i’d like to commit to doing something like this more regularly, but here’s a new genre of post where i’ll talk about some book i’ve read recently. don’t expect a traditional review, more a cloud of associations disentangling my overall interaction with the text.
also, forgive me for not utilizing page numbers in my citations, as i borrowed this as an ebook from the library and no longer have access to the full text. quotations from the book are placed by a book-progress percentage. shameful, i know.
SPOILERS abound…
it lasts forever and then it’s over.
right away, the title of Anne de Marcken’s novella pulls you in with its conflicting temporalities, an inherent conflict embedded in its vocabulary. though “forever,” especially in this phrasing, typically stands to suggest a notion of boundedness by human imagination. for nothing is truly forever, we know now that even stars expire away, matter decays, and entropy is the dominant force of the cosmos.
what is the true meaning of forever?
to me, it is an aspirational term. contained within forever is an immutable dream, an ideal immortalized by the reverence that the subjective mind assigns to it. forever is a force sustained by the imagination of the mind that conceives of it. it’s nearly a fantasy— completely untenable—it is a concept that is entirely framed by our bounded subjectivity, as it can only exist so long as we sustain an imagination of its infinitude.
and then it’s over.
with how the world appears to deteriorate across scores of existential crises before our own eyes, the idea of ruin is one deeply embedded within our collective imagination. but, like the idea of forever, ruin is an idea that is deeply anthropomorphized, infused with melodrama, and misconstrued as a tenet of existence.
industrial society raises us on a linear timeline, espousing a defiance of natural boundaries and striving ever-upwards towards an enhanced objective reign over the world. it is from here that the idea of ruin emerges as a natural opposition to the endless push of modernity. ruin becomes something that we carry within us, an infusion of our mortality onto an imagined canvas of infinitude that informs our view of life.
That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive. (8%)
our ontology can only expand to fill the boundaries of our imagination, but no further. thus, we imagine ruin as a facet of the ultimate conflict of the universe, the epic clash between life and death, the fate of our existence held in the balance. a grand ending, the antithesis to infinite growth.
and if we saw the world more like nature? by all accounts, time passes cyclically in nature; seasons depart and return at regular intervals, organic matter decomposes and sustains the next generations of life. even in the quintessential scene of environmental ruin, a volcanic eruption, the process yields rich soils from which new life invariably emerges, foundations to a new ecosystem arising from literal ashes.
When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. (96%)
we are so firmly rooted in our linearity, in that perennial hero’s journey where we believe ourselves constantly pitted against some existential threat, that we must prolong our value of exploitation indefinitely and ever-outwards into the universe. we are misled by this dream of “forever,” for it is all we can imagine when we reach out into the vast possibility of existence. but it is illusory, because no single state, process, or thing is truly infinite.
The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect… They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them. (96%)
we begin to internalize ruin, we grieve the violation of this perfect dream of “forever.” we constantly broach limitations as our existence grows to be defined by aging, loss, and ultimately, our looming, inevitable death. paradoxically, our imagination exceeds the limits of our biological lives while our biological lives exceed the limits of our imagination.
this need not necessarily be a source for existential malaise. though we are conditioned to search for objectivities within every wrinkle of the universe, there will never be a “theory of everything” that can encompass the entirety of our conscious and unconscious interaction with the physical universe. it’s not something that we will ever grasp in the palm of our hands. we simply have to navigate these unknowable spaces with the support of other equally mystified souls, for to know one another is the most profound action towards making sense of anything at all.
The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery. (100%)
The Ant and The Paperclip 