Growth: The Physics of Aging

A man walks through a store with his child tucked safely in his arm. The child leans over and grabs indiscriminately at passing products. The colors and shapes captivate her. The father keeps his child at a distance from her tempters. He moves with purpose past these possibilities back to the area of the store where the product his family needs is located. The father picks up the related products and grabs at the price tags. Cost per ounce, percentage of active ingredients--the numbers captivate him. He selects the winning competitor after comparing the potency in his mind.

Watch this sequence of events--or any other one involving parents and their offspring. Think that only some twenty years hence the same sort of event may be played out again, only the person who was in the role of the child may being the one playing the role of the parent. What is the link between children and adults? How many links are there between the two and how many lie severed on the floor between them?

Difficult questions need to be meticulously analyzed to be answered: examine the pieces separately, gain an understanding of them, and then a person can put forth a solution.

Vision is an immediate means of examination. People see in pictures, a series of fluidly changing images. Sight is always framed by a perimeter which gives every waking perception a limited dimension. The scale is amenable to human consumption. Is it any wonder that people often think in images as well? Pictorial thinking is manageable--like playing a game. There are boundaries and easily defined relations between the aspects of the image (i.e., the rules of a game). With the aid of pictorial thinking--a simple metaphor for an elaborate subject--something that was big is made small and what was confusing is now understood. A person paints a picture of something profound in life, shows it to his audience, and can now say, "There, I have made the big small for you." The artist has served his audience and releases his authority over his creation when he publicizes it. The audience is free to consider the work, critique it, leave it behind, or order a print.

Picture: Elevators

I take up my thought brush and paint thusly for you, my dear audience. The lives of people are like a set of adjacent elevators: as one elevator drops, the strain on the cord causes the other elevator to rise. One elevator is pure potential. One elevator is actuality--is being. Thus, when a person is conceived the actuality elevator is on the ground floor. Never can it go lower. The potential elevator is at the top of the building. Never can it go higher.

The little one, our exemplary individual, begins within the potential elevator. She can be anything at all. Potential is pristine, free from the taint of error. It is perfect in its vacuity. Naturally, the audience (I presume) thinks of the best of possibilities--the lawyer, the doctor, the president! Oh! Hope of hopes--what if she could be the leader of the free world? Time will tell.

The elevators operate on a time schedule. As the days go by, the potential elevator drops and the little one develops. Like grains of sand, the little one trickles into the elevator of actuality. Reality is defiant, stand-offish, proud of its dimensions and girth. It is noble in its density. The individual becomes something real and thorough, something fleshed out. She comes down to earth. The child learns a certain language, grows to a certain height, sees certain things, and so on. The actuality elevator rises as she ages. She becomes perhaps a student, a lover, a parent of her own. At some point the elevators meet. For a tenuous moment they are equal. The person whose life is pictured by the set of elevators now is fairly divided between the two. An instant later, disequilibrium returns. Now, more of her leaves the potential elevator and steps aboard the actual one. She is now ready to be more actual than potential. With the next moment, the tragedy comes--she realizes that the more she becomes, the less she can be! Oh! Terror of terrors--what if she has become the wrong sort of thing? The audience worries about the worst of possibilities--to be a failure, a vagrant, a disgrace. Whatever she is, it is impossible to change course. The elevators only move in one direction as time only moves forward. She becomes tired; her body aches. The prospect of deviating from habit or searching beyond the familiar confines distress her. Downward plunges what the person can become as who she actually is rises higher and higher. If the mistakes are too many or too great, the image is eerily reminiscent of an execution. The height kills. But if the triumphs have piled up, the image is of a catapult. The load is delivered unto the heavens. When she reaches the top, at the end of her life, the doors open, the cord is severed, and what was rushes to earth in a race to become nothing.

The audience wonders, what floor has she reached? Did she walk out? Is the ride simply over?

As the artist, I have the luxury of being coy. I can refrain from expanding upon my work and drawing out implications I think would infringe upon the responsibilities of the audience. I will say, though, that here I have painted a picture of life that is principally defined by time. In this way, childhood and adulthood are opposed. The contents of the elevators are inversely proportional. A person becomes less like a child the more like an adult he becomes. There is truth in this, is there not? One may look at life through time like a lens. Then the link between childhood and adulthood is a loose one because one has stepped outside of a life to look at a life.

Potentiality, with childhood as its representative, is the antithesis to actuality, with adulthood as its representative. Potentiality is open because it is empty. The distinction between potentiality and nothing is that we expect the former to become something else whereas we expect the latter to remain the same, to remain nothing. There is something there when we consider potentiality, however undeveloped. We press the raw material into molds or press stamps onto it. Now, it is or contains something else, it is formed. Actuality is binding because it is full. It resists alteration because of its structure, though it too can be undone.

This picture is weighty, is it not? Does it not saddle you down? It adds a great, painful, anxiety-inducing gravity to all of one's time because it paints imprisonment as so inescapable. Life is a process of binding. Being bound is what makes life like a gamble, for once the bet has been placed (i.e., the choice made) there is always a record of it and a consequential reckoning. Once a person has gambled wrongly, it impoverishes him. He takes that err with him in the form of an empty pocket, whether or not he remembers why he is poor. He never escapes it. He wriggles on the pin of failure. It is as though all moments of time impale a person and fix them at that point. Could it be that all these frozen people are what push the elevator of actuality downwards--that keep one from rising higher and faster? What heights could a person attain, how tall would the building of his life be, if not for all these instantaneous duplications! Is it possible that all the people a person has been are pinned onto this latest person? Oh how the woman now is different than the baby she was--that little balloon so scantly adorned!

Do not despair. We are looking out from time and time is ambivalent in the abstract. A person might just as easily be lifted up by her becoming. It is after all the natural motion of the elevator of becoming to move upwards. In potentiality there is freedom. What if a child took the advice of a beneficent mentor and developed a talent for piano instead of listening to his friends encourage him to vandalize? How many times does a person, going upwards, have the opportunity to become something they would approve of in quiet reflection--away from peers? Yes, life is a process of trial and error, of learning the truth of things from within them after assessing the truth of them from without them. So long as there is some depth for the potential elevator to descend into, there is still hope. Would it not be enough for a person to renege on her shameful missteps just prior to the door opening? Could she not shed those copies of herself that constrained her? In ways yes and in ways no, but if I elaborated I would be leaving my picture behind and moving somewhere else.

Impartial

Who are we to ask for guidance if we become disoriented and need to know where to go next? Let us set aside the suggestions of people. Their judgments are fraught with mistakes and rarely are preferable to our own judgments. What about old mother nature? She is well liked. We laud her for her impartiality--how she never discriminates. (Discrimination is unnatural, after all.) She tolerates everyone equally. Perhaps she is the fount of knowledge we are looking for. Ought we model ourselves off her posture? I have seen many people knock at her door. When she answers, what does she say? What fables does she teach us with?

A bear takes a wrong step and lands in a trap. His foot is crushed; his hide is punctured. Writhing in pain, what does he do? He takes to gnawing off the effected limb. Moral: Live at all costs.

Ought we be like the bear? No. Life is good. It is the most basic good. But should we live at all costs? All? No, no. One loses life trying so hard to keep it. The bear dies hemorrhaging.

A wolf takes a wrong step and lands in a rut. His leg is broken; his stride is undone. Writhing in pain, what does he do? He takes to limping off alone. He refuses assistance. If a helpful human came to set the leg straight, she would be bitten. Moral: Vulnerability is death.

Ought we be like the wolf? No. Death is bad. It is the most basic bad. But does vulnerability entail death? Entail? No, no. One gains life by permitting help. The wolf dies starving.

To live at all costs pits individuals in a mortal competition. Vulnerability is death pits individuals in a mortal competition. The impartiality in nature is a direct cause of confrontation amongst her children. Without the striations partiality--some individuals being embraced, others being confronted, and others being ignored--there is only homogeneous relating. Only the brutest facts are consequential--that one eats and reproduces. These facts constrain within the fixed limits of natural scarcity. One's eating takes away from another's; one's reproducing takes away from another's. The option is posed: either draw daggers or take leave. Fight or flight. There is no relating here; there is no cohabitation or dwelling. Is this any way for humans to operate?

I anticipate your objections. You will come at me and say, "You have gone too far. The bees--they cooperate! Lionesses carry their cubs in their mouths. Some birds mate for life. In nature, there is special treatment amongst some species." And to you I say: Yes. Quite right. I never said that mother nature never had good advice. She is alive and so she must have some good in her. One cannot exist without containing some good. My point is principally that those who rap on her door exclusively are doomed because she will sooner or later sell them down the river. And no, she certainly never meant to. It was the inquirers' fault for going to the well too many times.

We have observed how impartiality leads to inhumanity. If we heed mother nature's advice, the same results follow. One need look no further to see this than one's local instantiations of bureaucracy. One becomes abstracted and is referenced by a series of numbers. The end is not compassion, but collation. "We want to treat you all the same," says the bureaucracy. "Do not blame me. It is out of my control," replies the bureaucrat to your pleading. There is no place for specificity within bureaucracy. There are only greater and lesser generalities. Life is reduced to a flow chart, to a logical system of if-then statements. All of its agents are blameless--they only follow rules.

In this way, nature and artifice relate. They are perfectly devoid of intention and thus are innocent. (Guilt is, after all, unnatural.) We can scoop up the indiscriminate soil of nature and plant in it the seeds of our industry. What flowers grow? The delightfully ambivalent blooms of technology. The guillotine is impartial. Why? Because it harnesses nature. Gravity pulls the blade down upon all presented necks. And before you interrupt me, I can hear your thoughts already. Yes, yes. The wheelchair is impartial, too. Have you already forgotten my point?

To treat every individual as an individual, as a unique being within a unique context--how joyfully unnatural!

Fallen

(For an newer draft of this story, click here.)

The trees stood proudly about Roger Frost like soldiers presenting for inspection. If not for the light shooting through the little holes in the canopy, the glow of green emanating from the leaves would have made the time of day obvious. The scenery was tinted like light shined through an emerald. He deftly maneuvered between the trees without taking notice of their stances. It was nearly noon and Roger had already traversed ten brisk miles that day. He felt happy hiking with his home on his back.

Being in the wilderness pleased Roger. It tapped into the wellspring of contentment he had in being a simple man. Simplicity for Roger meant detachment from the frivolous trappings of life. He had become accustomed to owning little and learned to like it. When at home by himself, he often imagined what life would be like should a sudden catastrophe force humanity to live without the aid of technology. He fancied himself a survivor, someone who could adapt quickly and preserve himself even in dire situations. While everyone else would be running around crying and pulling their hair out, Roger would be rubbing sticks together with a smirk on his face. He would offer a neighbor a piece of cooked game and go on to be the one to organize a communal farm. He would humbly put human affairs back on their proper track.

Though it was early spring, the ground beneath Roger's feet had the familiar mush of ever-decomposing leaves. After absorbing a light morning sprinkle, the trail was slick. Roger used his worn walking stick to maintain equilibrium when the wet earth tried to induce him to do otherwise. All was silent except for swishing of his persistent pace and the huffs of his rhythmic breathing. Occasionally, he heard the crackle of a squirrel bounding through vines and saplings. The only sensation that interrupted his thoughts was the sporadic tug of undone spiderwebs draped upon his neck and face. A pinprick of guilt dripped within him for ruining the labor the tiny spinsters.

Nature had not always been his element. As a child, Roger was a homebody. He spent much of his adolescence under the watchful eye of his mother. Such a thorough hypochondriac was she that she channeled her overflowing sickness onto her only child. He was kept in his room for fear of contracting a malady from his suspicious peers or harming himself in his thorny surroundings. From his bedroom window, Roger loved nature as a courtier loved his fair maiden.

Trailing behind him strands of silken nets, his gaze was fixed on the ground shortly in front of his feet. He was preoccupied by the hazards along the trail. Although less nimble than he was in his youth, Roger knew well the ways of stable movements. Without remaining alert and compensating for the scattered rocks and roots, he would crash to the ground. The added weight of his supplies ensured he would be torn open by a fall. He appreciated how in nature nothing laughed when a person tripped. The sound in the forest before and after a tumble was the same. The natural world took no notice.

For all of its thorns and inhumanity, the natural world seemed preferable to the constructed one. The constructed one always seemed to fall short of its aspirations, while the natural one never publicized aspirations and thus never failed. Roger's childhood home was depressing for all of its disrepair. The shabbiness was a drain on its inhabitants. The doors always squeaked. The paint peeled. Drafts were common in the winter and leaks in the spring. One could not help but feel dilapidated by association to the ragged lodging. From inside the Frost house, the outdoors seemed glorious. He spent his youth daydreaming. Roger frequently pictured himself exploring the woods from behind his sweating bedroom window.

Roger took notice of the natural world. There was a subtle acrid smell in the air that always accompanied rain in the woods. Decomposition was being encouraged by the same water that was also nourishing roots. In the middle of observing how the odor reminded him of ones he had smelt in public restrooms, Roger recognized he did not feel well. Nausea had creepily begun to stir in his belly. Thinking he may be on his way to dehydration, he paused on a mossy stump to slake his thirst. He drank the tepid water in gulps and panted after holding his breath. He rifled into his pack for the bag of nuts he had brought. The salty crunch was disagreeable to his taste. He frowned and swallowed them down in haste. Roger ran his tongue around the interior of his mouth to clear away the remnants of almonds. He looked off into the distance and became enamored by the sight of doe. She was serenely grazing on sprouts--dropping her head down, lifting it to listen, and dropping it again. Roger lost himself in the vision of the animal. He was brought back to his affliction by the abrupt flicker of its tail.

Roger did not realize the exceptional decay of his surroundings until he went off to school. In kindergarten, he was taught of his impoverishment. He was ridiculed for his tattered clothes and belittled about his disreputable abode. Apparently, his family had developed a reputation in his all-too-small town. His plump, glowing teacher did what she could to mitigate the influence of his peers. She injected him with platitudes about the importance of invisible values--that it was what was on the inside that counted. Roger numbly wondered to whom it counted. He was immune to her kind encouragement and took heart from the plants outside his home instead. At times the trees and shrubs are bare, but they always revive. They grow and become more haughty. For all of the tenacious heckling he received, Roger refused to feel guilty for something that was to him as natural as autumn.

Shaken to attention, he resumed his task. With one last gulp swallowed, Roger grunted his way back to a walking stance. Feeling for the netted pocket and finding it, he slid the bottle into its place. His throbbing feet pushed against the interior of his tattered boots. The seams of faded thread began giving way years ago, but for all their use they never completely gave way. After succumbing to wrinkles and puckers on every step, they always sprang back to shape with every stride. He hiked onwards with a tighter calloused grip on his walking stick.

Inspired by nature, Roger embraced his condition. Instead of lamenting the relative poverty of his family, he took it as a season. He was going to prove to himself--not his classmates--that he could overcome his privations and thrive in an extended summer of vitality. Overcoming to Roger did not mean scrambling to fill the bare spots but embellishing further the areas in the self that were already adorned. If he was not wealthy, so be it. He was full of life. He had the power to alter his surroundings. As soon as his mother was distracted, he expended all of his energy as often as he could in spasms of revolt. He was fueled by spite towards the injustice of his situation. He lived to destroy barriers. He laughed at worldly trials and sought out difficulty. He thumbed his nose at suffering. So thoroughly had he treasured pain that he started to feel himself invincible.

His steps became less rapid than they were earlier in the day. He had difficulty blocking out the sensations bubbling in his abdomen. Roger's pain began to localize in the right side of his lower back. He tried to reassure himself that he was experiencing the usual cramping that occurred in the midst of backpacking. He pushed on and concentrated on his path. In most areas, it was only distinguishable by a thin ribbon of muddier soil. The leaves down the center of the trail were more trodden and thus less distinguishable than those on the periphery. The difference between being lost and on track was a preponderance of darker rather than lighter brown. He appreciated how singularly disinterested in humanity nature was. She offered no sign posts on her own. She showed no partiality; she did not play favorites. Trails had to be blazed or else one would wander aimlessly.

Roger aged from being an audacious teenager to a meek man in the span of a weekend. Roger's mother became more lethargic as wrinkles draped more heavily upon her face. As a consequence, her son was afforded greater liberty. He would escape his home whenever her guard was down. Roger set goals for his adventures of increasing extremity. First, he wanted to spend a night alone outdoors. Next, he wanted to hike to a river twenty miles away. He was intoxicated by his freedom. Roger was enraptured by action. He would push over rotting tree trunks and kick mushrooms. Chipmunks scurried at the sound of his cathartic grunts. The apex of his expeditions was a fifty mile trek with nothing but a knife, compass, map, blanket, and two pounds of deer jerky. He was seeking to find his limit. Roger wanted to be independent; he wanted to be sufficient unto himself. He wanted to be separate from the weights the hung on him--the truths about himself that were out of his control. He was intolerant of being boxed in. In preparation, Roger studied books on local vegetation and manuals on hunting. At the end of his greatest mission was a feat of immense daring. Old locals liked to tell stories in the town bar of a thirty-five foot plateau above a local lake that had since been cordoned off due to frequent injuries. Having a notion of the coordinates of the site, Roger struck out to conquer his part of the world early one Saturday morning.

The canopy shielded Roger from the afternoon sun. Nevertheless, he began sweating profusely. Steps were more laborious. He appeared like a wounded animal. His stride contained a noticeable limp that favored his right side. He paused to close his eyes and heard the rustle of a breeze. Mercifully cool wind tickled his neck. He let his head drop until his chin touched his sternum. He gulped air like water trying to calm himself. When the bouquet of decomposition reentered his nose, a geyser of vomit erupted upwards. The violence of his reaction surprised him. He hunched over dripping with his face to the ground in disbelief. He spat to cleanse his pallet and rubbed his right side with his right hand. Concern began to leak into him mind. Finding a nearby stump, Roger sat again. He fumbled for his water bottle. He noticed the disagreeable taste of the iodized water more acutely than before. He suppressed the desire to purge once more. He had no appetite and his energy levels were diminished. He focused on the glossy black ants milling between his boots. Some toted white granules of an unknown substance in their mandibles. They seemed directionless, walking and turning at random times. Where were their trails? Closing his eyes helped him suppress his mounting misery. He put all of his attention into his ears and listened to the leaves flicker. Roger lost track of time. Although it was barely dusk, Roger desperately wanted to sleep. He beckoned to unconsciousness as his saving grace. He held out hope that the next day would bring with it renewed health. He eased his oppressive backpack off his shoulders and let it tip over. His arms felt leaden. He thought of how he had forgotten old lessons and began to repent.

It took him fourteen hours of weaving between tree limbs and plodding through undergrowth to get to the makeshift fence that blocked the cliff. Roger slung his pack off his shoulder and let it tip over. He stamped down the chicken wire with his boot and approached the edge. Roger peered over it. His head spun with the sight of the chasm. The slope of the rock face was carved by skillful use of dynamite prior to the quarry being flooded. He retreated and scanned the periphery. The sky was billowing with clouds like smoke against the cobalt blue of dusk. The landscape looked surreal: dense forest butted up against a barren crater. A path that had been cleared for the transportation of minerals was in nature's reclamation process. The individual hickories and oaks looked melancholy in their singular insignificance. Roger felt his own insignificance complemented. He judged himself a wild thread woven into the tapestry of the wilderness. Before him was the gauntlet of death. Fear thrilled Roger. Adrenaline introduced a new lightness into his joints. He was primed to fling himself into the crater. After a deep inhalation, he rushed forward with the frenzy of youth and fell with the weight of pride.

The scent of pine filled Roger's nose as he entered a thicket of coniferous trees. His feet reveled in the relief the discarded needles offered in their carpet-like plushness. The increased comfort only made his nausea more distinct. A bead of sweat trickled into an eye, causing him to blink. Time had slowed to the pace of the sap trickling out of sores on the trunks about him. He wanted to be still. He fell to his knees, smashing scurrying insects in the process.

Just prior to Roger's leap, his right boot found a pocket of loose rock. The gravel shifted with his weight and absorbed a crucial part of his energy. As Roger flew forward and began to fall, he realized we would come up short. The queasiness that accompanies a great drop was multiplied by his terror. An embankment below was quickly approaching. He had time to regret his idiocy before the impact. After two futile kicks into the air, he struck the outcropping. The muffled sound hardly interrupted the quiet evening. He fell forward, breaking bones and losing consciousness. A crow flying overhead bore witness to Roger's misguided courageousness. He was ejected from the womb of his concussion onto the harsh bank of the lake. A sensation of coolness was the first memory Roger had after his plummet. So close was he to his target that his hair had draped into the cold, still water. It was thoroughly dark outside. At first he could discern nothing of the extent of his injuries. Pain reverberated throughout his body. He lay sobbing in a contorted heap. The chat he fell into kept the impact from being fatal, but lacerated his skin extensively. Roger could not manage to get to his feet. His legs were not working properly. Drowning in a pool of distress, his mind was not fully functional either.

Roger began to whimper aloud as he clutched his abdomen. The pressure building in his side was getting the best of him. For the first time, he began feeling anxious. He had not seen another man or woman for days. Death was before him again. Far from home and far from help, thoughts of helplessness began sparking into his mind. He snuffed them out as best he could, knowing he needed to remained focused at returning to the trail head. As he was thinking of how idiotic he had been to strike out alone and unknown into the woods, the pressure was released with a pop. Roger opened his eyes to see his denim-covered knees crumpling pine needles. Was he cured? He felt suspiciously relieved. Filled with gratitude, he released his concentration and allowed himself to rest.

Sprawled on the bank, he thought the thoughts of a dying man. Remorse welled within him. Roger previously was certain he was ready to battle with nothingness; he thought he could free himself by leaping into the abyss. Facing mortality would let him become more than human. Now, his fragility screamed through his nerves. He was neither alive nor dead but on his way from one to the other. Tears dropped onto the rocks of the bank as unanswered questions cascaded through his mind. What had happened to his strength? Why was he dying now? Was he to fade away and become absorbed unbeknownst to anyone? Where was he to file his complaints against reality? In his state of complete helplessness he was deserted with his dread. He could not bear the weight of life on his own and neither could nature. Roger had been alone too long. His solitary confinement was self-inflicted, brought on by hubris. He needed a companion. He knew now that there was no kinship with the universe; there was no brotherhood with impersonal matter.

The external world showed no sympathy with the internal world. Planets twinkled and stars lit up the clear night sky. He tipped over, exhausted. In a fetal position, Roger tried to sleep. Being immobile felt slightly better than moving, but his discomfort had returned in a new guise and kept him awake. He imagined what his insides looked like, what sort of mortal stew was brewing within him. With shaky fingers in the morning, Roger tried to shovel the last of his almonds into his mouth. Before he could bring his jaws together, his mouth rejected the intrusion. He convulsed in a fit of dry heaves. Roger suspected his organs were shutting down. The release he felt was merciful, but not indicative of recovery. He thought it strange that his biological defenses would lead to death's victory. Every individual function was suspending itself to prevent damage spreading to other functions. Taken together, the totality of his body was killing itself in an attempt to save itself. How was it that the body chose now to die after he had spent so long in trying to live?

There was nothing more to do. Life was leaving him as involuntarily as it entered him. Roger's blood mingled with the chalky white rocks. On the shore of an artificial lake, he awaited his end. There was only a choice to make: repent and resign to his limitations or refuse and revolt. He had attempted to spurn the world with singularity, but now knew he had gone too far. The wisdom imparted by suffering allowed him to discern between genuine and false freedom. If this was what it took to stop him from running, so be it. He passed out of consciousness hoping he would wake again. The whir of a motor jolted him. A retiree came noticed a motionless figure while he was trolling for bass that had been introduced to the lake years earlier. He pulled Roger into his boat, and later up the shore and into his truck. They sped to the nearest hospital, along fifty miles of painfully jostling country roads. Technology in the hands of doctors saved his life. Roger's body healed together with his spirit.

The natural world he adored as a boy was superseded by the God he called upon that desperate night. Both were wonderful for the way their superficial ambivalence masked a deep-seated, complex goodness. Rain falls on the just and unjust alike; a loving God allows the innocent to hurt. Neither forgot; both were always working to incorporate everything. Unlike nature, God did not operate by cycles. To live forever, one had to die twice; to die forever, one had to die once. Either way, a person never returned. Roger had been partially correct. The world ought to be spurned, but not completely and not by beating it at its own game. The human and inhuman world were irreparably heterogeneous, containing good and evil, life and death. Purity could not be had by immersing oneself in either world. Everyone has a sense of the fundamental ambiguities mixed throughout each. Roger was right not to succumb to the onslaught of his peers who were impoverished in a different way. He erred leaping for his own salvation. One drowns as surely in lakes as in tears. One needs to find other streams to be renewed in.

Roger, confronted by mortality again, refused to despair. His thoughts became focused with excitement. He prayed to God that He existed. He needed God to exist. He knew the only necessity in life was necessity itself. People need something fixed and changeless. It is why they were quick to look to laws and definitions. Roger wanted the law. He wanted to be held accountable. More than that, he simply wanted to be held together. He could not endure the thought of vanishing into nothingness. If he was to never exit the wilderness again, how could he ever be said to exist? Nature would not remember. She would devour him with her minions and bury him with her sediments. The memories of those he met in life would scarcely contain a note on him. Roger rejected the possibility. He was filled with hope at the possibility of an enduring record keeper. He prayed to God to give him faith as he lost his equilibrium.

Fallen, Roger terribly wanted to be warm. Turning his dizzy head and lifting his eyes, he could see an opening in the woods on the horizon. The golden glow of pure daylight enticed him. He dug his fingers into the moist soil and pulled himself through the remnants of his stomach. His writhing movements were awkward but effective. He crossed the terrain by inches rather than feet, but crossed it all the same. For the first time in hours, he forgot about how awful he felt. He thought only of the heated honey of sunlight being poured over him at the end of his toil. Strain was not a lamentable state to Roger. It was the state of living, and he was glad to feel alive. Twigs and the shells of nuts clawed at his skin and ripped his clothes as he forced himself over them.

After draining the last of his pool of energy, he reached the clearing. He splayed out enervated on the glade of igneous rocks that were impervious to plant life. As Roger lay dying, he wondered what his body looked like to an eagle. It seemed to be the perspective nature always took on humanity. He was a fleck of compressed carbon and water. He was imprisoned within the consuming forest. He swore he felt a compassionate warden comfort him with a blanket of light. He strained to see, but the muscles in Roger's neck refused to obey his will. His head dropped onto a pillow of lichen-covered granite. Orange-red seeped through his eyelids like light shone through amber. He no longer felt pain; he was done dying. He only felt tired. He released himself from his body.

Roger, who had closed his eyes moments before, exhaled and died again.

Subterranean

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

When some people lose their minds, it is in the sense of misplacing them. Like a juggler who attempts to toss too many balls, their minds roll off into an unseen place when everything crashes and scatters. When other people lose their minds, it is in the sense of intentionally hiding them. Like a desperate man who tosses a set of keys into a field of tall grass, their minds become needles thrust into a haystack. James Griffin had thrown his mind into a thicket at sixteen and had not thought of looking for it until he was twenty seven.

He sat numbly taking in the obscure shapes of women's bodies undulating in the blurred glow of black-lights. The view was further distorted by the haze of smoke that seemed to cake on the surfaces of objects. The movements drug behind them a trail of the past, making everything quick seem slow. His legs felt heavy with the weight of alcohol and his ears were stuffed full with the sound of disorientation. Deep, persistent bass massaged his temples while squeaky tweets reverberated inside his ear canals. Abruptly, he heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering somewhere behind him. On the fifth consecutive night of the twelfth consecutive month he sat staring forward doing his best to stay lost. With the sound of shattering, his mind called out to him like a baby elephant orphaned from the herd. The sense that something was amiss was so strong as to seem tangible. He turned his head to scan the periphery, expecting to find a little girl who had tugged on his shirt in a show of attention-starved pleading. All he found were other men slumped in chairs with greasy hair pasted onto their skulls with slight smiles on their faces and forlorn women scurrying between them. Some action was occurring around the scene of the accident. The sight of swept up glass spurred him to recollect himself.

"Need to leave," he thought as he wobbly arose from his usual spot two tables away from the stage. Unsure footing caused him to slip back into the chair he tried to rise from. The atrophy of inaction bound him to the reclined position. The fuzziness of every perception gave his setting a pall of irreality. He felt lost in a dreamworld of shadows and echoes. He was unsettled by how absorbed the countenances of his fellow-patrons appeared. He struggled concertedly to arise again. One foot in front of the other, he shuffled away from his lonely table. Concerned he yelled, "Come on!" over the noise of the room as he motioned towards the exit. "Shut up!" "Get out of the way!" "You wanna brusin'?" "Sit down!" all shot out at him from different directions. He felt something strike between his shoulder blades with a dull thud and heard again the sound of glass breaking behind him. The prod of pain heightened his senses further. "What am I doing here?" he asked himself as he stumbled further out of the doomed room.

The redish glow of the word "Exit" hooked him and drew him reeling forward. Imbalanced, he placed his left hand forward desperately. His wrist was compacted as he collided with the wall to the side of the steps that lead to street level. Additional pain sprinted through his nerves when he could not prevent his head from striking the wall. He bounced off it like a ball and crashed backwards in a drunken heap. The back of his head plummeted onto the dirty floor of the seedy subterranean establishment. Confused, he stared upwards and tried to make sense of the reflections of purple neon lights. "Where am I?" he wondered.

The tinny taste of blood trickled over his tongue. He had lacerated his cheek when his teeth shut upon striking the old wood planks of the floor. No one took notice of his tumble. No one came to his assistance. The back of his skull pulsated reminders of his accident. Vanquished, he squinted at the criss-crossed lines of the drop-ceiling above him. The bass again tickled his ears as it shook the ground. Laziness covered him like a blanket and his eyelids drooped. "Business is great. Never been better! Escapism is recession-proof." a gruff voice explained nearby. "The owner?" James wondered as he forced his eyes open again. "My customers are sheep and I am their shepherd. I lead them to the pasture they need after running through the maze of this city. Sheep are more lucrative than you'd think. The trick is sheering them just short enough so that they come back to you for shelter cold and desperate every night after wandering around. If you shorn them too short, they freeze. You gotta keep 'em cold, not frozen. I know just when to pull the plug, flip on the lights, and sweep them out into the world." the voice bragged. "Must be," James thought. The image of lemmings following a leader off a cliff came to him as his eyes shut again. "It's all a mirage. Think they're going home but they're going to hell. Need to leave." He thrust his lids open.

He commanded his arms to push himself up. The spinning room sloshed him around, but he would not be deterred. James tentatively arose and moved towards the stairs once more. He cast a final, dejected glance towards the smoky roomed filled with his lost compatriots. The hot sting in his back kept him from urging them upwards again, and instead he moved on. His toe slammed into the first step. His hand caught the railing as he braced himself. He stood erect and looked at the mountain of right angles that barred him from escape. "Easy does it," he encouraged himself. Slowly but persistently, he ascended. Every time he flexed his quadriceps to lift himself, there was a commensurate decrease in treble ringing in his ears. The thumping bass accompanied him throughout, but the attempt to lull him into submission was futile. James was determined to be free.

Passerbys grazed him as they excitedly went down into the den of debauchery. "No! Don't!" he exhorted, but their euphoric laughs were too loud to be spoken over. "Like lemmings off the edge," he thought dejectedly. "Need to leave," he reminded himself.

Midway up the stairwell, the wood paneling started to gleam with the light that seeped under the exit he had entered so often before. "What time is it?" he wondered. He thrust himself against the door jam and spilled forward onto the street. Sunlight exploded inside James' pupils. The blow dealt by brightness made him dizzy with nausea. Again, he felt himself tumble to the ground. Rather than the hollow thump of hard wood, the sound of bone on concrete dissipated from his touchdown. It disrupted the otherwise quite early morning on the avenue.

Something about the sun made him sneeze. He snickered as a memory bubbled up into his consciousness. When he was a child and happy, he mother used to kid him about being allergic to the sun because he had the habit of sneezing every time he'd leave a building for the outdoors. His mother's face made him wistful and he forgot about where he had just come from. The smog of the city smelled clean to him when compared with the stale atmosphere of his hiding place. When he began to see again, he could discern the skewed shape of his shadow. His vision passed from the grey his forearm cast on the concrete to the plaid of his shirt. The colors had been tainted by a film of cigarette smoke, but still struck him with a vibrancy he had been without for what seemed like years. He focused in on the intersection of yellows and reds that formed wrinkled criss-crosses. The orderliness pleased him. "Beautiful," he though as he traced the fine lines of tightly weaved cotton.

The morning light lazily reflected off of the street surface. James again raised himself from his knees to his feet. He stood still to gain his bearings and squinted in search of familiar landmarks. Before him was a rod iron planter filled with pink and white geraniums and a maple sapling. He followed the trunk upwards through the dark green underbellies of leaves until it gave way to the brilliant morning mauve of sunrise shining upon the windows of a high-rise. The grid work of glass converging higher uplifted his sight until his craned neck stiffened above the top floor.

The picture was serene in its clarity, like the sight one receives upon poking out of the water after struggling to resurface. Wisps of cirrus clouds converged like a stratospheric doily. Up beyond the meddling reach of people lived truth untouched and untainted. "Yet it shines down upon and amongst us if we would have eyes to see it. Why?" James sobered. His mind burned like a newly ignited wick. He considered the image, its overwhelming size and the shame it put to shadows. The quality of his perception rejuvenated him. The serenity of the gently sliding shapes nearly overtook him and clasped him in a new sort of chains. The more he thought about what he was seeing and how moved he was, the more he felt he needed to tear himself away. "It's not too late." In a fit of compassion, James turned around to face the place he was freshly emancipated from. "I must save them."

He nimbly hopped downwards and reached the landing. "Hey! Everybody! Come quick and see the sun! It's daytime! What do you think you are doing rotting down here in the dark? This isn't real! Can't you see you're stuck in a trap, pinned down by your own appetites?" The fingers on his left hand fumbled for a light switch by the stairwell, but none was to be found. The patrons began to bark at him and the waitresses threw daggers at him with their scowls. A barrel-chested figure emerged from the mist of the flock and glided towards him.

"Come on buddy, no disturbin' the customers." the shape uttered as he lifted James up by the armpit and drug him back towards the day. His ankles clanked against the edges of the steps as he scrambled to regain his footing. The power of the mysterious man surprised him. "Would have been easier to have been kicked out before," James observed.

At the top of the steps, the strong man ejected James outside. In the midst of his flight, James reached for the man's lapel. Feeling the smooth fabric between his fingertips, he grabbed hold tightly and pulled the bouncer forward with him. They both crashed onto the sidewalk as the door shut behind them. The bouncer shielded his eyes, finding the morning rays oppressive. James rushed alongside him and raised the husky man who had been made weak by his new setting. He took him by the arm and pulled up slowly but firmly.

"See?" James asked with a smile. The bouncer blinked in disbelief.

Falling

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

It was as though someone hit the reset button on Erik Winters. He awoke high in the air. He was in the stratosphere. Erik was so high up that when he looked at the ground beneath him, he could not tell he was falling. The patches of greens stayed the same size; the meandering ribbons of brown appeared unchanged for what felt like hours. His stomach told him he was falling and forced Erik out of his confused malaise.

He remembered that he was an astronaut. He remembered that he was in the cabin of a space shuttle. The sundry lights, dials, and instruments were all functioning as though nothing had changed. Constrained by a harness and pushed firmly against the back of his seat, he struggled to glance at the rest of the crew in his peripheral vision. They were all still. Everything was still in Erik's world, except his stomach.

He called out to the seven others by name, but received no response. The sound he made sounded muffled to him, like someone had stuffed cotton balls in his ears while he was sleeping. Erik looked back out of the windows to find the landscape barely altered. All was green and brown. He chose to focus on a tiny speck that flickered with light. He noted the charcoal grey trail that slithered and dispersed from it. When he realized it was a fire, he began to panic. "I'm upside down," he thought.

Something about the fire set Erik off. The distant danger awakened him to the present one. His fingers immediately began to fumble with the central clasp on his restraint harness. He pulled halfway up on the releasing mechanism when he realized the futility of escaping. There was no parachute that could save him. There was no joystick he could reach for with which to steer himself to safety. His thoughts expanded outward and he realized the futility of doing anything. Goals are luxuries for people with time. Erik had at most a minute longer, and that did not suffice for time at all.

His mind shot off images and half-formed thoughts in quick succession. He felt dizzy. He felt something warm drip onto his neck. He wanted something to drink. He wanted to have a conversation. Then his mind fixated upon the impending collision. Erik thought it strange how he could now sympathize with all the men and women before him who had been executed and wondered what they saw moments before they stopped seeing. He knew no one had seen his approaching murder through more than two and a half inches of glass.

Erik had never considered his own death before. Death was always something in the offing, something nebulous. It was even slightly agreeable to him while it remained theoretical. He assumed it would come to him when he was withered and prepared for it. It would quiet his arthritic pains he thought. Now, death was plunging up towards him. Death was in the green specs of the trees and the scant taupe patches of dirt. It would be so quick when it struck. Everyone dies in an instant--breathes one second and not the next. It made him feel small and he imagined what his ship looked like to the creatures living where he would crash. Could they make it out now? Would they bother to disperse or would they soon be breathing their lasts, too?

Erik felt the icy pall of isolation. More than being able to free himself from his demise, he wanted to free himself from solitude. A man can freely choose to be alone, and we commend him for being introverted. But when a man is forced into it--we call him a prisoner. Erik hated his powerlessness in a concentrated way. His ears burned with boiling over frustration. For all of his painstakingly accumulated strength, the world would not bend to his will. Despite his share of human dignity, he would be ended as swiftly as a worm underfoot. The greatest insult, however, was that he had no one near him. He wanted to speak and let someone know he was scared, that he resented having so much unfinished business. He wanted to be coddled and reassured by a soothing whisper. Instead, the muffled whistle of wind was all he heard.

He focused again on his situation. He pictured himself as a baby, swaddled by Mother Earth, tucked away into his place of submission. He was wrapped in a blanket of disorientation. What was this surreal truth that his life had become? Why was it his uniquely to suffer? Why would his body shortly be rearranged into fragments scattered at the bottom of a crater? How different this was than any cause of death he could have fathomed earlier! Yet, how similar the end was even if the denouement was original! One last exhalation.

He snickered to himself at the absurdity of it all. We don't know now, we hardly know backwards, and we don't know forwards in the slightest. He laughed at people's feeble attempts at foresight. He pictured a weatherman midway through a prognostication being struck dead by a falling light from the rafters above. Never saw it coming. That's the way it goes. We spend our time predicting the wrong sort of events. The only beliefs we can hold about the future with any sort of justification are the contents of our hopes. All else is vain or otherwise misguided conjecture. And what did I hope for all this time? I was living it no more than fifteen minutes ago. Erik then became distracted by a sensation of moisture pooling on his clavicle.

The patches of green became splotches and the hazy textures came into focus. Erik had begun making out the shapes of individual trees when he started thinking about who he was. If no one else is to know who I am, it is all the more crucial that I die knowing. His mind raced across the most obvious indicators: man, 32 years old, astronaut, doctoral candidate. None seemed to hold water. He thought about what he had been before: a punk, a rebel, a philanderer, a repentant, a humanist--mistaken. Erik thought that human identity is like a liquid that becomes more viscous with age. For all our attempts at improvement, at maturation, at becoming something we can be proud of--we always pour ourselves into molds that are porous. An astronaut? An astronaut! I'll seep right out of that before I turn 50. What can hold us? What definition has no holes? "We slip through everything until we're caught by the impermeable sac of nothingness." He looked upwards to avoid discerning individual branches. Tears welled in his eyes.

Erik, who had closed his eyes a moment before, exhaled and died.

Old Man: Pride

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

Most of the time when I would go visit my old friend, he would be waiting on his porch. His eyes would be fixed on a point slightly above the horizon. White, wiry hairs corkscrewed out from below his wrinkled forehead and above his pale blue eyes. On a favorable interpretation, he looked serene. On an unfavorable one, he looked vacant.

As soon as I was within earshot, the gaze broke. He called out a greeting. Sometimes this greeting was in the form of a "Hey there." Other times, he would begin speaking about a topic as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. He simply supplanted the long-running monologue taking place in his mind with a new actor. Once he called out, "I have no time for prideful people!" I replied with a grin, "Well I think you can keep your appointment with me."

I climbed the greying wooden steps and crossed the creaking patio to take a seat tangential to him. The wicker chair crackled in response to my weight.

"Did you think the way something starts speaks to how it will proceed and finish?" He asked.

"My historian friends would agree with that suggestion. They always claim you won't understand where you are unless you know where you are coming from. In exploration at least, I would think that's true. It would be essential to get one's bearings and keep an impeccable record of your route. So yes, knowing the way something starts is important to understanding it."

"Apply that very thought to people. How do they begin? As itty-bitty babies. At their own behest? No. Of course not. They're brought into the world unbeknownst to them. There's no choice in it for the living. No way to take credit for the start. Everyone is completely dependent to start. Show me the person who has given birth to herself, and I'll show you the person whose pride is well-placed. As for the rest of the arrogant dreamers, leave me be! For all of their accomplishments and accolades, they always start off as babies. The prideful live as though they've outgrown their dependency. But have they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone," he lowered his head and glared into my eyes, "at every point in their lives--is woefully dependent on a great many factors outside of their control. Your ticker has to keep ticking, the beams above your head and the planks below your feet have to maintain their integrity. Itty-bitty little cells need to keep performing their tasks without fail or else. Gasp! Heart attack! Boom! Structural collapse! Agh! Cancer! I could go on and on. My point is that no one is in as much control as the prideful person likes to purport."

At this point in the performance, I felt it my place to play the contrarian. "I'll concede that a person does not begin in a meritorious way and that much of our continued existence is owed to outside factors rather than those we are responsible. Still, if we slice all of that away, we get to the core of people. Even if the great preponderance of human existence is accidental, there is a sliver that is purposeful. The prideful simply grab hold of that sliver for all its worth, maximize it, and admire their accomplishments. How can that be so wrongheaded? If we all have our slivers and some of us take advantage of them and some of us prefer complacency, how is it more reprehensible to exercise our slivers rather than let them atrophy?"

He scowled at me. "I have not suggested that a person shouldn't take responsibility for what he can do. Nothing of the sort. Prideful people do more than take responsibility for they can do. They take credit for everything good and true in this world. I used to work for this woman. She waged a long battle to get where she was, I do not doubt that. She let you know--sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly--that she won that battle and rightfully so. In the process, she made sure you knew that she was above you and that you could not have won that same battle. That's what grates me--the inconsistency of it all. The old think they're better than the young because they've lived longer. If you give the young a little bit of time, they'll get to be just as old though. The strong can pummel you into submission, but what if they snapped a tendon way-back-when? Then they'd be scrawny like the rest of us. Yes, Ms. Swanson, you are the vice president and that is a laudable position to be in. But don't act as though you haven't caught a break along the way. We've all caught breaks and breaks have broken us. There are headwinds and tailwinds. The only sensible thing is to get off your high horse and walk alongside the rest of us."

"I think you underestimate how much of life is about the choices people make. You seem to think that because there are choices, and that the viability of those choices is often itself unchosen, that people should ease up on defining themselves by their choices--specifically the successful choices. Why begrudge people a sense of accomplishment for utilizing their talents? Your pride is another person's self-confidence."

"That's not true. Self-confidence doesn't make other people feel small. We are all itty-bitty. Besides being a lie, pride is disharmonious. Don't play the fool, Victor. You know full well that attitude I am talking about. I think you just like watching me get all in a tizzy. You need to be more careful with the elderly. I'm fragile you know. A regular porcelain doll." He smirked and the wrinkles in his cheeks folded together.

"Right, right. You caught me. Humility is a great attribute. I'll take it over the opposite. Still, talking small and being small is not so good as talking small and being big."

"Fine, fine." He smiled at me, but I could not leave well enough alone. Now that I had taken up a position, I felt the need to keep defending it.

"And I think you fail to grasp a mitigating factor in making pride so bad. It is completely natural. Show me the person that isn't prideful and I'll show you a corpse. Everyone is proud of themselves. Some are just more public with it. Some are proud of being exceptional. Some are proud of being meek. Some are proud of being in between, of being the average man. There are people walking around with humble faces that hide a holier-than-thou attitude. I think it was Twain who said something like, "When a man keeps telling you he's trustworthy, it's time to check his pockets for the sterling silver." Wouldn't the same thing apply here? A person who says he hates pride is actually quite prideful and only hates pride in others because it takes up room his own pride would otherwise fill."

His head kicked back slightly with a snicker. "Such a clever man, you are! I knew there was a good reason why we're friends. I'll only say this much: something being natural does nothing to excuse it. It only explains the origin of the thing."

Energy pulsated through my body as victory was now at hand. "Says the man who earlier claimed where something comes from says a lot about where it's going. And if I agree, then from nature to nature and no one is to blame at all. We're born, live, and die naturally and nothing we are predisposed to doing is unnatural. The only unnatural thing is to poke your head out of the flow of things and criticize it for not going a different, unnatural direction. So you are the one out of line, not the prideful people."

He laughed heartedly. "Very good my dear sophist, very good! And good luck with all that. If you'll settle for only what it natural, you'd better grab your cloak and dagger. It's a mad world you'll be a citizen of." His hand grabbed for the steaming mug on the little brown table between us. He shakily took a sip. "Checkers?"

"Sure."

Old Man: Autumnal

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

I once knew a man who claimed that the surest proof for the existence of God was the season of fall. "The leaves don't have to be so beautiful," he'd tell anyone who would listen. "They could very well have just gone straight to brown. Leaves could change from green to grey to black. They don't though. Nature grants you a reprieve."

The wispy hairs on this long white beard would wobble with the movements of his jaw. Although his eyes were clouded with the onset of glaucoma, they retained the sincerity of his youth. "Everything is ready to sleep or die around you, but the mood of the transition isn't somber. It's merciful. The brilliant reds and yellows and oranges are full of clemency. The trees are saying, "Do not be afraid. Take hope from our vibrancy. Death is not the end--be emboldened for the struggle against the upcoming cold hardships." Could nature on her own ever be so compassionate? Where else is she so wise? The rest of the year, she is capricious. She's manic. She gives too much or takes it all. Never does she seem concerned with her tenants. But in the fall she coddles you and whispers the sweet truth--not sweet because it is artificial, but because it satiates. She fills you up not on earthly goods--tasty berries or savory meats. She graces you with transcendent goods, those that can be stored forever in the soul. Berries shrivel and meats rot, but truth, goodness, and beauty--they are always with us as the perfect food for our aspirations. The leaves fall, but we remember their splendor draped upon the jagged branches. Aren't you thankful for that juxtaposition? That something so awesome can be here with us even when the winds prompt us to seek shelter?"

Even though the notion was outlandish and far removed from the taste of the usual apologetics, there was something in the way he spoke that made you want to believe. His voice was full of warmed gravel. His breath would tumble over the residue of years of speaking that caked on his vocal chords. "Some people tell you that winter is the most accurate of all the seasons--that it speaks the most truth to existence. After the flourish of spring and the vitality of summer, the living whimper and grow tired and hard. Life proves itself to be the accident we always worried it was. In the distant future, the universe will return to normalcy. Everything will be cold and dead."

At this point in his speech, he'd place his heavy, knobby hand on your shoulder for emphasis. The warmth of his mitt would seep through your clothes. "But I say, "No," and he would grip you tighter. "I say it's fall that most captures the way things are. It tells you, "Your ambition outstripped your potential. You got ahead of yourself with all of that budding and shooting of vines. We'll have to put your in your place. It's going to be painful, but you can bare it." And every spring, the world gets excited and every summer it forgets its proper pace. And every fall we are taught the meanings of the stern lesson of winter--that stultification is necessary but that beauty can see us through."

Gauntlet

If a writer wishes to set before himself a great task, he needs to try writing the story of a genuinely happy person. The great preponderance of literature, film, or anything else that takes a human as its narrative subject, that manages to tell the story of a happy person manages only to portray her happiness as accidental. She is a mirror, a responsive medium. The circumstances shine upon her and she thereafter shines back. A boyfriend catches a flight, a long-lost brother dies and leaves his estate to her, she becomes the unlikely winner of a contest--all of these scenarios are easily pleasing. They refrain, however, from speaking to genuine happiness. If the flight departs without him, if the brother lives to see another ten years, or if the wheel spins slightly further--what then? Can we picture our protagonist happy? No; she continues to reside in the tepidness that was her state before the possibility of circumstantial salvation.

Why does the author, the director, or the other artist so often concern himself with only the accidental? Could it be because it is the simpler route? Could it be that a change in situation is all the imagination the ordinary audience can muster?

There is something maniacal about the implications of the preponderance of human stories that portray happiness. It suggests that all that is necessary to make a man unhappy is to give him a raggedy wardrobe and that to make him happy all one needs to do is give him a closet full of Italian suits. Is this the way the humanity works? Are we really just balloons adrift in the weather systems of the world?

Not all of us are, at least. There are some who we may consider genuinely one way or another. These people are essentially weatherproof. They have transcended to the utmost humanly possible the influences of accident. Unlike a mirror that returns what it receives, they are flames. They give something distinct from what they consume. They are transformative.

What makes it so difficult to capture genuine happiness? Since one is not born genuinely happy, one must become so. But, the chain of events cannot appear crucial. If they are, then we are back to mirror-life. The process is similar to making a marble statue. The great sculptors have explained the creation of their works as consequences of an unexpected process. The layman supposes the sculptors see themselves as forming the rock to the image. There is a slab or marble, the sculptor chips away, and makes the image appear that had been envisioned previously. The greats, though, claim the inverse. They form the image to the rock. There is a form trapped within the marble. Upon study of their material, they see it and release it. The creation does not return what it receives. Though raw, the material emanates a refined form. This is the mode of development of a genuinely happy person. They contain within them the principles for happiness--they need only be released. It is much easier for an accident to be put in rather than an essence to be taken out. A man can be made to appear happy, but a happy man is so whether he is seen or not.

Out of Character

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

Nothing about Bernard Calloway's appearance was sinister. Halfway through his life, he was six feet tall with medium length thinning blond hair, and grey-blue eyes. He was slimly built and featured a well-groomed mustache that he had been growing for over fifteen years. His voice was unassuming, slightly above the average man's pitch. Air from his lungs would scrape against the bottom of his top teeth, giving his s's a breathy quality when he spoke.

Despite appearances and sounds, anyone who knew Bernard judged him to be an exceptionally evil man. In the workplace, he never returned the greetings of his peers. Neighbors loathed his habitual practice of parking over the left-line of the condominium's parking spots. When he went out to eat, he never left tips. When he walked down the street, he would turn around and accost anyone who brushed against him. As a manager, he was cut-throat. As a son, he was inconsiderate. He was a friend to none. When he was a child he enjoyed dumping his food onto the floor. As an adolescent, he enjoyed shooting cats with his pellet gun. In high school, rumor had it that he was to blame for the fire set in the boy's dormitory. He made right turns on red lights when he should not have. As a teenager, he made a game of seducing young women. As a man, he made a game of seducing married women.

For all of his misdeeds, Bernard had an uncanny way of benefiting from situations. He was ever mindful of avenues for advancement. He took credit for returning a dog that had been reunited with the owner's anonymously, earning him $50 in reward money when he was 10. Bernard cheated his way through college. He took many pennies throughout his life, and left none. Years ago as he was making his start, he would "rent" items from stores--buying them, using them temporarily, and returning them for full refunds. He forged the signature of his ailing father on a check in order to procure the funds necessary for a down payment on his first car. He pilfered the jewelry of his ailing mother years later to pay for three new Calvin Klein suits. He caught the eye of all of his superiors by making his coworkers look poorly. He once blackmailed a vice president of a rival company into giving him insider information that, when acted upon, earned him his first vacation home. Even after amassing a small fortune, Bernard would not hesitate to relieve a lost wallet of its cash. It's what they deserve for being so careless.

Virtues became vices in Bernard's heart. Normally, to have egalitarian leanings is commendable. In his case, it was despicable. Bernard loathed nearly all people equally. Being a highly competitive person, he viewed everyone as a rival for the world's limited resources. He justified his maniacal behavior as being natural. We are all struggling to survive. My way of struggling is more efficient than average. I not only keep myself going, but hinder others along the way. Bravery is employed on both sides of a war, and Bernard was proof that it took bravery to fight for evil as well. He risked being caught and ruined in order to win the greater rewards of underhandedness.

He maintained his ways at home and abroad. He relished the anonymity that traveling afforded him. It is preferable to take advantage of a person you would never see again--there's less mess. On a business trip during his fifty-second year, Bernard acted out of character. He had packed his belongings into his overnight bag, complained while checking out of the smell of smoke in his non-smoking room (which he had put there by smoking a cigar upon his arrival), received a free breakfast and a discount on the room, and made his way to the street. A mob of people was clamoring for a taxi and Bernard opted to move eastward to catch a westbound car earlier. Two blocks down, passing under emerald awnings and by rod iron patio furniture, he stopped in front of an apartment complex.

A flustered woman with a small wheeled black suitcase in tow descended the concrete steps and stood next to Bernard. She pulled at the ends of her shirtsleeves and ran her fingers through her hair. Exhaling loudly, she smiled at Bernard and said, "Some morning, huh? Something always comes up when you're in a hurry."

"That's the way it goes," Bernard responded as he turned his attention back to the busy avenue. He stepped off the curb and hailed the approaching cab. It decelerated and turned towards the customers-to-be.

"I'm sorry, but do you mind? I'm terribly late already. Could you, please?" In the cloud filtered morning light, the twinkle in her eye she used to flash men was hardly noticeable. It was enough to disorient Bernard. Unlike the strangers he usually wronged, her humanity was foisted upon him by the delicacy of her voice. Unlike the people that knew him, she had not assumed the worst of him. She simply and humbly asked him for a favor after recognizing her need for assistance. It would be good to let her go first. She is in more of a rush than I am. My flight doesn't leave for another three hours.

Bernard stepped back. The woman opened the back door, slid her bag in, and followed after it. He watched the cab weave through the congested street until, after a right turn, it left his field of vision. He walked down another three blocks to a corner where a car with the white sign reading "Taxi" glowed, idled. Bernard cut off a man approaching it with a number of bags in his arms. As Bernard climbed in and shut the door, he heard the muffled string of expletives flowing from the burdened man outside the window. He stared back at him coldly.

"LaGuardia," Bernard commanded the driver.

Aversion

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

The body has a curious, involuntary response to a disagreeable situation. In the creation of taste aversions, the body associates two contemporaneously (rather than causally) related events. When one eats a bowl of mint chip ice cream and shortly thereafter vomits and breaks out in a cold sweat, the body draws the conclusion that the mint chip ice cream to blame. Every subsequent time a person so much as smells mint chip ice cream, one feels a tide of nausea rise inside her and wishes to exit the setting. Though the stomach flu was the real culprit, the mint ice cream is judged guilty by association. The creamy, clean sweetness has the same taste as it always did, but it's examined through a different lens.

The mind has an analogous, though admittedly less document, response. Emiline Sortiere developed an aversion to her husband of 26 years somewhere in the second year. Emiline Schlager was married to Lloyd Sortiere in the fall of 1928. Both were admittedly desperate as the number thirty swiftly pursued them. In accordance with their yearnings, the two of them were blind to the premonitions of discord.

Lloyd was deceptive, though admittedly without trying to be. A man of few words and simple pleasures, he often gave the impression of being a sage. In truth, he was little more than an old--often sad--child. During their courtship, Emiline admired his emotional consistency and Lloyd admired her talent in the kitchen.

Emiline was inconsistent to a fault. On a drive in his Chevrolet in the spring of 1927, Emiline vented at how "crusty" Bach's "Organ Fugue in G Major" sounded. When asked for clarification, she answered, "I think organs are simply dreadful instruments. So abrasive!" In the winter of 1927 when the same fugue flowed in over the dining room radio, Emiline pleaded with Lloyd to buy her a record of that "wonderful music."

The marriage began as a symbiotic relationship. Emiline would tend to all things domestic; Lloyd would provide for all things in general. So long as he kept her company and she kept him fed and properly dressed, all was well. She could imagine that he wanted to be with her in a way the romantics wrote of in their poems. He could imagine that she wanted to nurture him in a way his alcoholic mother never managed to do.

All self-loathing people have disdain for their own company. Some self-loathing people have greater disdain for the company of others. Though neither understood it, only Lloyd belonged in the second camp. It was for this reason that he could stomach his dull, tedious work-life, and she was given to fits of depression in their dull, tedious home-life.

On a foggy early summer morning in 1930, the mind of Emiline Sortiere created an aversion to Lloyd that would cast a pall over the rest of her life and sour what little sweetness was available in his. Lloyd had for the past month been putting in long hours at the office. Emiline initially tried to take advantage of the superabundance of time. She marked several items of off the "rainy-day list," including sewing a different set of curtains for the guest bedroom (canary yellow with little green star bursts throughout) and repairing a pocket in her favorite winter coat (long, black and red tartan). The diversions were insufficient to keep a nagging sense of disappointment at bay. This is not how marriage is supposed to be.

Emiline had been anticipating a pleasant Saturday and dropping hints about going on a picnic. Unfortunately for her, Lloyd had a major deadline and a compassionless boss looming. Early Saturday morning after he covertly crept out of bedroom, Lloyd wrote a brief apologetic note and promised to return in time for dinner. Infuriated upon discovery of the note, Emiline resolved to make a picnic lunch for herself and to go to the city park without him. Not thinking clearly about how far off lunchtime was, Emiline took to making a sandwich and introspecting. Wondering how it was the idyllic marriage she had waited for all her life had eluded her finally despite the bold-faced fact that she was now finally married, Emiline sliced through the tip of her left index finger as well as the heirloom tomato. Shades of red mingled together on the wooden cutting board as she shrieked. Gripping her hand tightly with the other, she cried to release the torrent of pain and commiserate the ruination of her once beautiful hands.

The pointer is the most important finger! It will be so ugly now! Damn! Damn! Damn! It's all his fault! If he would have stayed with me today, I wouldn't be so maimed! Oooooo! If he would have come home a decent hour a few times during the workweek, maybe I wouldn't have needed to go on a picnic so damned much! Am I to be blamed for being lonely? A woman can't keep herself company--her husband is supposed to. People aren't supposed to be alone! He was so much more caring before we married!

Gripping the finger tightly within an increasingly bloody white dishrag, Emiline collected herself and walked next door. She proceeded to ask her neighbor to take her to the hospital, where she received a topical anesthetic, stitches, and a bandage. Later that evening, she refused to explain to Lloyd the reason for the gauze on her finger. Her fingertip scarred over as did her heart.

Ever since, the mention of Lloyd's name prompted Emiline's blood pressure to rise. A nearly imperceptible grimace darted across her face whenever she heard his voice. Seeing the initials "LS" on the backs of certain models of automobiles made her left eye twitch with rage. Emaline blamed Lloyd for everything wrong with her life, except for her red hair--whose fault was her fair-skinned father's. Doors squeaking, nails chipping, boredom pervading, breasts drooping, paint fading--all were the products of Lloyd Sortiere. In their subsequent interactions, Emiline would vacillate between yelling at Lloyd and ignoring him. Lloyd stayed loyal to her because through it all, she never stopped making dinner.

In Character

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

Brandon Hayes was a man without airs. When he spoke, his voice was hardly audible. When he walked, his arms swayed slightly more than usual. In the privacy of his own apartment, Brandon often used his finger to scrape out the last contents of his favorite dishes. He owned more books than he could read and read more than he should.

As a child, Brandon was petrified of authority figures. He would cower when adults raised their voices around him. He had a guilty conscience that cast a pall over most of his childhood thoughts. In kindergarten, one of his few releases was on the playground. He loved to slosh around the pebble-filled surface, running, jumping, and sliding to a stop. He would fall to his knees, grip the rocks, and let them tumble out between his fingers. He would dig down four inches to the muddy bottom of the pit in search for treasure. Once, he zealously flung the rocks between his legs like a dog. A young passer-by was struck by a number of the tiny rocks. Unfortunately for Brandon, one rock made its way into her empty mouth. Shortly after tasting the salty chalkiness, the girl wailed in the direction of the recess monitor. Mrs. Flareghety, the sloth in the midst of badgers, slowly digested the girl's frantic explanation. Dumbfounded, Brandon stared at the interaction. Mrs. Flareghty called him to her side. Looking down at him with stern eyes, she said, "Did you throw rocks at Rachel?" Brandon was scared and willing to admit anything the monitor wanted him to if only he could be out of the situation. After he answered in the affirmative, a phone call was made to his parents. He was suspended for a day of class and grounded for a month. In his sparse room, he did not allow himself the pleasure of playing with the few toys he had. He laid on his bed, usually thinking confused thoughts about his own cruel motivations.

Time at home was not a treat for Brandon. When removing adhesive-coated bandages or strips of wax-coated paper from one's self, everyone knows the key to it is quickness. "Get it done quick." It is as though there is a sliding scale of pain that begins at 10 units say. You can feel 10 units for 1 minute or prolong the duration to 10 minutes and feel 5 units all the while. One might as well feel them all at once and move on.

If you pull slowly, you just feel it longer.

Sometimes in life, a circumstance sticks itself on us. Some bandages or strips of paper we cannot grasp. The hand of time slowly tugs at an even rate. Hair is pulled; skin is stretched. Never enough that the end will be reached, that we will become unstuck. No, it just tugs and tugs and only prompts pain.

Brandon Hayes's family was a slowly pulled bandage. His mother and father always fought and it always hurt him. It never changed. Brandon grew and they incorporated more topics to war with each other over. As a baby, they argued about who's turn it was to change his diapers. As a toddler, they argued about leaving windows open. As a child, they argued about credit card bills. As an adolescent, they argued about methods of laundering (Mr. Hayes thought Bounce sheets were frivolous). By the time he was a teenager, they could bicker about anything and Brandon overheard nearly all of it. He had a knack for blaming himself and entertained thoughts of his own demise in the hopes that it would allay his parent's mutual consternation. Oddly enough, the thought of him being spoken ill of after the fact kept him from every carrying any nebulous plans out.

The yellow and brown house he grew up in was not always a setting for sadness. His mother would let him lick the beaters after preparing baked desserts. His father would play catch with him now and again in the street in front of their house despite the fact that his own father never taught him how to throw. In the winter months, he would build an igloo every chance he got with the discarded snow that had previously covered the driveway. His mother was always boiling water for hot chocolate and Brandon was always burning his anxious tongue.

It was from this source of self-loathing and simple pleasures that he grew into the soft-spoken man his co-workers thought of as aloof. On a mild summer afternoon during his twentieth year, Brandon was walking home from his desk job twelve blocks away from his house. He passed under a series of fading awnings and crossed two quiet streets, when a peculiar sound reached his ears. A little boy was sitting down on the steps of a duplex, sobbing into his backpack. After scanning the area for other signs of life, Brandon approached the child.

"What's the matter?" Brandon asked softly after squatting to the boy's eye level.
The boys red-tinged brown eyes looked at him distrustfully. "Nothing."
"Come on now, there must be something wrong. Boys don't cry like that for nothing."
"None of your business," the boy quipped between sniffles.
The corners of Brandon's mouth fell. Stubborn child.

Finished

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

Timothy Fleming sat on a bed with worn-white sheets questioning what good he was. Everyone wants to give something back, or at least feel like he's altered the world in some fashion. Previously, he thought he was a talented athlete. As a little boy, his tee-ball coach bragged about how fast he was. He beamed with pride at his natural ability. He made his speed a defining characteristic as he aged. He never wanted to rest on his laurels. The fastest runners in the world aren't born or made. They're both. He trained rigorously, beefed up his muscles, and read copiously on the mechanics of running. He took all the best paths in competitions and concentrated as singularly on excelling a possible. Throughout high school, he moved up the rankings in his state.
Timothy never bothered with academics. He did enough to avoid academic probation, but otherwise was disinterested. His only friends were other runners, but he rarely had time to socialize. Even on the long intrastate bus rides, he would close his eyes and run the courses over and over with Wagner playing in his ear buds. The local media covered the state race in his senior year. The sports writers speculated that Timothy Fleming was bound for the Olympics. Careening around the track earlier that day, Timothy knew he was on state record pace. He felt strong. He heard the metal of his spikes dig into the rubberized surface. The strands of blond hair fluttered about his scalp. Everything was as it should be. Crossing the finish line, he completed the race faster than anyone ever had in his home state. Hands slapped his back and his coach embraced him with his sweaty, hairy arms.
A pronounced sense of accomplishment never formed in Timothy's mind. High school competitions are kid's stuff. Legends aren't made in Springfield, Illinois. He wanted to set world-records. He needed to train more. His body had more developing to do. Then he could captivate larger audiences. They'd be in awe of his speed just like his tee-ball coach. Before the other events were over, Timothy was already thinking about how many reps he needed to do on the leg press tomorrow. Ascending the steps to the bus for the long ride home, a teammate called, "Congats, Timmy!" He turned his head around to scan for the face that matched the voice. Distracted, he clipped the edge of the second step. Quickly bringing his leg down to regain his footing, his knee joint gave. All the sinews in his knee tore, shooting pain up the relays to his brain. As Timothy fell forward in a heap, he knew his ACL and MCL were torn and hoped he was dying.
Waiting in an emergency room bed wearing a white gown with sky-blue small polka dots, Timothy wondered. Is it possible for a person to have a talent that goes unfulfilled? Nobody cares about high school records. I have nothing now. No prospects. I'm not good at anything else. What a waste of space!

Drifting

I feel like a child whose balloon has escaped into the sky. Unlike a child, I am not wailing. Instead, I am watching it shrink as it rises and wondering whether it is so lamentable. The gifts we receive in life can be like balloons handed to us as children. Though we adore their marvelous color and gravity-defining, rarely can we manage a lasting hold on it. We look away at another child passing by or towards the origin of screams coming from a nearby amusement ride. Our fingers open ever so slightly for want of concentration, and our balloon takes flight. "It was meant for the sky, not for you," says the grizzled grandfather. "There are other balloons," says the consoling father. "We'll get you another one," says the sympathetic mother. Sometimes we lack the motivation to jump after it, anticipating the futility of the action. Sometimes, we mourn the loss by swearing off balloons. I am simply gazing at it and making note of its bearings. So this is the way balloons leave: east, then northeast, but always up.
I am older now and realize I am still holding other strings even though one recently snuck out. Until we die, we are always holding at least one pretty thing on a string. Some children want to look up at what is lost and cry. The wiser ones blow it a goodbye kiss.

Erosion

Life has a way of eroding everything, good or bad. A man stumbles out of a hospital immediately after the death of his wife. Still the traffic lights change from red to green to yellow. Still cyclists pedal down the right lanes. Still turn indicators flicker. The world moves and wears individuals down as surely as water droplets do mountains. Even in our personal worlds, weathering is constant. A woman accepts a man's proposal, is thrilled, darts about making plans, is disappointed with her honeymoon, doesn't like the color of her bedroom walls, and lives to loath her husband. If the world was a person, we'd call her fickle. If life was a will, we'd call it capricious.
How can we have peace if there's no place to rest? What humanity needs are fixed points in the midst of flux. Could a person maintain concentration long enough to invent fixed points himself? No. Humans lack the necessary tenacity. How can people endure starvation then? A common strategy is to give oneself over to the flux which, in effect, gives the sensation of running on a treadmill. The contrary motions collude to create an illusion of stillness. A woman places her foot down on what feels like solid ground (she invests herself in a political campaign, for instance). But the surface is moving (the election comes and goes), and so she thrusts her other foot forward (she tries her hand at running a business). In all of this striding, she can look to the left and right and see the same walls. She thinks, "I have remained the same, and so has what matters." In truth, she is delusional. She has constantly expended her energy in different locations and has nothing to show for it but a demise in sweat and exhaustion, being flung off the track, and being hurled into the stillness of oblivion.
Even a man's memory is an agent of erosion. How many moments in a single day are lived through and discarded without ennobling it by lodging it in the mind? How many moments which a the time seem unforgettable and yet could never be recalled some months later. Time adds water to all the potent tastes of life. It tarnishes the shiny brass of love and rusts the defiant sheen of iron.

Ricochet

David Hume asks you to imagine that you had never seen before two objects colliding. Although you know everything you know now, you have no understanding of the physics involved in a collision. What might you predict would happen when a moving billiard ball strikes a stationary one? For all you know, a ball traveling north strikes a still ball and bounces southward. Equally as plausible, perhaps both balls move northward after impact. would it be so impossible for the balls, squarely struck as they may have been, to dart off on to the west and one to the east? How profound our ignorance of cause and effect! Had we never experienced physics, we'd never be able to project the state of the world into the future.
I must confess that we have as much a priori predictive power in regards to human affairs as we do the ways of the world. The original situation is merely a thought-experiment (and therefore a matter concerning only academic-types). The latter situations--who must not admit that he is in such a state of ignorance regarding his fellow humans? When we don't allow our biases and prejudices to be active, could we guess which way a person will break when running into a stationary object? (Life is a series of stationary objects that people bounce off of in one way or another.) Will a given person bounce to the right, say to become indignant, after running into a demotion? Or will she instead bounce to the left, say to resign herself to her new position. Will she bounce straight back and attack her boss, or will she continue forward and quit the company? That possibilities are various and the truth is we never know which way a person will break.
Here is a tricky thing about life: we cannot always trust the explanations proffered for one's actions. Take the following example: a certain woman appears generous. You take to observing her. She gives sundry gifts to her friends and family with frequency. She gives beyond her means, always taking wealth from herself and passing it around. She lavishes her circle with fancy cards on top and wrapping paper around the gifts, and often does not even stay near-by to watch them opened. She is pleased at a distance. The onslaught flatters her circle. Whenever she finds herself in an altercation with one of its members, she draws upon her philanthropic activities to mitigate her responsibilities. You watch this and think, she must be after something with all those gifts. Perhaps she wants approval or appreciation. Perhaps she just wants acceptance. Whatever the case may be, the sheer volume of her gift-giving is suspicious. You suggest in passing that she is to some extent "buying the love of others." At this, she explodes. "I have never done anything of the sort! I like being nice to people and showing them how much they mean to me!" Does her response count against your hypothesis? Is the violence with which she retorted further validation? It could be that she is buying the love of others and is not conscious of it. She could know that it would be ill-intentioned to be giving with such motives and thus respond negatively at the accusation. It could be that you have misread the situation. Perhaps the distance she takes after giving is humility.
Is there anything to gain from our own cases? Which way will you break? Don't you know. Ah! You are ignorant even of yourself. Poke and prod as a good scientist does and you chink your own armor.

A Trial of the Self

Nietzsche made a curious observation in a passage expressing his doubt as to the reality of the self. He noted that thoughts are rarely ever intentionally prompted, It is more often the thought that springs itself upon the thinker. Thinkers don't think thoughts; thoughts think thinkers.

If one reflects upon that stream flowing through one's consciousness, how many of the waves appear self-generating? One does not first intend awareness of perception and then categorize the perception. The perception presents itself. Even the more complex items of consciousness, the strands of linguistic thoughts often flow without any aid from the thinker. One sits in a waiting room, hears the sound of a woman scratching her arm, and is taken from thinking about dry skin to thinking about the American revolution. At the end of so many strands one wonders, "how did I get here?" How unruly are the contents of the mind! How often is a man's concentration broken by wandering thoughts? How easily does a train of thought become derailed! In all this, we are taken away from our "selves". In all of this victimization, we bare no responsibility. It was either a thought-object against our will or an unwilled thought-object that nevertheless took our field of consciousness over. How can there be a self that endures through the extent of one's life if there is not a unifier between a cross-section of one's consciousness? How can we proclaim the existence of a self when so much of what constitutes the purported self is involuntary and the self is fundamentally an agent (i.e., that which acts voluntarily)?

The unifier is the cohesiveness of the subjective experience. Every conscious moment contains a personal element. All of the contents of the mind, everything remembered of the reality previously experienced, and all the day-dreaming projections of the future, have the characteristic of being intuited in the same way. I can doubt the origins of a thought, but not that to be thought is the same--it is always something before me. Whether this "me" is a soul, self, mind, or body is a question for consequent investigation. At the moment of being thought, the quality of its being thought is the same.

How does one know there's something unifying one's life? One can never imagine a thought without thinking it, and thus stamps it with the characteristic of consciousness. The uniformity of consciousness is the evidence for a self.

Unseen Truth

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is near to hear it, does it make a sound? This is a hollow question. If an evil deed is performed and it is not punished, does it remain evil? Is there a more heart-rending question?! The possibility that an evil act unpunished is not an evil act is nauseating. What a horrible thing existence would be if there is no justice! Would not a sane, concerned, existing individual not snuff out her own life if it was certain that justice was a myth?

For justice to be a myth, it must not obtain universally. Human intuitions about justice include a requirement for absolute enforcement. A single act of injustice that slips by unnoticed, that tumbles into the past, and is forgotten totally and forever is enough to make justice a myth.

The desire for justice that so often resides in the heart does not entail that justice is real. The truth about existence cannot be bent by one's will (although one's will may be bent by it). Does the fact that people pine for justice make it suspicious, though? Is the appellation of 'wish-fulfillment' concerning its reality--if I may put it thus--justified?

A sense of justice need not be taught. However imperfectly, children know it and adults know it. Only sociopaths appear on occasion to be wholly devoid discerning judgment regarding justice. Every person not only knows something of justice, but wants justice to be done--at least when his or her case is in question.

The desire is so entrenched that it often is operative without one's notice. A man, finding faith completely repugnant, disavows all knowledge claims that are irrational. Accordingly, he refuses to assent to the notion that justice is real (i.e., universally pervasive) thinking metaphysics to be solely speculative and therefore irrational. Yet, how easily he takes offense when he has been wronged! When he is the victim of slander, how heavily he slams his fist on the desk and how loudly he demands satisfaction! What could be more satisfying than justice being done? To witness justice, to see an evil act derided for what it is, for merit to win the day: these events energize him. His heart acts on principles his mind rejects.

What could be more frightful than that one of humanity's highest ideals is proved an illusion?

Sorts of Killing

Propositions:
A person's life consists of, in part, consciousness over time.

The object of consciousness (what one is conscious of) determines the quality of the consciousness.

To kill a person consists of bringing the duration of his consciousness to a hastened end.

It is wrong to kill a person, in part, because consciousness is a basic good.

It is wrong to kill a person, in part, because life is a basic good.

Basic goods are good-in-themselves in the abstract (all things being equal).

Complex goods are good-in-themselves in the particular (in the life of an existing individual).

The complex goodness of consciousness derives from the goodness of that which is its object.

One person ought not directly remove a basic good from another.

Background:
Life in the abstract is good. A given person's life is not always perceived as good to him (or to an outside observer). Such is a colliding point between the basic and complex aspects of goodness. Consciousness in the abstract is good. What a given person is conscious of is not always judged as good. At such points, there is another collision. Moral quandaries arise in such atmospheres.

Question:
If it is wrong to kill a person, is it wrong to kill one's time?

Response: Yes. To consciously, consistently squander one's time is to--in effect--kill oneself. To squander one's time is to diminish the quality of what one is conscious of. Knowledge is of purer quality than ignorance. To kill one's time is to beckon unconsciousness; one forfeits the fullness of the present moment to arrive at some point in the future. Knowing that our life is limited and that the ultimate duration of our consciousness is thereby limited as well, all acts of disregard for one's attention (i.e., consciousness in the present) are, after a fashion, suicidal.

Objection 1: It is a privilege of a right-holder to waive her right. Every person has a right to live. Others must submit to that right, unless it is forfeited. To commit suicide is to tacitly forfeit one's right to live. Suicide, including the forfeiture of one's time, is permissible because on can waive one's right to live.

Objection 2: Although we have a duty to others regarding the removal of basic goods, we do not have a corresponding duty to ourselves. A good that is not wanted is not a good. We are to abstain from removing the basic goods of others because their basic goods may be presumed to be good. Knowing our own case first hand, we can conclude the apparent goodness of the basic good is so paltry that it becomes an evil. A duty would become counterproductive in our own case insofar as it would force us to endure an evil. Such a duty does not exist.

Objection 3: Killing a person is not similar to killing one's time. To kill a person is to completely, permanently relieve him of his consciousness. For an individual to kill his time is, at most, only to temporarily relieve him of an aspect--that of interested participation in an event or activity--of his consciousness.

Reply to Objection 1: Although a right-holder can waive her right, it does not follow that she ought to.

Reply to Objection 2: Although some duties to others are unique because they directly stem from the otherness of other people, the duty to not remove a basic good from another is not such a one. The duty not to remove a basic good from another is a primary duty consequent to personhood, which the self and other people have in common.

Reply to Objection 3: Isolated instances of time-killing are not immoral. The argument as stated above addresses consistent, systematic time-killing. Such would be the case with many addictions, be they substance abuse or experiential abuse. Experiential abuse consists of the inappropriate consumption of experiences, including excessive sexual experiences and technological experience. Addictions may be unto death, the possibility of which raises it to a level of gravity higher than what can only be temporary. Killing time is not as heinous because it is not always unto death, whereas all forms of murder are. When taken in isolation, the act of self-murder and time-killing can have the same motivation (e.g. dissatisfaction with recent/current consciousness). It is the intent that makes the similar acts immoral.