It’s a relief, really, being back at work. Another week off, and I might have been tempted to stop blogging altogether, and that would have been annoying. The thinking about it. Thinking in the wrong direction. Also: in another week, the forgetting-how-to-do-this, the slippage from memory of everyday, nuts-and-bolts routines, might have become really serious.

***

I worried that a meaty story would break while I was “on vacation” — actually, up to my proverbials in other jobs —  but that didn’t happen. Of all the things that I read during the three weeks away from the Daily Office templates, a passage from Sore Afraid made the deepest impression, but I knew that I could come back to it, as indeed I am. It appears in an entry datelined Christmas Eve.

The holiday season reminds me about the prevailing worldview of most of my counterparts in non-heterosexual New York, and maybe even for me: the purpose of life is to collect as many fun experiences as possible, before death.  I realize that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but, for most people I know, it’s more or less the case.  The person who dies having played with the most toys wins!  Of course, people with children have a different orientation: the purpose of life is to do everything possible to ensure a good life for the children.  People with children are generally willing to make great sacrifices for them, although I think that the kind of good life they are trying to ensure for their children is more-or-less the same thing: a collection of fun experiences.

I’ve had these thoughts myself, often, but never all at once, and never with Eric Patton’s concision. My entire worldly ambition has been to avoid living a life that could be described as “a collection of fun experiences.” But I have nothing particularly sharp to say about the alternatives. There’s the “meaningful life,” of course; but the meaningful life, by definition, requires a more or less clear sense of meaning, whether religious or secular. The older I get, the more wilful and imaginary such meanings come to seem.

Whether or not Eric intended it, I read into “a collection of fun experiences” the implication that the person accumulating the fun belongs to a community that validates it. Even if the community is vanishingly small. I know, for example, that Eric and I enjoy foreign languages, and that we find it “fun” (for want to an excuse to look for a better word) to spend hours with grammars and lexicons.( Or would if we had the hours to spare.) Most of my friends, certainly, do not share this interest, and I suspect that the same is true for Eric — but we can form a community of two, if need be; so that when Eric wishes me “Happy Birthday, Grandpa” in Nederlands, it’s definitely a fun experience for me. At the right time, such a gesture can altogether make my day. But just because it’s less expensive and more educational than a week on the Riviera doesn’t make it more important or even, necessarily, more personal.

In other words, I try not to kid myself about the quality of my entertainments. I do flatter myself that they are more entertaining to me, though. I have given pleasure a great deal of close attention — it’s in my nature to bestow close attention on anything that I don’t simply ignore — and I have never had much of a problem resisting the pleasures of others. The Internet, moreover, has made it possible to expect to find other people whose ideas about pleasure have roughly the same contours as mine. As a result of all this, I don’t wonder if I’m missing out on something, and I’m not beset by the nagging fear that “this is all that there is.” Although I get tired quite easily, the world itself grows more inexhaustible every day.

I’m almost certain — I haven’t been thinking about it for very long — that the part ef each of that dies and deconposes and quits the earth (whether for another destination or not) is the least important part of us. To the extent that we’re remembered with a smile, our collections of fun experiences don’t dwindle to ash, whatever they may have been. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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