Stone Life

“History is that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time. But also it is the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us; and the deeper the roots of our being go down into the layers that lie below and beyond the fleshly confines of our ego, yet at the same time feed and condition it – so that in our moments of less precision we may speak of them in the first person and as though they were part of our flesh-and-blood experience – the heavier is our life with thought, the weightier is the soul of our flesh.” – Thomas Mann – Joseph und seine Brüder

My concerns, though shallow as the puddles  splashing beneath my feet as I walk down the street, evaporated by the time I return, a mere shadow existence remembrered only as minor nuisance and momentary disruption of my gait, nontheless resound with the intensity of thunderclouds or demons in the immediacy of the moments I can no more escape than ignore.  The banalities of everydayness, trifles and insignificances by any interpretation, weigh heavier than the proverbial millstone dragging one, me, further into the abyss.  Mightn’t we, mustn’t we, rather, stand before the colossus of History and marvel, not merely at the collected mount of achievement, loss, failure, love, hope, and fear that opens before us like a doorway which both cannot be breached from behind yet will inevitably be again reopened before us without our full knowing; must we not also marvel no less at our own insignificance?  Or mightn’t we instead tremble before the great paradox: History as the product of the collective insignificances of the everyday, interrupted only sporadically by fleeting moments of greatness that become so only in the mirror of the historical.  This poor visage that dwells upon creation for less than the span of a century stands testament to a living, breathing, rolling cycle upon which one is ground and grounded.  I might live and die in the span of three decades, a mere sneeze in the annals of recorded history, but the ‘soul of my flesh’ carries with it the added weight of Being that transcends such a span.

What of this first-person accounting?  Do I share equally in the pains of generations previous on account of my pains, small though they might appear in comparison?  Do the grieving mother and I contain within us the same germ of loss, our strengths and weaknesses no less divided than the individual grains that make up the coastline?  Is the strength of writing these words any more or less heroic than the spirit of Achilles that pushes warriors into the brink of destruction just because the outward manifestation takes on a different form?  We desire individuality, the seperateness of our triumphs and disappointments, because the unbearable lightness of undifferentiated being crushes us beneath its gentleness, but our strength resides in this inescapable connectedness in and out of past and future, neither with precedence over the other.  Our fears, therefore, should not be aimed at the loss of self, ego’s great fall into the well of community; rather, our fear should be squandering a lifetime in missing the warmth of knowing oneself as oneself, in disentangling oneself from the mythic fog of the I and taking refuge one’s place in and out of the great tapestry of History – merely a thread, yet as vital to completing the whole as any other.