A large waste of space

'Thenne al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst
And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdays mony'

(Then all that sprang up at first grows ripe and rots
Thus the year spends itself in many yesterdays)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

'My way of life is fallen into the sere.' Macbeth

Almost a year has passed since the last post. It is only human, it is only natural, to wonder what have I achieved and what have I done; what a year in Cambridge has contributed to my, to use an overused term, CV.

Let’s count up the score. Number of books read – a truckload. Number of books understood – less than one. (And I only know how to count in whole numbers.) Skills learnt – none. Lives saved – none. Epiphanies or mystic visions – none. I detect a pattern here, and no regression analysis was required.

It seems that the only thing that has passed is time. But is it ‘only’? Much as life seems pretty much the same now as it did before, things have changed, certainly, just as time has passed. Seasons change and the world returns to how it was before, but there is irreplaceable loss, and death, which is a precondition for the miracle of renewal. Nature moves in cycles rather than remaining stationary only because it has to accommodate the irrefutable fact of expendability. Life multiplies and reproduces only because inevitably, it has to die.

It is tempting then, in light of my failure to achieve anything, to fall back on the crutch of death, to gain solace and support from the grinning skull and yawning grave. All are alike in death, all men, rich or poor, famous or notorious or mediocre, all resolve themselves sooner or later into a lump of flesh, then a pile of earth in which bones are embedded. The temptation is great indeed to say with the Qoheleth, ‘Hebel! Hebel! (Meaningless! Meaningless!) and write off a year, ten years, of wasted time with the pat but unanswerable statement that all achievements and honours mean nothing in the end.

Yet this cannot work. If one was to argue that only death (loss of the physical body, loss of life, loss of the conscious person) means something, and all else is meaningless, then if we were a little looser with the terms and fairer with the definitions we could also argue that even if achievements are meaningless, loss is meaningful. What is present therefore, in the absence of visible or invisible achievement or growth, is the concreteness of lost time and missed opportunities; in a way potentialities become meaningful only when they are unrealized and once they are achieved, they immediately become meaningless, ‘a chasing after the wind’. And this is just plain weird, and inadmissible.

Perhaps this is why man, whether religious or not, cannot use the inevitability of death as a postulate in formulating a practical philosophy of life, or of living. Intuitively, one realizes that however one welcomes the grave and / or the hereafter, one has to exist in the here and now, ‘to be’ rather than ‘not to be’, and achievements matter because the human mind, in its rational and emotional faculties, is structured to function through valuation. The perception of complex chains of causality, whether this causality be a construct of the human mind or a metaphysical property of reality, is a defining feature of Man and is applied unconsciously or consciously to every situation; valuation must occur and the best, or most valued course of action selected, so that purposeful action can take place and we don’t spend eternity and beyond deciding whether or not to take the next step forward. And since the human mind is also possessed of memory, revaluation occurs, and from this, we may argue, the feeling of loss is produced. Lost potentialities are not really lost because the potentialities cease to exist the moment the action is taken, they merely change in quality from a rejected nothing to a forgotten and impossible nothing. Memory and revaluation produce feelings which the irrational mind misinterprets as concrete objects and actualities; training the mind to be rational and logical would remove these non-existent objects and lead back to a healthy person.

But this is rubbish too. Feelings are real because they exist in the mind of the feeler (I really have to find a better word for this, I am not a caterpillar) in the same way that sense impressions of objects exist in the mind. They are less specific, but equally real, and equally important. And perhaps this is where I may make a case for my lack of achievements, in case they threaten to take away my scholarship for not achieving stuff. Concrete achievements to a large extent are short-term, what is long-term and important are their effects on the achiever’s mind. They build self-confidence, develop the achiever’s ability to value, and enable the achiever to make correct decisions in future life. In short, it is the impression that these make on the achiever’s mind which are important. Hence, even if achievements have not been made, if a similar impression, or even a different one but of the same importance, has been created, there is growth and development. Just as the old vegetation must die for the new to flourish, the actuality of the lost time and lost potentialities must be spent for the learning to take place. And what is to be learnt? That it’s not really where you go (which after all is ultimately the same dark and unknown place) or even how you get there that matters. What matters is that the way that each one of us goes to that place (whether confidently or stumbling around or somewhere in between) makes you, and I, and all others, individual and unique and human. And being an individual, and at the same time being fully able to relate to others as fellow individuals, fellow human beings and fellow travelers on this dusty road, is what gives life its value.

So this is just a long ramble about how one learns from mistakes. Alas, not even a coherent or logical one. Well, English or GP tuition teachers out there, give it to your charges to practice their summary skills or something.