I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
–Annie Dillard,
American author and Nobel Prize recipientÂ
Â
My dance card is filled to the brim these days – I’ve got something every night this week and have had something every night for a while now – so I guess I’ll sleep when I’m dead. My friend S writes to me that after her daughter left to go spend a week with her father, she felt alone and lonely and realized she needs to open herself up more because it really is all about connecting with people.
I can’t remember if it was Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates who described humans as a semicircle and all of the yearning is to find the other piece, the other semicircle to complete us.
When I was at the camp with N and the Snake I was taken by the Snake’s insistence that we are all living lives of quiet desperation. It grew out of a conversation we were having about the demise of his 20+ year marriage. He said he knew he couldn’t stay and does not regret leaving but he thinks life still remains a muddle for him of who he is and what he wants. Plato’s dialogues speak to our tragic existence – first, we are radically insecure because our end is uncertain, next, we are blind to our own identity and to those we love most – we fail to comprehend those who are closest to us, because we are too involved with them emotionally. Lastly, there is inevitability of tragedy in our lives because we cannot satisfy all the claims that we should meet and tragedy forces us to reexamine who we are.
I’d agree whole heartedly that tragedy forces you to reevaluate who you are – I don’t think there is a person alive in New Orleans right now who isn’t turning over all of the bricks that paved their way here and wondering how to place the bricks going forward – if there is, they are among the living dead.
BTW: The other day AOL accidentally released the search findings of hundreds of its users – they weren’t identified except by number, but the results are pretty frightening – most all of them begin with casual searches – christian terms, church info in the neighborhood, and rapidly segue into every form of deviant behavior from how to kill someone to beastiality – the community is up in arms about privacy – I am up in arms because I’m horrorfied!