I just finished watching the film again and remembered how much I had enjoyed it the first time around. It makes me wish Emma Thompson were the narrator of my life, her omniscient voice foretelling my fate. Perhaps people would be more at ease with death if they knew beforehand how the scene would play out. Life forces us to take caution when crossing a street because it leaves us in the dark about the outcome of circumstances. But would I, fully knowing that I am to be run over by a bus, cross the street anyway if I knew with certainty that was my fate? One often hears the phrase, “you could get hit by a bus and die tomorrow” but how many people actually ponder that thought long enough for its meaning to soak in? If I knew that I was going to die tomorrow, I don’t think I would be able to sleep tonight.
The timeline exists even now; I will die one day in the distant future. But the hope that I have still a few decades left to live, to make a difference if you will, allows me to sleep tonight without the guilt that I am wasting time in slumber. Perhaps I would fall asleep anyway, regardless of whether I knew I would die tomorrow. I have always felt that sleep is a waste of time though, so the imminence of death might trigger the compulsion to stay awake and be productive. Productive doing what, I wonder. Have I any ongoing and important enough projects in life that need attention before the moments when I cease to exist? I feel that I may in fact blink away most days without giving significant life projects a second thought. How about that – my life as a vegetable.
This is not true. It cannot be true. I do have ambitions and lots of it. They just have not been solidified yet. They are in their blueprint stage, and with some architectural insight will soon become monuments in my grand scheme of a fairytale. Yes, someday my prince will come and yes, I will have waited long enough for his arrival to have figured out my own person. I just realised that I haven’t been crossing off the dates on my calendar all summer. The calendar is hanging on the wall, stuck in July. The dates flew by as I lived out days like clockwork; weekdays were spent in the office and weekends were spent engaging in fervent hedonism. Life is short after all. So instead of reading a good book as my mother would have suggested, I hung out with friends and engaged in long conversations with them, ate good food with them, laughed with them, drank with them, walked with them. Now I don’t see anything wrong with the way I spent my summer nights; there isn’t a single thing I would have changed, not in the least bit.
Apparently loneliness is good fuel for productivity. Perhaps it is true that being immersed in a romantic affair would have one lying in bed all day and consequentially neglecting life’s responsibilities of hard work and rational thinking. How long can a person be lonely before the seams of his soul begin to crack and the holes leak the essence of his happiness down the sidewalk of devastation? I always have believed that true artists need to suffer in order to produce a masterpiece. We naturally reflect upon our lives more when in the depths of sorrow, anguish, disappointment, guilt. Happiness on the other hand does not find one brooding in the same manner. When you are utterly happy, smiling for no apparent reason, chances are you are not questioning it or yourself about those feelings of contentment. Lovers are foolish because their minds are intoxicated with endorphins. Oblivion is bliss I guess. So it appears everyone seeks bliss as everyone wants to fall in love or be in love.
It is ironic that talk of death leads to talk of life, and life as a topic invites a discussion of love. But what do I really know about love or life or death? As much as I feel as though I am old, I must admit I am still quite young. I meet someone every day who has more knowledge than I do about things that I feel passionate about. I get up every morning, take a shower and get dressed even though all my life I have felt that life is in many ways a pointless venture. Was I born a nihilist? This is why I have tried hard all summer to enjoy living without attaching to it the notion that nothing matters in the end. I need to work on being grateful for each morning that I wake up to find I have been given a whole new day to explore myself and others. Sleep is indeed a waste of time if overdone, but it is also a refuge from reality and for that I am also grateful. And on that note, I believe it is time to go to bed. What better way to fall asleep than to the sound of rain splattering outside, in the city that never sleeps.
