Alara
@paperthin
“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
My deepest pleasure was to lose myself in the world of a novel, and over and over again I told myself that the very best thing a person could do in life was to write a fine novel. I’ve always had a hunger for stories, and since I first read Treasure Island as a young adolescent I have dived deeply into the narratives that great writers offer us.
Reklam
And in my daily work, as I help patients reconstruct their early lives, I grow increasingly convinced of the fragile and ever-shifting nature of reality. Memoirs, no doubt this one as well, are far more fictional than we like to think.
"My life is very solitary. There’s no one I can share those thoughts with."
"Does solitary mean lonely?"
"Oh, yes."
But to be honest with you, I think of religions and the ideas of the afterlife as the world’s longest-running con game. It serves a purpose—it provides religious leaders a comfortable life and it dampens mankind’s fears of death. But it comes at such a price—it infantilizes us, it blocks our vision of the natural order.
I’m interested in astronomy and have made my own telescope and whenever I look at the night sky I’m blown away by how tiny and insignificant we are in the great order of things. It seems obvious to me that the ancients tried to deal with feelings of insignificance by inventing some god who considered us humans so important that he should turn his attention to surveying our every act. And it also seems obvious that we try to soften the fact of death by the invention of heaven and other fantasies and fairy tales that have one common theme: “We do not die”—we continue to exist by passing on to another realm.
Reklam