Behind All Of This Noise
Living in the midst of this jumble
of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness:
how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire,
how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life
comes to light every moment!
And yet silence will soon ascend
on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people.
How his shadow stands even now behind everyone,
as his dark fellow traveler!
It is always like the last moment
before the departure of an emigrants’ ship:
people have more to say to each other than ever,
the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence
are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise
–so covetous and certain of their prey.
And all and everyone of them suppose
that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything;
and that is the reason for all of this haste,
this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other.
Everyone wants to be the first in this future
-and yet death and deathly silence alone
are certain and common to all in this future.
How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element
makes almost no impression on people,
and that nothing is further from their minds
than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death.
It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of
death. I should like very much to do something
that would make the thought of life
even a hundred times more appealing to them.
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 278
These are lyrical lines of prose. A deep love is expressed in these words. Clamor and shouting, cacophony is signature of such scenes on a dock as a great ship boards for departure.
What is possible to make the thought-of-life many times more appealing to my fellow travelers?
One thought on “Behind All Of This Noise”
I’m reluctant to write this because it has been said and discussed for centuries by millions of people, and yet here I go again.
Isn’t the juxtaposition of life to death what makes both of them relevant? Is there a “yin” without a “yang”? Is there light without dark? The notions of life and death are inexorably intertwined for one cannot exist without the other. Just as the universe itself will come to a close at some point, so does the life of an amoeba begin and end. We should find consolation in this notion, that our lifetimes are a page in this dance of existence. My sense is that Nietzsche embraced this concept and encouraged his fellow travelers to become more aware of this connection.
And certainly you and I can relate to the idea that, as we reach towards those final years, we can feel the touch of the reaper on our shoulders. This is both frightening and in some ways reassuring; reassuring in that our cycle has been steeped in curiosity and exploration. A life well lived, or at least as well lived as we can muster [and we aren’t done yet].