https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/well/live/immortality-at-midnight.html
Some excerpts:
There I am, then, my body seeded with cancer that has recurred and may return, whereas now the air is sweet and quiet, with only me conscious, and I can inch forward into futures I weave for the ones I must leave behind. May they prosper and thrive through a series of tomorrows I will not experience but cherish envisioning. For they need to find—oh, please let them find!—love elsewhere and abundantly.
Alone but not lonely, I creep down the dim hall to study photos on a shelf: friends, children, cousins, grandchildren. All of them at various stages of evolution with their unique expressions of expectation or anxiety, curiosity or self-consciousness—standing still for the intrusive camera. Each requires a long stare. Where are they going? Will they be happy? Each elicits a smile; tears flow, but tears of joy.
What is this inebriated euphoria? Immortality at midnight! An intuition of the rightness and beauty and uniqueness of those I know and those I do not know but reverence from afar in my singular ecstasy of simply feeling fine, feeling good staying in what sense that here is the genius of truth and the truth of genius because pleasure and exultation pulse now in this contingent place, inside just this illumined moment of being.
A comment:
Our consciousness of anything points two ways: one toward the things of this world and one toward Being itself. We usually neglect the latter for the former, but in such extremity as Susan experiences or in moments of poetic reverie Being makes itself known and when that happens, all that we are consciousness of, every little bit of all that, is endowed with beauty and meaning and love and truth. It is a kind of existential proof that there is a reality that is more than what we think of as this world. It would be easy to extend this idea to that of God but that would be a falsification of what I am speaking of. It would make of Being one thing among others. If the experience of Being is anything more than an illusion, it is that we are one with a reality that will never die.
Comments