The Enduring Vanity

Do you ever feel like you're disappearing? If you're like most people, unreflective and consumer oriented, you've probably already disappeared.

I was recently looking through a high school program where the students listed their plans for the future. They all wanted to save the world this way or change the world that way, go on to bigger and better things, live a happy, fulfilled life, doctor this, lawyer that, Hollywood starlet here, pro-athlete there. Not one said they wanted to work the nightshift at K-Mart. Or become a career waitress. Or become a drug addict. Or die in a tragic accident. Or end up old and alone. But hey, shit happens.

Artist Ed Kienholz called a bar a "sad place, a place full of strangers who are killing time, postponing the idea they are going to die." This concept also applies to excessive television watching, or going to church, a sad place where strangers who realize they are going to die congregate with the hope of doing something about it. What an appalling display of self-righteousness. Why do people envision an afterlife or a heaven as existing in the sky? Perhaps because it is a constant they can imagine existing forever, even longer than the planet, and they somehow seek to project themselves there in a vain attempt at immortality, in whatever form it may be. And how daring of them to propose oneself worthy of such a salvation. This is the enduring vanity. To suppose that we are anymore significant, beautiful, and deserving than any other animated piece of meat that ever lived.

Our world is one of confusion, bewilderment, and futility. Listen to people around you and you'll hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings. But start to analyze their ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect the reality to which they appear to refer. Quite the contrary, through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his very own life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but is frightened at finding himself alone and face to face with this terrible reality and tries to conceal it with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It doesn't worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

Indeed, how strange it is to be anything at all. The feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation - the miracle of everything, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all. Man is limited by his abject finitude, his physicality, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. Man is utterly perplexed at the sheer non-sense of creation, not only is his body strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. He doesn't know who he is, why he was born, what he is supposed to do, or what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him. This is the terror. To have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression - and with all this yet to die. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy fertilizer? We are beautiful. We are doomed.

What we call the human character is actually a lie about the nature of reality. Perhaps at some point in your own life you've heard the dreadful whisper, that human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the "creator" may not care any more for the destiny of man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than he seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians. The whisper is the same one that slips incongruously out of the Bible in the voice of Ecclesiastes: that "all is vanity, vanity of vanities."