ILLEGITIMUS
NON EST
CARBORUNDUM
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Try Until You Die
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Hope can break your heart. Everything begins with a dream, but most dreams
don't come true. The ad for Lotto says "You can't win if you don't play",
which is true enough. Playing, though, does not guarantee winning. Odds are
incredibly long, and there's the rub. How long should one struggle against
incredibly long odds or is it a fool's errand in the first place? Is there
a road to utopia? Hope for humanity? Or we ask
why bother? Life's a bitch and then you die, so the song says,
and there's something to be said for that. What if you try, work
hard, and don't succeed, like an obese person who loses weight and
doesn't get prince or princess charming anyhow? Perhaps the thing to do
is take a break. Stop struggling. Accept reality.
If at first you don't succeed should you try again?
What if you've tried ten times is the eleventh try perserverance or stupidity?
I finished my book fifteen years ago and promote it to deaf ears.
I hoped it would be a best seller, still do, but success in that sense
was never my goal. I wanted to write it. Not sure why. Haven't sold many copies, and
after all the years still try. Don't know if that
makes me persistent or stupid, but it's my life. That's the
only attitude, I believe, for any life. There are realities. If you want
to play shortstop for the Yankees and haven't made it by twenty-five,
it's time to move to a different fantasy. That's the nice thing about
selling books. Hope has no limits.
Some years ago a doctor predicted my sister-in-law's mother had six months to live.
She was a better than average artist, and I liked her, so I asked her to paint me
a picture. I wanted something to remember her by, and
sensitive person that I am, wanted to engage her in her remaining time.
She refused. Maybe the illness made her tired or maybe, seeing the
handwriting on the wall, she decided it didn't matter. She told me I'd have to remember
her on my own. As it happened,
the doctor was right. She died within six months. She was also right because
I remember her without the painting, but why not paint me a picture?
What else did she have to do? Although facing the end and feeling bad,
she was entitled to relax. It was her life and her call.
A quadraplegic named Callahan clenches a pen in his teeth and draws cartoons filled
with black humor, often about disabled people. He could be excused if he stayed
in bed cursing the fates that put
him there. Instead he creates and displays the human spirit at its best.
Death awaits, and we ask does anything matter? If the grave is the end, why struggle
against impossible odds? Why fret about society? Why attempt to change our behavior,
lose weight, or shed fears? Why not accept the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune?
Can we solve human problems? Who knows? Have we polluted too much? Sure, but have
we crossed a point of no return? Are we dead and too dumb to lie down? Again, who knows?
We know two things for sure. We die eventually, but we're not dead yet.
Why not, current events notwithstanding, believe in humanity? If you
cannot hope, you can be curious enough to wonder what comes next. See
humanity as this experiment that should never stop trying to get its
act together. The alternative is doing nothing, in which case nothing gets done.
Another dream of failure comes true.
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| IS FREEDOM
ANYTHING ELSE
THAN A RIGHT TO LIVE AS WE WISH? Epictetus |
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THE VICTOR BELONGS TO
THE SPOILS F. Scott Fitzgerald
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