Your identity is the story of why you are – a selective account of the unexpected events between the birth of the universe and this time: atoms come together in one way and not another, parents bond with one partner and not another, values bind you to one culture and not another. Against this absolute choice in the variables that each of us has taken out of the cosmic lottery – our colors, neurotransmitters, our external location in space and time – it becomes really absurd to grow attached to the story and its products: ideas, identities, absolutisms. It's a logical thought experiment to go through one day and imagine any of those variables have fallen one thousandth of a degree somewhere in the plane of possibility – suddenly, the person going through your day isn't.
In her extraordinary manifesto of clairvoyance, Iris Murdoch noted:
The self, the place we live in, is a place of deception. Beauty is connected to the effort to see yourself as a selfless person… to pierce the veil of selfishness and join the world as it really is.
For thousands of years, all Eastern philosophy and countless other ancient cultures have made the elimination of that illusion – the painful, confusing, confusing dissolution – the greatest achievement of existence. For those who have had the opportunity to be born in the modern West, when they claim to be who they are, they always ask the question of who we are – this few unselected stars on temporary loan from the universe – an act of counter-cultural courage that requires dedication and special behavior.
Long before the theory of probability, before the discovery of gravity and genetics and general relativity, before the population of two billion galaxies inhabited by countless worlds, the visionary Blaise Pascal, who did not live forty years ago but touched the ages with the clarity of his thought, imitated that courage by cutting the veil of extraordinary deception:
When I look at the short period of my life, swallowed up by eternity before and after, the small space that I live in, even the one that I see, is full of endless spaces that I know nothing about and that know nothing about me, I am afraid, and I am surprised that I am here rather than there, because there is no reason why I am here than then.
There is no reason for you to be here, just be yourself. But perhaps what remains after thinking is love – matter, our essence that repeatedly exceeds antimatter the opportunity to make life tremble with life. Like life itself, love is the guarantee of an impossible nest, lasting, at best.
“What will survive us is love,” wrote Philip Larkin.
No – love is simply how we survive the cosmic deprivation of our own birth.
giving = love
For seventeen years, I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (from which the old name was coined Choice Brain its first fifteen years). It is always ad-free and lives on thanks to funding from readers. I have no employees, no interns, no assistant – a labor of love for one woman and my life and livelihood. If this functionality makes your life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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