bellus nusquam

I was listening to my internal dialogue a few nights back and it was babbling away as usual and suddenly I came to an awareness that at some point the endless chattering would come to an end, that I would not be there anymore and that I wouldn't have to listen to myself thinking nonsense. It is a very strange feeling to in a moment become aware of your finite nature. I thought about this for a while, and enjoyed the strangeness of it; it's not a feeling that it is possible to put into words so I'll just say that it was disconcerting but pleasurable in an uncomfortable way.

That line of thinking lead me to think that it didn't really matter what I did when I was actually alive since inevitably I'm going to die and after a number of years no one will remember who I was and it won't have mattered in the grander scheme of things. But what grander scheme of things? At some point the sun will explode and then the earth and even the solar system won't exist anymore, like they had never been there. And then everything that anyone ever did will just be wiped out (who cares about minor-becomings or Dasein now?) What is the point of doing anything that you don't want to do when eventually it won't matter, not even to the human species as it won't exist?

But more than that... I thought, what if the Universe implodes? This is a far off thought, a time scale that I can't even think about but it confirmed to me even more how finite I really am. Not only will I die and decay, not only will our solar system be annihilated, but I cannot possibly conceive of an existence beyond our own universe. It is completely impossible to think it. I remember my cosmology lecturer telling me that there could be anything out there, even crazy dragons or monsters, we will never know. I remember thinking when I was young that the edge of the Universe was like when Bugs Bunny would run off the edge of the screen and onto a white background... maybe that is what it is like but the only thing I can be sure about is that I can never know. This brought me even more before my finite nature and confirmed to me that there are things that I can never know. I can study forever but I will never know what exists after the Universe!!!

Now I can read philosophy because I want to and whether it's useful or not doesn't matter. My mum asks me why I want to do my MA over 2 years, I tell her because I want to make the most of it. She asks me then what, I reply probably travel a bit and then a PhD. She and my Dad want me to get a career and make some money, I ask them why I need money.. they want me to be secure, to have a future... I think that it doesn't matter, I don't have a future... I can save money my whole life and in the end I don't actually need it.

An acceptance of death, of finiteness and the shortfallings of our little brains is not a terrible thing as one might expect. I find it liberating to know that I really can do whatever I want because all there is in the end is nothingness; no one to judge, no one to care, nothing except the blank screen that only Bugs Bunny et al can get to. It makes life more of an affirmation really... a short space of time in which one can do what one wants, certain of the fact that the sun will gobble up this shite piece of rock and incinerate whatever remains of the human race.

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