Dead Air

It is time to steal a moment away from my busy schedule and engage in the superfluous activity of blogging. I have been under exorbitant amounts of stress as of lately, but finally the pressure is beginning to ease. Though finals week is still to come, I believe the worst is well behind me. In the last week, I have written two papers, and quite frankly, I am a slow writer. This means that the papers have taken pretty much all of my time. It does not help that a close friend, Brad Hansen, was killed in a car accident over Thanksgiving weekend. How petty of me to align his passing with the pressures of an ending semester, but who can deny the horrible timing? Not I, said the pig.

Alas, I have spent the last 5½ hours or so working on the final 3½ pages of a paper. That actually seems pretty quick for me. Granted, I more or less edit as I go along, so when I'm done with the paper, there is usually not too much else to do with it. I am not going to spend hours editing it as well. Perhaps you, my faithful reader, can inform me whether or not this is slow. I probably spend 2-3 hours per page when all is said and done. I don't think that's impressive. You'd think I'd be pretty stressed considering I have one more paper to write by Monday, and it has to be about 10 pages long. That's 20-30 hours of work, I imagine. Yeah, that is stressful, but considering that's the only thing left to worry about, I feel pretty good. I do have two finals next week, one for Greek and one for Latin. Luckily, I have pretty much a full day to study for each of them with basically no other obligations. So that shouldn't be too horrible. I'm a little worried about my overall Greek grade, of course, but you get to a point where you just have to let it go.

To share some more intellectual fodder, my philosophy of religion class spent the last month or so discussing a Jewish philosopher by the name of Franz Rosenzweig. I have quite enjoyed his philosophy, at least what I have been able to understand of it. I sometimes wish I belonged to a religion that was more liturgical. I have thought that for a while, but Rosenzweig brought it home. My religion doesn't have a strong religious calendar like the Jews and Catholics, for example. Heck, it doesn't really have a religious calendar at all, I wouldn't say. But Rosenzweig believes the cycle of the religious calendar gives one a sense of the eternal in life. By going through the constant cycle of holidays and "normal" days, one gets into a rhythm that makes life bearable due to a connection with the eternal (or so I understand him to say). As he puts it:

The holiday will serve as a training school for every day. Once a man's legs are accustomed to its rhythms, he will have no difficulty walking the streets of the work-a-day world. The gait is the same. If he has been well-trained here, he will not stumble later. Rather he will halt in amazement at how simple life actually is.

My friend's passing probably makes these philosophies all the more poignant for me. But I really like them. Rosenzweig also says that a person should "direct his life to no other goal but death." This may sound morbid at first, but how can you not believe this would alleviate the anxiety of loss felt in this world? Brad's dad surprised me when Melanie and I went to the viewing. Before we could say anything, he simply said, "Boy, what a shocker, huh?" and proceeded to say how recent circumstances made him feel assured it was Brad's time to go. I guess the situation forces you to be cordial, but I was amazed at how normal he came off. I used to think it was a form of self-delusion to take comfort in the platitudes of "it was his time" or "we'll see him again" and other such clichés. But if you really, really believed those things, how could you not feel better? If you could really believe that this moment means so little in the long run, and that this temporal world will in fact end, and that the only meaning this world really has is based on the fact that it will someday end, and that we should be preparing for its conclusion, how could you not take comfort?

So the question is, do I live for death? Do I live for the next world, or for this one? If I live for the next world, this world isn't nearly so intimidating. And I believe this is true. I think I have had moments when I feel more spiritual, and I do feel more of an eternal perspective that way, and then life seems less strenuous. In those moments, death almost seems like a neat opportunity, in that the important things can then be focused on in full force. This life bears constant obstacles to living for the next world. The next world, seeing as how it is the next world, allows you to live that way unhindered. Granted, I don’t know what it’s like, but death doesn’t sound scary when I’m feeling the right way. Rosenzweig speaks of “revelation as orientation,” meaning revelation helps us find ourselves connected to the eternal, and we thereby realize that we are not the center of the universe, and that this moment—the present—is not the center of time. Every moment is somewhere specific on a timeline that is going to end one day and become nothing. Time will turn into eternity. If that’s where we’re going to spend all of our time, why be so scared or sad to go there? Or to see somehow else go there? Death can be beautiful when viewed properly. This is not to say loss does not hurt, but you get my point. I hope. I just found a Latin quote for you: "Crudelius est quam mori semper timere mortem" (It is more cruel to fear death than to die) - Seneca.

Anyway, this has turned into a lengthy, stream-of-consciousness post. I hope you don’t mind. To end on a lighter note, I coincidentally watched a sitcom the other day wherein someone's aunt committed suicide. She did not leave a note, and some people were discussing how rude they felt that was. One of them says, "Would it have killed her to leave a note?" I always appreciate comic genius. Until next time…