Spring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of Winds<\/p>\n
Quick notes for some future thought.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Let me extend\u00a0 the notion.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness.\u00a0 We know we will die.\u00a0 This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not.\u00a0 The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction.\u00a0 Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs.\u00a0 This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism.\u00a0 That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.<\/p>\n
Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch.\u00a0 No, of course not.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side.\u00a0 But they are no great loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Moon of Winds Quick notes for some future thought.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem … Continue reading A Thought on Extinction<\/span>