On my way home at midday
I wonder what life is like for those who don’t think.
Some gloomy wasteland of unpleasant dampness?
Some desert with damp flashes lively enough?
It was less hot this morning.
On my way home at midday, a young lady was walking ahead of me towards the traffic light and the pedestrian crossing on the left at the corner. She had very soft, light brown hair, slightly wavy and very shiny in today’s refrained sun. An upturned nose and upturned smile appeared in profile as she turned. I felt like dropping the warm bread, hugging her from behind, touching her nose with mine, and saying, I love you — right before she continued on her way to the left and I on mine to the right, without bread nor young lady.
It is no coincidence that all the brightest minds agree that one cannot go far with reason alone.
Once the real summers and youth are over, the most normal thing that can happen while one is busy with normal business before noon, within a normal life, is thinking about death.
Thinking about death with a clear, uncluttered mind will reveal that we don’t know what comes after. The fact that we don’t know what comes after, coupled with the fact that things can always be worse, could be the cause of anxiety.
Existentialists focus on the idea of nothingness, but that’s no longer harvest of a clear, uncluttered mind: it presupposes nothingness without foundation.
Nothingness, moreover, could easily be seen as something better than life, unless one considers it from the perspective of an exceptionally privileged life or an obtuse brain. Nothingness is neither the only possibility nor the worst.
Famously, Epicurus argued that it was pointless to pay attention to death, because where death is, I am no longer; and where I am, death is not — and deservedly so, it was this argument that no one ever paid the slightest attention to, because without foundation, Epicurus identified death with nothingness or non-being.
— Yet to say nothing is already to say too much.
As for suicide, experience reveals that the normal reaction immediately preceding it is not, as one might imagine, overwhelming fear, but rather profound pity. However little value one believes one places on one’s life, the fact is that just before taking one’s own life, what one experiences is a tremendous longing and the feeling of error and crime.
— Yet there’s no remedy for anything except after death.
As soon as one returns to a mental state detached from suicide, then life and a clear, uncluttered mind once again will point to death as the only hope and suicide as the only rational action available.