the harbinger of dumb

Yesterday I learned about a Harvard student that committed suicide.

But not before leaving behind a 1,904 page manifesto.  Yes, 1,904 pages.

My friend showed me this said manifesto on the web.  I looked at the title on the first page.  "Hmm," I thought.  "suicide note.  I wonder what that's about."

Well, to his credit, he left a table of contents.  That's nice when I'm deciding which part of a 1,904 page suicide note I'm going to carve into during my free time.

I'm going to critique this 1,904 pages without reading more than one percent of it.  Why?  Because I'm lazy like that.  And why do I sound cruel?  Because this person is not just saying that his life is meaningless, he's saying that my life is meaningless.  And he's saying my 200 friends on Facebook lead meaningless lives.  Well, maybe some of them waste a lot of time, but their lives are certainly not meaningless.

Look, he's saying my nephew, now two-years old, is meaningless.  And now that crap is on the internet for everyone to see.  Onwards.

Being a sucker for brevity, I went to the section in the table of contents called "Punchline," a section heralding his revelation about nihilism.  Unfortunate.  I guess the letters, words, structured sentences, and logical underpinnings that constituted 1,904 pages were meaningless, too.

I wonder, what would have happened if someone else had done the exact same thing, but only the day before?  And what if their argument was better?

Okay, so let's entertain the notion that experiences are illusory and meaningless.  Everything you experience (love, happiness, anger, pleasure) is really just a chemical reaction in the brain.  Therefore, life is meaningless.  Huh?

Are you thinking about the code that represents these letters on the page?  Okay, so maybe you are.  Stop it.  But seriously, do you stop to reflect upon these pixels every single time you finish reading this elegant prose in your head?

No.

You just reflected on whether or not this prose is elegant.  You had an attitude about my tone from the beginning.  You understand this sentence as it unfolds.  Now this sentence.  Now this one.  Now this one.

No?  So, these words are still an illusion.  Okay, maybe this reduction to the absolute physical is plausible.  After all, science has tremendous explanatory power.  But why should there be any less wonder, even given you can obliterate Mona Lisa's "smile" to atoms?  Isn't there still some mystery in the very experience of her expression that you can't quite grasp?  I mean, abstracting my experience of happiness to atoms just doesn't come even fucking close to the actual experience of happiness.

I'm still wrong?  Okay, so the nihilist is right.  Clearly, because he wrote 1,904 pages!

But I'll have the last word, fortunately.  If the stuff that constitutes "us" is meaningless, then I know of no better time to start cultivating my own meaning.

What more could a writer ask for than blank, empty canvas?