Aqua vita

(Words I hope will console pyreflie)

Sometimes the heavens show mercy and let a brief rain fall on the man perishing in the desert...

For the past few weeks I have been mired in despair, falling into black moods that only become blacker, and I have been trying desperately to remain cheerful as I push another fistful of pills down my throat, as I attempt to ramrod into my heart enthusiasm for things I tell myself I want -- to teach English abroad, to learn Vietnamese, to become a published poet. But to no avail. That old hobgoblin Nihilism stalks me once more, making me believe that any project I undertake would prove empty, futile -- ashes and rust.

In a conversation I had yesterday, I maintained that, because we conduct our lives with a constant awareness of death -- and an often crippling one at that -- death seems to have more force, more influence, than life; that life is so thoroughly permeated by death that one may question, as I do, if we humans are ever in fact alive at all, or, better stated, if Life indeed stands as some definite dialectical antithesis to Death, and not simply the latter's more attractive profile, as it were.

Such a morose line of thought (this turn of mind, if you have not discovered for yourself, dear Reader, is quite characteristic of old E.) led me to make this assertion: That any nihilist who prides himself on uncompromising intellectual honesty could only write one work: a single page with a period in the middle of it. And that's all. Otherwise, he betrays himself as an imposter, a metaphysician in pilfered garb.

This asseveration seemed so apt, so pithy, that I laughed in spite of my stifling sadness.

I set my mind, then, to live my new-found creed: to live life awaiting death. Life for me would be simply a purple plastic chair in Death's lobby.

But, as is so often the case, I cannot make that move which is the dark inverse of Kierkegaard's one of "infinite resignation" -- a sort of infinite resignation in it own right, though lacking the intuitive assurance of an eventual boon in the hereafter -- because always some tiny fissure in the melancholic mass of my mind parts to admit some small drop of a promise of the hint of an intimation. And I, the parched crawler upon the sand, slaver drily after it.

So, forgive my lack of resolve, dear reader. It is not the result of an absence of faith, but of faith despite absence. After all, whenever we find ourselves in a darkened room, we instinctively grope the wall for a light switch.