The human heart beats 100,000 times a day, moving six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of vessels, twenty times the distance from one edge of America to the other, and for what?
Last Tuesday, while on a hike, a very close friend told me the world could end in the year 2012. According to him the Aztecs and Nostradamus made this prediction. This means we could be pressed for time, but I doubt it.
I have to say the last thing I worry about is the end of the world. I would much rather see a fantastic armageddon type performance than die a regular death. And that’s exactly what it would be too, an enormous drama, not a Shakespearian drama, but rather the High School Musical type. I mean. Wouldn’t it have to be?
And furthermore what about the collective experience of seeing everything we took so seriously disappear probably by some kind of nuclear disaster? Wouldn’t be fantastic to just run down every street screaming, “I told you so.”
Nietzsche said that even love is a selfish emotion in that we love so that we might be loved, but he died of syphilis, which he contracted in a brothel. The man accused of murdering god himself, influencing Hitler, and hinting at ideas that would later become the fad we know as existentialism, could not to literally save his sanity or life, be loved by a woman.
“If you love without being loved in return,” Said Marx, “then your love is impotent and a misfortune.”
Jesus said that a man could gain the world but lose his soul.
Is anything worth doing if you are not loved?
Today’s front page head line reads, “300 dead”. Beneath it there is a picture of a basketball player. It seems to bother no one. Stalin said that one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. I suppose we would have to agree.
Max Euwe described Bobby Fischer’s approach to chess as follows:
“Fischer thinks in systems, not moves. With him, it’s not good enough to say a player has made a good move. You must know the system he is playing and what fits into the system.” He may have been on to something.
The same might be said for life. In choosing a course of action, it’s not enough to be familiar with the immediate consequences.
