Saturday 20 January 2001

Pic of the day: If the sun sets and there is no one to see it, is it still beautiful? Or are we somehow ... needed?

Vanity of vanities

An online friend took the time to e-mail me yesterday, and I appreciate that. He gave me various advice, after reading my journal. I appreciate that too. Still, we are not all made in the same mold; one man's paradise is another's purgatory. I particularly was hit by his concluding statement, which I shall try to translate into English: "Neither you nor others gain anything from you pondering the future of humanity." This, I only agree with in part. Ironically, I can only agree with it by pondering the future of humanity. And so I will do. :)

***

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
Ecclesiastes 1, the Bible, New International Version.

This statement was made more famous by the older translation, where it reads "Vanity of vanities!" Perhaps a more literal translation, but in modern English vanity means being superficial, conceited, obsessed by fashion. Of course, the language drift is not random. There is a connection. But more about that shortly.

Science is not exactly improving the picture, compared to that old-time religion. According to current cosmology, the Earth will not remain quite forever: After about 5 000 000 000 years, it is going to burn in the corona of the expanding sun, and fall into that mother star like a dust mote in the fire and be gone. But long before that, the conditions for life will no longer be here. The oceans will have boiled away, and then eventually the atmosphere itself escapes to space as the place heats up. That's still a few billion years into the future, though.

Even if we don't think that far, it is a safe bet that a billion years from now there will be no humanoid life on Earth. Or any life vaguely similar to anything we see today. Looking a billion year into the past, we see nothing but simple single-celled bacteria and such things. A random visitor then would have no chance to guess that we should be here now. No more hope is there for us to know what our planet will be like, a thousand million years from now.

As a matter of fact, it is not likely that there will be human life even one million years from now. True, there were plenty of humanoids here a million years ago, but none of them had more than the most rudimentary culture, similar to what we see in chimps today. Since then, change has accelerated. And it still does. When the Jewish wise man penned his observations as quoted above, life was basically the same from one generation to the next. In fact, the man goes on and on about just that. Today, fundamental traits of our society change within one generation. Technology, standards of living, even morality ... they transform before our eyes, a dizzying dance of ever increasing change.

A thousand years from now, will anything of what we do now be remembered? A hundred years from now, will it even make sense?

***

And yet, the enormous gaping emptyness in front of us does not really register. While some of us can see it with our mind, few can truly feel it; and fewer yet survive it, with their sanity intact. This may be just as well. We have to interact with the world that is today, not the world that will be millions of years in the future.

And in the world that is today, there is meaning. Everything may be meaningless in a longer perspective, but we don't really know that. The things that exist today, do so because of what happened in the past. It may be a small detail, which no one thought twice about, that changed the world beyond recognition. A careless word, a smile or a scowl, moving onward, changing a life, changing fate. We don't know what will become of our works. A straw may break the camel's back, a raindrop may break the dam; but we don't know which straw, which raindrop.

My journal may not be remembered in this world anymore than I do, but it is my way of reaching out, of hoping that perhaps there will be a few rings in the water when I have passed through the surface and am gone. This may be my vanity, as riches or beauty is for others.

All we can do is live now, and mean something to someone. Someone needs your kisses, and someone needs my philosophy. There may be dramatically fewer people who needs, or even wants, these strange and abstract thoughts. But that's OK, because the world isn't exactly drowning in the stuff either. Even I spend much of my time doing fluffy, temporary stuff. Making food, playing games, bantering with online friends. I try to keep a perspective, but I also try to keep my sanity. It comes in handy many a time.

So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 8, ibid.