep me up at night. We all die alone. So, why am I supposed to spend my life working, sweating, struggling? For an illusion? Because no amount of friends, no girl, no assignments about conjugating the pluperfect or determining the square root of the hypotenuse is gonna help me avoid my fate. I have better things to do with my time.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew that I would have to keep writing or I knew I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know that we know that we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often found after the early twentieth century, or not in that form.) To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or - the Marquis de Sade defense. Used by ironists - vice versa. To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honour. To thumb my nose at death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so that I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create is Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new work. To make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national conscience. To justify my failures in school. To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I couldn’t be a ‘writer’ unless I actually did some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any woman at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive logorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control. Because I was possessed. Because I fell into the embrace of the Muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth. Because I had books instead of children (several twentieth-century women). To serve Art. To serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To act out antisocial behavior for which I have been punished in real life. To master a craft. To subvert the establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is right. Because the story took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. To search for understanding of the reader and myself. To cope with my depression. For my children. To make a name that would deserve to survive death. To defend a minority group or oppressed class. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose the appalling wrongs and atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To speak for the Dead. To celebrate Life. To praise the Universe. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of what has been given to me.

“Narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.”

Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man’s very insides his self are foreign to him. He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange.

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.”