Forty-two!
The meaning of life?
by Scott McNutt
By the time you read this, our washing machine should have been repaired for the second time in two weeks, another funeral for another friend will have occurred, and I will have turned 42, a number fraught with significance. As any member of AGA (Adult Geeks Anonymous) could tell you, in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels, "42" is the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything.
The catch, natch, is that no one knows the actual question. But I'm skeptical that "42" -- or any explanation of life -- can provide a comprehensible link between the profane (!!@#$&*%!!! washing machine repair) and the profound (another friend gone).
That's just life, right?
Well, for some, life is a riddle, the answer to which is deceptively self-evident: "What's life?" we ask. To which god, or nature, or our own restless intellects reply, "Why, you are! You're alive! Go! Live! Eat, excrete, work, recreate, procreate, sleep, retire, expire!" If you've a religious turn, add "serve god" and "go to heaven/hell" to the equation. Riddle solved, game over.
Is it that simple?
After all, humankind has been pondering the nature of existence ever since some proto-human first smacked rocks together and wondered what she was looking at as she watched the sparks fly. As the old saw goes, humanity's first joke was purely existential. You haven't heard the purported first joke? It was a knock-knock joke, and it goes like this:
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
I don't know.
I don't know who?
I don't know. Punch lines haven't been invented yet.
Just as the aspiring stand-up caveman didn't know the stinger to his own gag, we can never really know the answer to the question of our own existence, because we are inside it, and it is inside us. Like mirrors, we can't reflect what’s within ourselves. Because of the inherent limitation posed by trying to understand existence while being intermingled with it, all reasoning must ultimately fall short of explaining life, the universe, and everything. Oh heck, that's too generous. Such philosophical acrobatics usually fall flat trying to solve why the chicken crossed the road.
Where were we? Hmm? Oh, yes. By the time you read this I will be 42, the washer might be repaired (again), another grave will have swallowed another friend, there are no explanations, and it’s always been this way. Come in a circle, haven't we?
Life's like that.
So the bleeding heart of the matter, the crux of this rubber biscuit that keeps bouncing back and confounding me, is that I have reached what might be considered a mature age, 42. Yet I've not acquired enlightenment. Illumination escapes me.
Despite my geekly inclination to hope that attaining 42 will provide true sapience, I despair of ever understanding life. Forty-two will become forty-three, as forty-one became forty-two, and each preceding year became the next in succession. In not so many years, the succession will stop, the chain will be broken, as it has been and will be shattered for everyone who's been and everyone who's to come. As the popular joke in plague-decimated Europe went:
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Mort.
Mort who?
Mortality.
I can't grasp the meaning of an existence from which all are cruelly snatched, and so many so capriciously. Blown to pieces by a bomb in Beirut; leveled by a heart attack while reclining on a couch; crumpled by a brain aneurysm leaving class; savagely beaten and pushed head first out of a speeding car; ravaged by a rare cancer that "young people don't get." That’s just life, right? Life cut short, maybe, but still, that’s life. So I happened to know them, so what?
So there are the loved ones you have lost. And those lost to every other person reading this, and every other human on the planet, from the dawn until the end of time. And soon enough, each of us will be cut off as well. What enlightenment could possibly explain such whimsically relentless fate?
And how could any wisdom reconcile death and the fact that it's still important to get the damn washer fixed (again)? To finish this column by deadline (again)? To dress up again for the next funeral when the next friend dies?
Forty-two years of existence, and all I can say is, that's life? Yes, I have no illumination. All I have is this:
Love. Forgive. Accept. Endure. And while you can, if you can, laugh.
Knock, knock...
http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2005/dir_1505/t_snarls.html
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