Letter to Cormac McCarthy

Yo Cormac-

One of the interesting things about the past decade is the rise of apocalyptic fiction. The culture of my classmates often displays undercurrents of a persistent belief in some kind of end. Zombie apocalypses are everywhere from the massive popularity of the Left for Dead video games to the new AMC show The Walking Dead, based on a popular graphic novel. And that's the mainstream culture; the underground has become the dark and nihilistic internet sites like 4chan.org who laugh at horrifying images of people with their legs cut off or the disembodied heads of soldiers with their own penises shoved in their mouths.

The Road is a very modern book. It captures much of the sickness of the modern world by displaying what we will do after we destroy ourselves. I'm pretty certian that the apocalypse you describe is a nuclear winter, although it's definitely meant to simply be a deflating of everything that was holding life up, a dissolution of what holds the world together, not necessarily needing context. But no matter what the cause, cannibal rapists are not far fetched.

It feels good, in a way, to think of people raping and slaughtering other humans for food and broiling their own babies alive. It's a rebellion against every ounce of censorship and protection, against our culture. Once you've read the road you feel like you can say anything. That no horror is unspeakable. And that's a strangely good feeling.

How Do I Know What I Know?

I'm not sure where knowledge goes or anything. I guess it's basically memory, but a little different, like i know how to type but I don't "remember" it. But I guess I can treat it as the same thing.

Nobody knows exactly where memory is stored in the brain. The brain doesn't have a "hard drive." In fact it seems that memory is stored all over the organ; perhaps memory is stored in the part of the brain that percieved it. A computer's memory is finite and knowable. Even on a huge hard drive you can quite easily count the ammount of data it contains to infinite accuracy. The brain is the opposite. We can't define a specific or discreet boundary for our memory, so in some ways it's boundless and infinite. We find there are many layers of our knowledge and thought. Some of our knowlege we are consciously aware of, but most of it is deep in our subconscious. An experience can bring out knowledge we didn't know we had, drudging it up from the bottom of the cool swamp of our subconscious.

Our knowledge  comes in to our brain through our senses, primarily. Reading, hearing people talk, watching things, or percieving things originally for ourselves. But, perhaps, there is an undercurrent between the cool pools of our subconsciouses, an underground resivour we can all connect to. There is some human knowledge that we all seem to be born with. Some kind of memory passed down from our ancestors, from the monkeys in the trees, from the first muddy fish that sloshed on to dry land. The boy in the road knows that stealing is wrong and he knows what other humans are and he knows that if he prays they will hear him. His father told him that but it seems like there's something in his head that was there when he was born, that's part of the swirling and vast consciousness he, like all of us, came out of.

Or not. Maybe we're all just seperate with none of this spiritual crap.

10/15 Our Meaning

This question is kind of ridiculously vague. So what is the question even? It's just two words. actually it's not a question. What I'm going to take it to mean is what is the meaning of us, our species, humans.

That question implies that there is a meaning, which is itself questionable. It's like this: When you're making a computer program, before you do anything, you have to tell it to "include" a bunch of other code and programs for what you're saying to make sense (true story; im in computer science ONE!). So this question only makes sense in the context of the general human assumptions that:

1. Meaning exists.
2. We have meaning.
3. We can know our meaning.

So first off, what even IS meaning and how do we know it exists? I'm not going to go to the dictionary for this. Actually I will....

"the end, purpose, or significance of something"


Actually that doesn't really help. "End", "purpose," and "significance" are all equally human and equally questionable synonyms for the original word. When you can't really define something it's best to look at what it does, and what the actual function of the concept is. So what does "meaning" do for us? Well, when something is meaning-LESS, we feel like we shouldn't bother doing it. Something without meaning shouldn't bother to exist. As in, there has to be a reason for something to exist for it to..... bother existing. Ok wait.

Cause and effect, which makes a lot of sense, says that EVERYTHING that happens has a CAUSE.

I just said that we don't do things that are meaningless. Meaningless things shouldn't bother existing.

If everything that exists has a cause, why would it not also have a meaning? How could you possibly distinguish between meaning and cause?

Well meaning means that something has a goal at some time in the FUTURE. That it's going to do something. That there's a plan to its action. But ultimately, in the universe, I don't think we can distinguish between an event's cause and its implications and effects. Although cause and effect flow forward through time, I don't think it's really two distinct concepts; it's all part of the same event. So the meaning of anything, then, is the same as the cause, and the same as the effect; it's all implied and tangled up in the same event which we can only faintly distinguish from all the other events ever. So an event's meaning is implicit in its very existence.

I got confused, so I'm basically saying that everything has meaning. Or that nothing does. I don't know.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW??

There are a lot of things that make us human. We build buildings and wear clothes and communicate meaningfully and come together to form things greater than ourselves. But one thing that's really intrinsic to being human is that we all, in some way, somehow, believe in God. I'm not talking about having a religion or anything like that at all. I  don't even mean that we all believe in a soul or a supreme being or anything. There are atheists out there, and there are people whose religions are so twisted that they aren't really religions at all. But everyone believes in something at some time in their life. There's something subtle but important and indescribable that we all believe in simply by existing. It's the belief that there is something beyond absolute nihilism and meaninglessness, in a way similar to "I think therefore I am." And no matter how much this innocent belief in meaning is bastardized and stomped on and used to control people down to their very souls, it will always remain. Today God is everywhere and nowhere. In a way we've lost God, but when you think about it that's not so bad. Religion has been a vehicle for control since its inception. People want to find answers and those people who provide them answers are the ones they will trust and who will easily and viscously manipulate them, into anything from slaughtering other humans to building giant stone triangles. So the downfall of "God" as an institution is not so bad. Of all the things I think have gotten worse with modernization, God has gotten better. A lot more people feel the freedom to find their own meaning and spirituality. And although a lot of teenagers today are waking up and realizing that what they've been worshiping all their lives might be a lie, that's just how it is. It's the truth and more people are starting to realize it. Today we're finally starting to make the distinction between the God you find for yourself and the God other people force in to your head. And that's something we hadn't been able to talk about for the first ten or fifteen thousand years we existed.

Was Candide's punishment deserved? (according to annie this is the question this week)

I'm not really sure how to judge this. Candide was written in 1759 (I totally knew that and didn't look it up on wikipedia just now.) So not only was that an entirely different time, but the book really takes place in a fantasy land. It might have been normal for this kind of punishment to occur in 1759, but I think this is an exaggeration of even the harshest punishments. It's also an obvious plot device used to set in motion the entire rest of the book. So was it deserved? Absolutely not. Not only is it ridiculously harsh, it's stupid to even punish him for such a normal and healthy act. There's not even any real justification offered. It's assumed that it's because Cunegonde is so high status she's expected to not do anything, ever, with any man until she's married. But then why isn't she punished at all? This is a really weird question when I think about it and if Annie's wrong about what the question was this week then I'm going to feel dumb.

Modern Day Socrates

I really don't think there is a modern day Socrates. He wasn't just a unique man but he was living in a unique situation, a world very different from our own. In the day of Socrates you could be noticed by walking down the street. People knew eachother. Not by an image on a screen, but either by their voice and face or in some cases by a book or letter. There weren't any celebrities like we know today. The streets of Rome were full of both ordinary people and political figures, intermingling in the same space, and Socrates could walk outside his door and find both his audience and his subject of ridicule on the same street. It was a time when someone walking around outside and asking thought provoking but entertaining questions could not only be noticed, but could make his way to the forefront of the consciousness of his nation and be remembered vividly for thousands of years.

Today the busy streets of Rome seem desolate and empty. The people walked about and saw maybe a hundred people around them, but these were the only people they saw. There were no television screens in their pockets. No newspapers. No instant communication with people perhaps thousands of miles away. No ads on the subway and no voices on the radio. All that they experienced were the people who were truly corporeal and visible in front of them. And if you're looking at a hundred boring people then it's easy to spot one interesting one. Today, however, we are looking at thousands of people constantly vying for our attention. I really can't stress enough just how many ideas are constantly pouring in to our heads as we walk outside. There's no escaping it. Our nation, and really every part of the world with electricity, has become a sea of human faces and words and ideas and letters flying across the air and landing on our walls and in our ears and eyes in the hope that perhaps one shred of it all will register in some part of our brain and we might remember it. And the motivation for nearly all of this is money. That's not an oversimplification or an overstatement. Advertising, radio shows, newspapers, all of it is ultimately based on the concept of capitalism.

But a modern day Socrates would not be a capitalist. He, or (of course) she, would be honestly interested in people listening to her questions and thoughts and would really just like to be heard. She wouldn't want to make money off of her opinions or her face, her identity, her name or her brand. She'd just want people, like those bemused romans, to perk up their ears at her voice and tone and words and to listen and maybe consider one or two of the things she said. Today, this sort of person will not be heard.

Nonetheless, authors of books are still heard. And I can't say there is no honesty or decency left in the world. But it's just not the same and isn't quite a worthy comparison. Today Socrates is just a name in a sea of names. A drop of water in an ocean, almost literally. But at the time, Socrates was the man. He was genuinely saying something that nobody else was saying and that nobody else had ever said. His ideas were truly, literally, inescapably new and compelling. I think that for some people he was the only voice in their world that  developed what they thought and made them say "Yes! I've always felt that and never known how to say it. Tell me more!" But today, everything ever you could possibly think is being said quite publicly by somebody somewhere. You won't just find what you want or need to hear by seeking it out; you've probably already heard it and just ignored it because of the constant drone of other thoughts barraging your head!

Socrates was not just an interesting and unique man but was also a product of his environment. Our environment is just so inescapably and irreversibly changed that there is no modern day Socrates, that there can't be, and that there may never be one again.

The Unexamined Life

The question of how true this statement is is a question that haunts all men and women who think and question. We all like to think that those who don't question their existence and live whatever life is projected upon them lead an unfulfilling and pointless life. But there will always be that nagging thought that, if I had never watched the news, never been aware of the world and questioned the rights of those in power, never bothered to think there was more beyond my tiny world, would I really be worse off? Is it possible that to live in complete ignorance truly is bliss? Many people who question only find themselves in an ever-increasing existential dilemma to the point that they conclude that life is meaningless anyway. They unravel everything they thought was true and realize that nothing matters because there is no one to say what matters. It's easy to say that to take questioning to this extreme is unnecessary, but is it possible that if you keep questioning, this is the only real answer? That there is no answer to the ultimate question?

What I like to think, and I guess ultimately do believe, is that it is not unhappiness but stagnancy that is the enemy. Pain, even the most torturous spiritual pain, is a part of life and of development. It's a necessary part of growth. So perhaps the scale we ought to measure our actions on is not unhappiness vs happiness but stagnancy vs growth. A society without questioners would sit in the stone age, like animals, farming and hunting for sustenance, having sex, giving birth, never looking to the stars or imagining gods. We have progressed because we choose to question, not only because we can.

We are the tool the universe uses to examine itself. But would it really be worse if the universe had never examined itself at all?

Eulogy

 Colin's death could not have come at a more unfortunate time. He went through much of the anguish of his life without ever experiencing the happiness he wanted. He contributed very little of what he had to offer to the world. He had big ideas and dreams that for various reasons he never really fulfilled.

He really won't be remembered by the world. Surrounded by people who worked hard to impress the world and compete even in high school, Colin struggled to survive. Although he learned quickly, was knowledgeable, and was extremely intelligent, Colin had problems with doing his school work. He never joined any clubs at Whitney Young and never felt connected there. The intense and perhaps elitist environment of the school made him feel alienated. He was not popular, had a low GPA, and never did anything noteworthy academically. His name was never read over the intercom.

Those who will probably remember him are his friends. He was known for a cynical but honest sense of humor. Although he was often abrasive, he was never mean. He truly tried to put out a positive aura and energy. Whenever he and someone else started to hate eachother, he had a hard time holding up his end of the bargain. Although he saw the bad in people, he saw the good as well. He always had something funny or witty or stupid to say.

Although the pendulum of his life had only started swinging, he did reach some kind of resolution by the start of senior year, compared to how he was as a freshman. His life went to hell that year, as he began to truly suffer from depression. At that time he wanted to become “cool” by high school standards and desperately wanted to fit in. He passed off friendships with people he didn't think were cool enough in favor of getting in with whoever looked like they were popular. Over the years, however, this changed. He realized that the popular kids were really just boring. He found friends who, despite annoying him, really liked him for who he was and maybe even cared about him. He realized that the way society views a person is so skewed that it's not even worth thinking about. And his depression only made his perceptions more extreme. By late Junior year he finally realized that the thoughts of others had none of the merit or weight he attributed to them, and that he was really free to talk to or be with whoever he wanted. He realized he was free to be who he wanted to be.

So even though he didn't fulfill much of his potential, and even though his life was troubled, perhaps it was not wasted. He did find some peace and happiness within himself, and was becoming more and more comfortable with what he believed and with who he was. Sucks that he's dead though.

My philosophy

For my whole life I've thought deeply about philosophy. I have experienced a great deal of mental and spiritual pain throughout my life mainly due to my severe clinical depression, problems with school, and social alienation. This pain has nearly driven me to suicide. In trying to find meaning I think about philosophy almost constantly; I could probably write a lot about this question but I never thought anyone would read it so I never did. An essential part of my philosophy:

A “person,” a “human,” or a “soul,” (whatever it is to be called) is composed of many different parts. These parts often fight with eachother. For example, a part of me is arrogant and believes that I know everything. Other parts of me are afraid of that arrogance, other parts are ashamed. As a consciousness this means that I am often unwilling to admit ignorance, incorrectness, or especially any immaturity. This part of me believes I am mature beyond my years so much as to outrank adults I know. The other parts of me are overpowering this part, but it is honestly painful for me to admit that this part of me exists. It is also painful to admit that this part of me is probably wrong.

These different parts come together to form the gestalt that is the human consciousness. My mother would say that this is a conflict between the ego and the oversoul, or Self. She believes in a combination of East-Asian and Jungian philosophy. I think that a person is composed of even more parts than that, that perhaps those are just categories of the various components of the soul. A wise soul seeks to align these parts and find balance between them.

I am relatively sure of this all because I truly feel it within my own mind.