Reading and Thinking
Listen, being human has always been difficult. You know you will die. You know most of the time you feel sad. You know that you’d like to feel good, like the pleasure of a cup of coffee, or a good meal. Sex might be too intense as a baseline, but you’d like to feel safe and embraced as much of the time as possible. But you don’t. You will die, and 80 odd years really starts to feel very short. What’s worse, thinking about what happens once you’re dead really twists your guts. Not only will you be gone, but those left behind will feel even more sadness for a time. If you don’t feel this keen sense of death and finitude perhaps think about it some more sometime. The only solace is that you are never alone in this outrageously awesome and banal experiment. Nearly 8 billion people are already at sea with you, and millions more have perished. Those millions left millions of messages. Millions of messages in millions of bottles. You might be lucky enough to find one. Maybe its the music of a hero, maybe its a reformer’s speech, maybe its the freeze-frame families of Pompeii. Each is a challenge to death. Each is a defiant statement of life, existence and survival. You will die, but while you’re here why not get a second opinion and boot-strap your experiment to the best discoveries of theirs. That’s the humanities man, that’s the arts, that’s an education.
