A thought that never occurs to (almost) anyone.
People don't usually wonder about their death. They rarely give a thought to their old age, let alone the idea of not existing. But don't they, really?
More and more I see people ridden by anxiety, on edge, thinking about legacy (be it an online or a financial one) from the moment they wake to when they finally put down their phones and go to (troubled) sleep. I'm not excluding myself from this, but rather attempting to see it from an outside perspective (being in psycoanalysis for over four years), how this behaviour of my generation can only be symptomatic of fear. And the most fundamental fear of all: ceasing to exist.
But amongst these hoards of fearful beings, some face rare experiences. People who, at a young age, have a brush up with death, or more than that, a real face to face with it, tend to relinquish some of the anxiety, the wrongful idea that we are in control of anything. Something that people approaching the inevitable end of life usually have figured out. And it is an illusion. Control. And it is smacked in the face of individuals who need to be hooked up to an IV for dear life.
"More and more I see people ridden by anxiety, on edge, thinking about legacy(...) how this behaviour of my generation can only be symptomatic of fear. And the most fundamental fear of all: ceasing to exist."
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot is a book about these ideas. You, as a reader, start the book thinking you have everything under control, after all, pretty early in the story you know people are going to die, but to continue on with the story, you must relinquish that control, so you can find out how they've lived. And how on earth have they managed to meaningfully do it from inside a hospital, where most of the story takes place.
The hospital in the story is not a cage. At least not one so tight as some of the ones we put ourselves in. I'll tell you what I mean.
We have just been through a pandemic. It is not over but it has subsided enough to look back and count our losses. And when I got this book, right in the middle of it, I can honestly say I didn't look at it twice. I had enough death around me in my day to day to invite it to my fiction world, even though I knew a book about a teenager dying of cancer in 2020 would not actually be about a teenager dying of cancer (thanks to Nicholas Sparks and how he juiced that fruit all to its dryness back in the early 2000's).
But funny enough, 2022 comes along and after moving away from my tiny apartment in a city I was beginning to resent, and as I looked around my new porch and my new view and the palace that I now had in my neighborhood (yes, you read it right, palace, as in castle, a block away from where I now live - talk about upgrade), my thoughts turned to this title resting on my bookshelf, and I was drawn to it.
While I read it in the gardens of said palace, in cafés I hadn't sat on for over two years, on my porch while basking in the view of trees ans pure nature I now have, I realised how much life are within those pages. Not idealistic life, meaningless and numb, but ordinary, wonderful in its commonness life, the type I searched for and was beginning to find, here. Where I chose to read it also played an enormous part in my adoration for this title. Outside. A place I thought I had grown afraid of the past two years for obvious reasons, but looking back, I was stifled by where I lived. A crowded and very dangerous place that had made me so afraid something would happen to me I had actually began to keep things from ever happening to me. I was living in a rut that would either kill me or drive me insane.
And isn't it what we do? Work our asses off so we are underpaid to buy things we only think we need and or to have shallow experiences in bars every Friday night during happy hour to stop from feeling like something is not right? Talk about a cage.
And I'm not here talking about work to survive. We do live in a capitalist society and one's got to eat. No. I'm talking about the dream of the corporate career, the money you think you need to buy that bottle of whatever at a party just to say you can. That cultureless trip you take to Miami of Vegas to numb yourself enough to forget you actually have no idea what you are doing with your life and to convince yourself that whatever it is your doing is worth it.
As I finished the pages I thought of how a fictional dying teenager and old lady filled with loss could have a more meaningful life than some of us. The one hundred paintings they produce, their memories, the significance they have, a clear image of how we live our lives outisde of the page, and the fact that they are so many, it can be crushing. Because if you had to start painting yours right now, how many meaningful ones could you actually make?
"The one hundred paintings they produce, their memories, the significance they have(...) it can be crushing. Because if you had to start painting yours right now, how many meaningful ones could you actually make?"
I start my posts in 2022 with this pearl of thought, an attempt (or maybe a hopeful musing, really), that I can live my life gathering things worth painting about, from experiences to the effort of persuing what I dream of, the real wantings I (thankfully) have managed to establish are truly with my heart and mind, and are not external, mere images of what others or our broken society wish to take from me. And on that note I invite you reader to do the same. Happy new literary year.
Comments