"Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate." --- Arthur Koestler, 1953

THE TOREADOR "WEAKNESS"

Why?

To understand why, you must know the dread of eternity and the horror of the infinite. You must look it in the face. If you still believe there are "things beyond the void", you are still using a crutch to evade the ghastly meaning of the void itself. If you still believe in Gehenna, you are still forlornly clinging to the idle hope that someday there must be an end to this existence. If you think it's going to be great to live forever, then you cannot possibly understand why we do not scoff at, but rather, admire, the Toreador who die entranced by a sunrise. (Someday, though, you will.) This is also why we engage in art - because we want to feel something so beautiful that its shining brightness blots out the endless monotony, the unbounded banality of "living forever"- something so wonderful that we would die for it. Not kill for it. Kindred will kill for more or less anything you want them to kill for, given enough time and enough humiliation. But they won't die for just anything. That's why we stare at beauty, or enter hypnotic trances at the speaking of certain turns of phrase, or enter blissful unawareness when perfect music plays. Usually, from the moment we claw our way into dreary consciousness every evening to the time we bury ourselves in oblivion every morning, death is a bitter, useless, infantile, sick joke, good only to receive a hateful sneer. But in the times when we are lost in beauty, we taste death and find that it is everything that we have been promised it would be, that such excellence makes the investment of a horrific eternity of unchangeable tedium worthwhile - it makes the dread lift momentarily and the clouds part, and we again feel the sun and, with it, the heat of the flames fueled by our own unholy bodies, every part of our being touched by the longing for perfection and the satisfaction of that desire, all at once. When it is over, we are greater for it. If we miss an opportunity to lose ourselves, then we are less for it. I will close with a poem by Don Marquis, entitled "the lesson of the moth", a much-simplified version of what I have just said:

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows

pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll

that is what life is for
it is better fo be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude towards life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

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