a little more

Warning! The following post is of an unusually maudlin & navel-gazing sort, rather outside my normal MO. I'm not apologizing for it, I'm just giving fair warning. My life has taken some twists and turns lately that have left me speculating on the human condition, the vagaries of fate, and other such nebulous topics.

"So may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not, but still could be." - Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., from P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, by Studs Terkel

I fall into the trap, sometimes, of thinking the question of the human condition is the province of writers, musicians, artists alone. Leave it to Studs to awaken me to the infinite possibility of the question, and its relevance to every human in humanity's history. What is it in us that makes us yearn for beauty, for justice, for immortal truth? And do we really care as much about immortal truth as we do about its immediate experience in our lives, right now?

I have to wonder at the struggles we go through every day. We deplore injustice, we sorrow at ugliness, we outrage over a lie. But as long as they stay out of our immediate lives, we don't often do much about them. Maybe we find ourselves ignoring them so often because they're just too big to cope with while driving on the morning commute or lunching on a PB&J; maybe we ignore them because they'd keep us up at night. And yet when they touch our lives, when someone is unjust or ugly to us, how massive the question then, how we lose our appetite, how restless we lie in our beds.

But surely it's not only writers - or artists of any type - who hear this question whispered day in & day out by our stirring souls. My life has taken place entirely in the nuclear age; there's always been an underlying sense that the world's going to end somehow, someday, maybe in ten years, maybe in a thousand or ten thousand years. It's either going to end entirely, or humans will, and all our art, all our beauty and truth and justice will be - not meaningless, because they have intrinsic meaning - but without an audience.

And really, what use are truth and justice and beauty without someone to appreciate them? Is it enough for them to exist for their own sake? I'm not sure it is. And I confuse myself, honestly, somewhere between the intrinsic meaning of these crucial elements of life, and the fullness of existence that an audience gives them.

For example: let's say there's a ridiculously scrumptious organic strawberry dipped in dark chocolate. (Just for example. Not that I could totally scarf about a dozen of those right now.) This is going to have an inherent element of deliciousness to it (just pretend no one's allergic to strawberries, for the sake of argument). But if nobody eats it, does it matter? What value would it have? The truth and beauty of its deliciousness is wasted, unappreciable, without consumption.

But I don't think this is what Studs and Rev. Coffin, Jr were discussing on this occasion. (I get sidetracked easily by chocolate-covered strawberries.) I think their point bears more on the perhaps ultimately futile and yet necessary struggle to heighten the human condition, despite the fact that the world will end someday.

The question is not so much about art but about justice. Whether the world will end one day or not is almost irrelevant to the human condition (almost, but not quite). What matters is here and now, how we treat each other this moment, how we treat the world today, how much beauty we see, how much truth we speak, how just we are to one another. The fate of the future matters, but we're living right now, and all we can do is make now worth living.