Like this spider, we're caught in a web of
raindrops and beauties.
Today, we’re suffering from time out of season.
It is spring, but that is frustrating when I look outside. Two days of heavy rain are forecast. This is the first, and there is little I can do about it. I have tried rest, work and keeping occupied when I don’t wish to be, and even a cup of tea. I drank the tea. I did not try to drown in it.
What’s come of today?
Sometimes I feel well, and other times it’s all I can do to make it to my bed and crash down in it, if my sleeping dog will make room for me.
It is a pattern in my life. I have never been able to find a proper balance between misery and pleasure, and have despaired of trying. Perhaps this hold true for everyone, save those in complete agony or pure bliss, which do not last for long in either instance.
I have tried to find the balance, but it always seems outside forces tip the scales one way or the other, just as the weather and my bed and dog are doing today.
The conclusion must be that I have very little control over obtaining one state of being or the other.
Friend and foes, weather and time, health and sickness, all these and more dictate these to me.
It might even be random, which is the most terrifying possibility of all. As much as we try to apply diligence or work toward a better time, the outcome seems arbitrary if we try to determine why one state of life or mind predominates. Even those who seek out agonies sometimes are pleased with them.
The Romans claimed that despite how we might deny it, our pleasures are directly related to our pains. That’s all very stoical. I have never been able to figure out what that means, although I have tried dodging raindrops until fatigued.
Does it mean we have to take pains to formulate pleasure? Or that taking pleasure leads to pain? Does it even matter what path we pursue? The inability to find an answer seems to point to the conclusion that all is random, a product of chaos, and much of the modern world seems to have reached that conclusion.
In anticipating this, another favorite of the Romans was to assert that fortune, fortune, all is fortune, meaning chance rules. That seems to be an anti-human conclusion, since we would have no say in what we feel if that were true, that raindrops fall on our head indiscriminately and we don’t have the sense to put on a hat, or that we can’t make the choice whether or not to play in traffic. Yet I have known and liked people who live this way. They generally are fun-loving and open-hearted, and being that way seems not to dictate whether they are satisfied with pleasure or defiled by pain. Both things happen to them, just a both things happen to every kind of human being.
Maybe all is fortune.
Nietzsche said that life is a well of joys. That implies that we should be like those who happily play in traffic, for he also said that life gives the greatest pleasures and offers up the most satisfaction if we live dangerously. I have tried that, and it is not always true, although danger often tips the scales one way or the other and gives either great joy or terrible pain. Then again, it sometimes gives neither one nor the other, and we crash our motorcycle.
It all seems absurd.
Absurdity appears to be the
conclusion Kierkegaard came to when he said, I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is
too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too strenuous. I do not care to
lie down, for I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do
that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa
summarum: I do not care at all.
And then Kierkegaard channels the
ancient Romans in another way: There are
well-known insects which die in the moment of fecundation. So it is with all
joy: life’s supreme and richest moment of pleasure is coupled with death.
Or is it the other way around?
I don’t think we get to decide.
All this because of rain in spring.
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