Spring Waning Moon of Winds
Quick notes for some future thought. Often I carry a notion around for days before I set it down and I’ve had one banging around for a week or so. On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. The more I’ve thought of that poem and the sinking in to the sands of time of 99.99999% of us, often not even name remaining for long, I’ve felt strangely liberated by it.
Let me extend the notion. Not only will even the best and the brightest of us fade from view, as have all but a very few, but given time even the starship on which we travel will die away, too. Long before that humanity will have ended its time here on earth, perhaps we will go out to the stars, perhaps not, but at some point the planet we know, that humanity has known as its only home, will disappear from the universe, swallowed by an expanding red giant.
This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness. We know we will die. This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not. The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction. Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs. This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism. That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.
Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch. No, of course not. Camus felt that death made us all brothers and sisters, committed to each other and to as smooth and happy a course of life for the other as for ourselves. Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side. But they are no great loss.