I never really understood how tragic (wo)man’s existence is until I saw it up close. Humans are constantly at the mercy of all sorts of illnesses, accidents, and environmental catastrophes; from one minute to the next their situation can go from tolerable to utterly untenable. The only thing for certain is that they must die, usually in dreadful pain: not a very cheering certainty. In such conditions, it’s pointless for them to make plans for the future, but they keep on making them anyway, they never give up.
Once I considered them awful whiners, chronic depressives, inveterate grudge-holders. Now I think I understand them, somewhat. It can’t be pleasant to be hungry, terribly hungry, and then when you do find something to eat, you get a stomachache because you ate too much. To be cold, terribly cold, and dream of being in a warm place, then a split second later find you’re dying of the heat and longing for it to be cool. To desire a partner and suffer atrocious heartache because the other’s keeping you at arm’s length, then to realize that you’re bored to death with that person and tempted to commit murder. To observe the relentless furrowing of your own skin, the deterioration of your vital organs, and know that your brain, too, is beginning to fail.
Humans, incapable of being happy, spend their entire existence fantasizing they will be happy in the future. Five minutes later, half an hour later, that afternoon, next year, ten years hence, all the hitches and the problems will vanish, the desired state will materialize out of nothing and as if by magic everything will be easy, jolly. Unlike the other animals they are born premature, and no matter how hard they try they can never catch up; something about them always remains infantile, unfinished.* They try to make up for this by telling a million stories, twisting the facts, philosophizing, drowning in their own words. All vain efforts; unhappy they are, unhappy they remain.
* They even project this shortcoming of theirs on yours truly; it’s just impossible to have a mature relationship with them.
Maybe I should have inverted the life cycle, putting death at the beginning of their existence and birth at the end. It might be a relief to them to be done with the perishing—out with the tooth, out with the pain—and have the icing on the cake ahead of them: a peaceful, delightful childhood. Maybe that way their condition would seem more acceptable, and they’d be happier. The intolerable stages of maturity and senescence finished, they would slip into a pleasant unconsciousness, running around, playing and screaming like children. And then they’d re-enter their mothers’ wombs without suffering and without regret, the way you park a car in the garage at night, to enjoy life’s one period of genuine tranquility and fusion with the universe. Eight to nine months and they’d be back to the embryonic stage, then just a rowdy spermatozoon or an ovum, and then nothing.