It has been argued that the love of knowledge is nothing more than a lifelong attempt to come to terms with the circumstances of mortality.  Because we have already defined love as a sacrifice, the love of knowledge, too, is a sacrifice of one thing for the other, a process of learning to become accustomed to the endings of things at the expense of experiencing them, a long labor of life to develop a noble and accepting disposition toward the inevitable and the unknowable.

Similarly mischaracterized is the nature of thrill-seeking. Frequently we describe the thrill-seeker's flirtation with danger as a life-giving impetus, that to willingly skirt the threshold of death is to invigorate oneself, to renew one's "thirst for life,"  to "feel alive." In this way, thrill seekers are characterized as virile forces representing as a whole the Western interpretation of the human endeavor: to be human is to transcend limitation, to confront, seemingly effortlessly, the otherworldly liminal space between life and death.

And yet human endeavoring can only carry human beings so far. There is a man on your back at the threshold and he can give you a little push into liminality. And like a tortoise in a shell of flesh you may emerge from the sheath of humanity as you free-fall, ten thousand feet, into the impossible space your body was never intended to occupy. In those moments, the sublunary world and your earthly memory tear away in the thunder of the descent, until there is nothing left of you but a ghost of your thought and the sensation of pleasure.

Of course, this is the critical moment of the thrill, because you must inevitably touch down. If you feel alive when there is nothing left of you, when you have cast off from every platform of reason and from every foundation upon which the knowledge of your life has been built, then you have accepted what is inversely proportional to the pleasure of your descent: that to be confined to the world in its mundanity is stifling, that the world beneath you is a tomb.

Interesting how we fall in love:
in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—
so it was in my youth.
And always with rather boyish men—
unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves:
in the manner of Balanchine.
Nor did I see them as version of the same thing.
I, with my inflexible Platonism,
my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time:
I ruled against the indefinite article.
And yet, the mistakes of my youth
made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves,
as is commonly true.
But in you I felt something beyond the archetype—
a true expensiveness, a buoyance and love of the earth
utterly alien to my nature. To my credit,
I blessed my good fortune in you.
Blessed it absolutely, in the manner of those years.
And you in your wisdom and cruelty
gradually taught me the meaninglessness of that term.

— "Unwritten Law," Louise Glück

Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant, but you know one can't take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.

— Notes from the Underground

It came upon me sitting in the dark on some Friday evening that I should declare myself an enemy of weekends.

You and my colleagues have asked me why I would say such a thing, and in your asking, with bated breath, I hear gasps and sighs as if in sitting in the dark alone with my thoughts I had made a declaration of war against leisure itself, that Classically liberal self-assurance, that very foundation of our happiness. It is your belief that the enemy of leisure fears sanity. Upon your insistence the enemy of leisure fears pleasure. He is insane because every tomorrow is without reward, and without reward there can be no pleasure. He looks on in horror at the rising and the setting of the sun, no matter what day it is, and during the moratorium that is the weekend he hears the Vulcan god of Progress descending, his robot chariot carrying the instruments of Monday, an awful god with an awful mercy.

No rational man has a love of work for work itself, that much we have already established, though in the dark this too I have disputed. Rational men work for reward, they love to be loved, they sacrifice to gain. And so you have asked of me for what I should strive, from Monday through Friday, if not leisure for leisure's sake? Why should I work if not to be rewarded, why should I love if not to be loved, why I should sacrifice if not to gain?

On Monday we work and these questions are not ours to ask; on Sunday we sleep and they are not ours to answer. For we are but machines, spokes in a wheel of seven days, and we turn effortlessly, effortlessly, effortlessly like the hours and the days and the weeks and the years.

Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct this kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal. What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid-back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living this way can human beings be said to share in his life. Believers sometimes speak as though a key difference between themselves and non-believers is that for them, the meaning and purpose of life lie outside it. But this is not quite true even for believers. For classical theology, God transcends the world, but figures as a depth within it. As Wittgenstein remarks somewhere: if there is such a thing as eternal life, it must be here and now. It is the present moment which is an image of eternity, not an infinite succession of moments.

—Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

— Aldous Huxley

Like most radical organizations, the hegemony represents an organized system of control, a matrix of domination, a set of relations in the social fabric of the human sphere designed to mediate power between individuals and among colleagues and across cultures. But it is also the case that the hegemony is driven by fear, which as a primal urge arises in response to our darkest concerns, that of our self-preservation and our self-loathing, during those moments when the fealty of our peers is put into question by their desires, and our own comportment as rational beings becomes compromised.

Nothing exemplifies a system of control more accurately than a television broadcast. You are presented with a set of images and you are expected to accept it passively. The effect of each image on your psyche is meticulously predetermined, its suitability for the demographic to which you belong measured and quantified, its propagandist objectives already in force in the moment of your perception. There is no act of interpretation; there is no argumentation or reflection. Like your witty friend of limited intelligence, the image charms you only in the seconds of its debut. For a time you are happy and dazed and you think you are worldly.

Then nothing of substance remains.

Real athletes are not hedonists. They have no interest in pleasure, and though it seems impossible, they derive pleasure from pain, and are invigorated by their own suffering. It is said suffering is the precursor to change. That the rending of the flesh is a reminder of our fragility, our transience, our impermanence.

The rationalist argues that the athlete endures what she endures because there is the promise of reward in exchange for her suffering. Rationalists are always forward-thinking; in this way, nothing comes as a surprise for them. But the rationalist confuses the symptom with the cure. For the mere aesthete, whom you have mistaken for an athlete, tries to shape a statue out of sand, and the sand shifts between her fingers no matter how ambitious she endeavors to be. For the reward is superficial and momentary, and the pursuit of it will only rekindle her desire in the same way that running headlong on a treadmill is not fortuitous.

Life is the treading on the track and the lifting of the weight and the loathing and the fear and the hideous strength.

Life is suffering.

There is nothing more I can do for him, or for myself. Supplies are exhausted, no food or liquid consumed for over 24 hours. The outer hull most probably flooded, though for now the inner hull is supporting the ship's mass...

I found a children's book of Norse legends. From what I can tell, the pictures show the end of the world—not in a sudden firestorm of damnation as the Bible teaches us, but in a slow covering blanket of snow. First the moon and the stars will be lost in a dense white fog, then the rivers and the lakes and the sea will freeze over. And finally a wolf named Skoll will open his jaws and eat the sun, sending the world into an everlasting night.

I think I hear the wolf at the door.

—"Død Kalm," 1995

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

— Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"

I've allowed you to keep your wicked life for two reasons... And the second reason is so you can tell him, in person, everything that happened here tonight. I want him to witness the extent of my mercy by witnessing your deformed body. I want you to tell him all the information you just told me. I want him to know what I know. I want him to know I want him to know. And I want them all to know they'll all soon be as dead as O-Ren.

— 21st century revenge tragedy

We know as little about subjectivity as we know about death. Our assumption is that the two lead coterminous lives: where the one ends, the other begins, and vice versa. Both the priest and the coroner place a similar wager: the former that our subjectivity transcends the flesh, the latter that our subjectivity depends upon it. However, like God and rationalism, there is no test a thinking man can run to falsify his thought, for it is true that all thinkers must possess the thing to be able to recognize it. Therefore the contemplation of these beginnings and endings has little to do with the possibility of our persistence after death and everything to do with unobtainable knowledge.

In the dark, a heavy stone plummets into a pool and only the sound of the breaking of the surface of the water is our evidence of its disappearance into the deep. There is the throw and the descent and the sound and then the silence, silence the same as before the throw and the descent, silence the same as after. It is likewise indisputable that without our sense of hearing it is impossible to observe the entire process, our eyes being useless instruments in the dark. Our observation ends when the surface of the water is broken.

And so a stone throw into the deep is a show of faith, like death. Both acts wager one's existence for one's freedom from it.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.

— Emily

Give me a loop of your thread and I will sew together every piece of your garment which is torn. Then you will be able to go out into the world again, fully in garb, free in your disguise. But for he whom everything has unraveled, a sewn-together garment is an eyesore, and each thread a tendril, hateful and imprecise, reaching out effortlessly to entangle the Earth, hip-to-hip, until nothing but red threads are visible from space.

Poor planning can result in things slowly unraveling. They say the facts become indisputable, given the evidence over time. In retrospect, analysis is effortless. Thus even they looking on with the most cautious eyes, assessing the costs and the benefits and risks of the plan, can miscalculate the amount of pressure to be applied on a wound, and so the wound bursts suddenly. When that happens you have an emergency of great magnitude on your hands, and it is madness to try and save the whole Earth, all at once, with the tips of your fingers.

There are a thousand eyes on the surface of the sea floor, unblinking, unafraid of our probing lights and our seething wanderlust; we little worms shimmering in tin cans, we bronzed machine-Sphinxes gliding over a dead landscape, grinning fiercely.

And the pressure there at the bottom of the ocean is tremendous, imperiling, infinite.

Honesty is a word. It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.

The assertion is straightforward, but the implications are not. Honesty is the ghost of King Hamlet shuffling between a world of pretense and a world of suicide. Swear if you would on my sword to tell the truth; if you would bow nobly to swear on it, then you would be noble, and this again is the difference between being and doing, character and action, living rationally and living honestly: Swear on my sword if you would tell the truth, and then you can die nobly.

This is your father in the old house that he built, your father of the square and compass. Eighty years ago means Old World: old beliefs, old values, old money. There is the woman sitting in the garden, a white arch and white columns. I have never met her and she will never meet me. These are possibilities, each branch of man-made flora weaving its way through the cracks in the earth.  Sometimes I imagine my own wrists inside those crisp, cufflinked sleeves, his shadow at the morning striding behind him; my shadow at evening rising to meet him. The smell of shoe polish on fine leather like the smell of gasoline. Then we all tip our hats, pay our respects, go our separate ways. Tombs for the living and tombs for the dead.

San Juan. Bisabuelo. These too are just words.

"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost."

—Robert Pinsky's translation

Sepulchered, you raise your head, lower the sheets, close the blinds, unhinge your body from the rigid impression of your bed.

Serrated morning weighs upon your tomb in one-inch shafts, the floor burning, unfolding, emptying in concentric circles. The world, peopled by your thoughts, becomes hell’s fixture.

You are at all times beset by the circumstances of your cyborg existence. You awake from yesterday and you enter the train, or your car, or you are chauffeured—for even in luxury there is an unsettling regularity to your leisure—and the day is still fixed by the hours in the rotation of the earth. The apparatus of the machine is all-pervasive, imperceptible, inescapable. You are both its prisoner and its operator, supremely unaware of your machine role yet supremely confident in your arrogance that you may operate freely despite your mechanized existence.

Time, leaking effortlessly from your alarm in steady metallic shrieks, signifies an illusion, like motion. We take a step forward and the distance is halved, and the distance is halved, and the distance is halved, but our journey is never complete.

You depress the switch: time stops.

The day is reset.

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

— Walt Whitman

Everything has a price. In the hegemony, this is a mantra that reinforces what we call our independence, something we are taught to accept as an axiom for the basis of Reason. Rational thinkers, therefore, understand that in every human interaction there occurs a transaction, and in that transaction there are considerations of value, cost, risk, desire. The consequence is simple: If something passes from your hands into mine without a consideration of these things, it is not a gift; it is a maneuver. Charity too becomes a bartering of favors; love an exchange of vows only for as long as they are valuable to the barterers.

Stepping into the kingdom of the Underworld, Persephone is likewise fearful, but you should not pity her. If you are like Persephone you are like a daughter of the freest goddess, unbound by any commitments except a commitment to yourself. Into your cupped palm the god of the Underworld has placed three pomegranate seeds, and the rule is that if you taste of the Underworld you must remain its guest, you may never return to the surface, you may never again be careless and free. Thus it is so that a gift becomes a manacle, and a daughter of the freest goddess must decide whether she should exchange her freedom, which is valuable, to become a queen of the Underworld, which is risky.

The myth of Persephone is not a myth of freedom: the myth of Persephone is a myth of compromise. For even though she lives among the shades of the dead for part of the year, Persephone emerges to renew the seasons, a daughter of the fall and the summer and the spring.

He held there was no difference between life and death. "Why then," said one, "do you not die?" "Because," said he, "there is no difference."

—  Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

There are rooms in the houses of our minds built up on borrowed life and memory cemented in time. We have boarded up these rooms as best as we can, shabbily, first with one lie like hollow wood, and then with a second in a curved nail, blow after blow, until the sound of the boarding too is sealed off and what lies within is immersed in darkness.

You prop up a new piece of furniture there, then you set the table, hang up a frame, plug in appliances, the hum of power like the hum of life. You believe the house is yours and you move to and fro. A new lamp, a red curtain, a stack of books, a wastebasket: these before the door. Tomorrow will come quietly if you want it too.

You talk to Jerry in E7 while you wash the laundry. A tailor named Aroush will do a top-stitch. By signing below you acknowledge you have authorized your employer to withhold the amount specified in Section 2 from your wages.  You appeal the surcharge, you see a movie Downtown, you smile, then you return home, though you emptied the whole bag, all your personal effects, the parting gifts, the handful of nails, the silhouette of a dress, a thousand pounds of black hair, a wave of flesh, dark eyes.

You breathe in and slide your back against the door, and open your eyes.

The room is getting dark, the days long.