Sunday 28 May 2000

Pic of the day: "Kjeks, brus og rock'n'roll". (Sorry, this one is for the Norwegian / English bilingual, though I guess the native English speakers can guess it. Kjeks = cookies, brus = soda.)

Eternity revisited

I woke up from the familiar voice of one of my favorite Norwegian troubadours singing that he believed in a life before death, and who wants to live for all eternity anyway?

Me! Me! I confess that even my imagination does not grasp the concept of eternity. But I know that I would be happy to live for millions and millions of years. And by then I guess my earlier memories would be so hazy that it would seem a good idea to go back and see some of the same places and people again ... except of course they would have changed too, so things would be new even then.

When I was a boy, I found that I would not want to live forever, because it would be boring. But after I grew up, there have rarely been five minutes of boredom. (Well, work can be somewhat boring at times, but that's because I can't do what I want to. It is another kind of boredom, not real boredom but some kind of silent protest.)

I don't really get the "boring" argument. I mean, just because you ate a pizza in 1967, does that mean that you can't eat a pizza today without getting bored? Just because you talked to someone last year, you can't talk to them today without getting bored? (OK, there may exist some such people ...) To me, the sheer size of eternity means things could be spaced out so much that they would always be fresh and new. But even without that, there are things that I like to do again and again. There are people I like to meet again and again. There are places I like to go, music I return to ... repetition is not always a recipe for boredom.

***

Here's my theory on boredom: Boredom comes from confinement. If you're in a naked prison cell, boredom is a natural reaction. But with a whole wide world waiting for you with its arms wide open? I remember when we let out the cattle in the spring, after a harsh Norwegian winter they had to spend indoors. How even grown cows would sometime jump around like calves in reaction to the immense freedom and freshness of it all. Of course, they stopped doing that fairly quickly. But some people don't. :)

I guess there are other forms of confinement than those of a prison cell. As events in the family have shown, one cannot take for granted to keep all body parts for all of one's life. Suddenly there goes a leg, or part of the brain. I can see how, if I live and the body just decays and falls apart, I may eventually arrive at a confinement worse than any prison. It's not that kind of life I would like to live forever. And yet I guess there is something even worse for some unlucky few.

The worst confinement, I guess, must be confinement of the mind. To have one's thoughts and emotions so walled in, so threatened by inside forces, as to lose much of one's free will. I have felt some of it, in the grip of neurosis. Like chains around the chest, that will keep me from breathing freely. But then when the hidden message is found and the riddle is solved, the freedom is even more overwhelming. A rush of freedom coming from within.

To me, life seems like one of those really addictive games. You think "just a little more of this, just a little more of that" and suddenly it is bedtime and you never got to finish it. Can't I pleeeease stay up a bit longer? Really. There's a good chance that my last words in this life will be "Please, don't let me die!"

And I honestly can't see why it would be different a million or a billion years from now.