For All Joy Wants Eternity

Some thoughts as we head towards 2024

All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you ever wanted one thing twice, if you ever said, 'You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!' then you wanted all back... For all joy wants—eternity.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

This year began with the death of my father. When you lose people you love, the ground begins to feel less steady beneath you. Things you took for granted become unfathomably precious in some ways, but it can also be too much. There is only so much fixation on the fragility of life that can be healthy. Beyond that it enters the dream realm of the hypochondriac.

Life is a bittersweet trial. It is rough journey and it takes what it wants from you. But it gives things to you as well. It is not only filled with grief, pain, and suffering, it is also filled with pleasure, beauty, and joy.

American culture does not allow us to focus on the pleasure of being alive. We are not a sensual or aesthetic people. We are driven by the markets, by money, by the churn of the machine. This creates within us false desires that require more and more time and energy from us, but which do not provide us with the joys we need to give us meaning. Instead, we’re told to find meaning in the striving. Ultimately, that does not provide us with much. Even if we do climb the mountain and get to the top.

Yes, work can give us some meaning. It does have a structure to it. And if we are personally invested in our work, then it can also be momentarily rewarding. But most work does neither for the majority of people. It only provides money, which is then spent on bad food, poorly made cheap clothing, experiences that might give a moment of pleasure but which are not very memorable. Dopamine surges that excite but also disconnect us from each other and from who we really are.

When I was younger, I did not really understand that enjoying life was important, that we shouldn’t waste it on working so hard. My boyfriends at that time were right about me. I was self-absorbed. I was so focused on myself and my flaws, the perfection that I couldn’t achieve. The things that I thought I should be but wasn’t able to be for others. So limiting and dumb to focus on those things.

From a macro perspective, this striving for perfection is related to my culture’s churn. From the micro perspective, my husband says that this is a common defense mechanism for children who grew up in chaotic households, who witnessed the breakup of their parents’ marriage.

I had a dream recently of someone who was probably one of the most significant people in my life to this date, but who I didn’t really know too well. But then I guess we rarely truly know even the people we are closest to. Through him, I understood that I wanted to live my life as a writer and artist. I have never met anyone else in my life like him, even though I’ve met many artists and writers. But I also don’t think there was really anything special about him. My friends at the time could not understand what I saw in him, because they didn’t understand that I saw myself.

Because I kept myself at a distance from him, he became sort of a canvas which I could throw upon my ideas of who he was, what his life was like, who I thought he might really be. I didn’t want to know him because I didn’t really want him to know me. I felt that I could not live up to what I assumed he desired. I didn’t feel beautiful or accomplished. I also feared that he would completely destroy me. I think because of the power and influence he held over me within my mind.

He was older than me and had far more experiences than I had. He was cynical. I was very young and naïve then. A child. Not illegally young, but I was just over that threshold. I was too afraid of whatever fire he held within him that would burn me alive. I was afraid that I would completely lose my sense of self in his fire. I didn’t recognize that I held just as much power within me over him. That I also had a fire within me, that I was the fire that could burn him alive, and that he might be just as afraid of that as well.

Maybe he would have meant so much less to me and my artistic work if I had really known him. Ultimately, he became for me the perfection I had sought in myself. The artist and writer I wanted to become. The call and the response driving my work through the years. Mirrors glinting light off each other infinitely.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I studied philosophy as an undergraduate. It was during that time that I began believing that we live our lives in a form of eternal return (Nietzsche, who I have quoted above, writes about this). It is a concept in that we have these experiences in our lives that we are fated to repeat over and over again - often even within our own lives in a variety of ways. Imprints upon us that we have to be mindful of because they create patterns in our behavior. Lessons that are repeated, trials that we keep being put through. Whole collectives experience the eternal return. History repeats itself.

When I was younger, I believed more positively in that things would come back around, that there would always be second chances in our lives. Even up to my father’s death I believed it still. Now I know that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the road dead ends. Death is a finality, even if one believes that we never truly die.

My mother did not get a second chance on love. After my father left her, she was alone. She never again had another suitor or romantic love interest. She had tried but had found the overtures of online dating to be ridiculous. She said that every one on there was lying in some way. I always think about the fact that my mother deserved to be loved. She was a kind person and wonderful mother and she did not deserve to be left by my father the way she was.

When we were looking through photos of ancestors on my mother’s side, we were astounded to see a man who looked very much like my father. My mother prayed that she wasn’t in some sort of infinity loop where she’d have to forever by tied to my father through the ages and go through this heartbreak again and again with him through eternity.

I have often thought about how different my childhood might have been if my parents had not divorced, if they had somehow made it through the trials of their marriage - the difficult parts of it - and come out the other side still together, still in love the way they’d been when they married each other. But they did not.

We are not promised anything in this life. But we need to believe that we are. For this reason, I have always wanted to write a searing love story, but I also don’t really believe in them. Not the way they are normally depicted. I see the end of the affair embedded within the beginning. How can one be courageous in love when you already know how bad it can end up?

And yet…I believe in love. I am now happily married to someone I love deeply. I know love can’t be reasoned. It is illogical. Despite knowing how bad it can end up, when it feels right you leap into the fire anyway.

—

A few things…

I’m closing up shop for a winter solstice / Christmas holidays break. I am taking some time off from Substack altogether all the way into January.

See you sometime in early 2024. Have a happy new year!