So this is a conversation I had with someone the other night, thought it fit under my general heading…

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Hypatia: Have you ever just been curious about death?

Corey: That is something I can honestly say no to

Hypatia: Really? Huh.

Corey: If you spend your time welling on death then what exactly is the point of life? I want to live so that when I die, I can die a worn out, experienced, beat up and bloody man, but nevertheless a man without regrets, and contemplating that which is impossible to ever know is antithetical to that goal, especially if I’ll find out, in time.

Hypatia: Yeah well I guess I mostly agree, which is why I haven’t gone and killed myself yet. Can’t keep myself from thinking about it though. Isn’t that in Beyond Good and Evil? That we don’t control our thoughts, they control us?

Corey: Maybe. Dunno. Just because he had crazy hair, doesn’t mean he was always right.

Hypatia: Haha. It’s still interesting though and it makes me feel less guilty. Wait wait wait. Back up. I disagree with this: “contemplating that which is impossible to ever know is antithetical to that goal, especially if I’ll find out, in time.” I think if we genuinely understood the nature of death, it would make life mean so much more. Not that we ever can but I think what we chose to believe is important.

Corey: Ha!

Hypatia: What?

Corey: But isn’t it that longing for a belief that weighs you down? Is it important what you believe to be true or is it important what is actually true? Because in reality, we believe that our lives continue. That we live on. That our souls are immortal.

Hypatia: Do we though?

Corey: But what is actually true is that we cannot exist as we do now after death. It is impossible. We cannot exist in anything that is known to us, anything that is perceptible, even. Some things are meant to be left as a mystery. Not everything has to be cracked open like some little piece of rock, because not every geode contains crystal.

Hypatia: Well, by the very nature of the question, it must remain a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that thinking about it doesn’t somehow change us.

Corey: But why should it? Why should I change for something I don’t know about? Hypatia?

Hypatia: Yes?

Corey: If you lived in a dark room, all your life, and once lightning struck in the room, would you think the same of light as if a firefly had come through a window, or felt the afternoon sun on your skin?

Hypatia: No. But like it or not, your experience with light would change how you treated the outside world.

Corey: But you are locked in a dark room. You cant get out, Hypatia. There are rules. Once you leave the darkness, you cannot go back.—

Hypatia: Right, so if all you had was lightening—

Corey: The baby doesn’t jump back into the womb. The dead do not rise after centuries to come back to life, because they will it so.

Hypatia: Well you’d be more willing to leave. How you treat the light changes how you treat the darkness. You simply can’t avoid that. I mean if you could manage to stay completely isolated form light until you left the room, it would be a different story, but we’re all exposed to death at some point or another…

Corey: Exactly my point.

Hypatia: I don’t understand what you’re arguing then…

Corey: For some death is the lightening, fear is their thunder, following immediately. For others, death is the warm sunlight on your skin, enticing, a sweet release. For yet others, death is the firefly, you think of it, you try to catch it, understand it, but let it go, because nature cannot be contained or have rules set upon it. For yet others… for yet others, we blinked.

Hypatia: Okay. But regardless of what the light is to you, it’s worth it to think about it a little, or at least not a complete waste of time, because it changes how you experience darkness and makes the darkness more real. If you didn’t feel the way you felt about death, you wouldn’t have the attitude that you should die completely spent. You were right, light is all of those things: a bolt of lightening, a firefly, and sunshine. Light is complicated. Death is complicated.

Corey: Light maybe, but I do not know about death, still. Hypatia, I don’t know how I did it, but I blinked. And death seems so straightforward. You die when you are no longer present. Your body may die but as long as you are thought of, you don’t die. That is why we all strive to make a legacy, have children, live, love, why we bother to do anything at all, because death does not stand aside for any man, and, when he comes, and brings you into the light, you do not want to be left in the threshold of that room holding the doorframe with all your might, screaming and crying like the day you were born, for that second chance, because of those regrets, because, truly, the baby cannot return to the womb, and the dead do not rise.

Hypatia: Why does life have to be so significant? Just to be clear…

Corey: Because when you come down to it, it is the only thing that we have

Hypatia: But look, when we die, either there it will be the same, or close enough, or it will be more than we could ever have imagined or there will be nothing. Which ever way you want to go, it doesn’t seem all that relevant.

Corey: The idea of death is an impossibility in the mind of the living, just by virtue of the fact that you are alive, you cannot imagine it.

Hypatia: Yeah, not to get all clichéd, but it’s like explaining colors to a blind person.

Corey: Except that the blind person still has eyes. Or even, you could say, like explaining light to a person who has spent their life in a dark room.

Hypatia: Live people still have souls, if you believe that.

Corey: Dunno. All I know is that I can’t see death, or dead people. I blinked.