nihilism

Once I dreamt I was taking photographs of a guy playing guitar. It felt like they were coming out great.  I was using an old camera and looking forward to seeing the pictures when they developed.  I thought maybe one will be the cover of his next album.

Then I woke up.

I don’t know who he was supposed to be, but that musician is never going to have an album.  He was a figment of my imagination.  Same goes for the camera and the film.  And those pictures.  They’ll never be developed. As I woke up and realized this, I felt a sense of loss.  I had been looking forward to something that I’ll never get to see. But then I thought, really, in the sweep of time, were the dream pictures all that different from real ones?  The real ones will eventually disappear just like those wisps in my head.

Everything goes.  

Even all the stuff that feels permanent. Even Shakespeare.  Even all your files that you have backed up on an external drive.  Even the marble headstones that name our lost loved ones.  This isn’t news. We all know it. One day everything will go poof.  All our museums and libraries and monuments. Everything we made and everything we figured out.  

Gone.

I was out with my family, and my brothers and I were talking about games we play on our iPhones. Our dad said, “Don’t you think when you get to the end of your life, you’re going to wish you hadn’t spent so much time on those games?”

I heard myself say, “What difference does it make?”

I think it took my dad back a little.  He just nodded and said,  “I guess you’re right.”

It’s hard to argue against Nihilism.  If you pull the camera back far enough we do look just like ants. And if there were a way to pull back the camera not on space, but on time, all human history would just be a flicker of light.  But I do want to argue against it.  I want to fly a better banner than “who cares?”  I know this is a depressing subject to start with, but I feel like if I don’t knock down Nihilism first, why talk about anything?

I don’t want to bum you out.  Avoiding these questions is probably the best choice for the most part. But maybe by dragging them out into the light, we can kill them, like vampires.  Or at least see what we’re dealing with. This was all covered in Ecclesiasties. Which was written over 2000 years ago.  There are plenty new things under the sun, but feeling all is vanity is surely not one of them. Who do I think I am – thinking I can add to a millennia-old conversation about Life’s Meaning?

Look at that – how despair infects even my desire to talk about despair!  Clearly I have a lot of work to do.

—

I started with thoughts I had on waking from a dream.  I have the luxury to not have to get up at any given time, but it’s a dangerous thing to be able to linger in bed.  People who have to rush to work have less time to get mired in darkness. And You know what? The more I worked on this show, the less Nihilistic I felt. I’ve been too busy picking out microphones and music and working with actors and learning editing software.  And more than just being occupied and distracted, it feels good to make things.

What can I say? Doing my show about Nihilism really cheered me up!

Peter DeVries wrote: “The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life means nothing. But that is not to say it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque “mean,” or a rainbow or a rose?” If you feel troubled that there’s no meaning in the universe, if you feel there’s no point to life, you’re probably just sad about something much less cosmic.  You probably have some personal reasons, and if you don’t know what they are, you might want to take a look.

I like to imagine all my beliefs are shaped by reason, but one thing reason tells me is that a lot of what I think comes from what I feel.  And even people who don’t worship the scientific method – whatever they believe, Everybody thinks they’re realistic.  Every religion and philosophy and outlook. Nobody thinks they’re warped. Cynics especially, love to call themselves realists.  As if they don’t want to be cynics.  “I’d love to be cheery, but look around.” And they point to the indisputable half-emptiness of the glass. The universe is a great big Rorschack blot, and how you see it says more about you than life.  Yes Nihilism rests on facts that are inarguable.

But so does happiness.