To die quickly is to let a day, a week, or a season go by without anything novel to demarcate it. In the ruthless economy of the mind’s compaction and garbage collection, these mundane days, weeks, seasons, and years will come to be to you almost as if they had never been at all. But they will nonetheless age your body, and then eventually you’ll die.
So you can die, quickly or slowly, but to do anything other than this requires actually living. And living is an entirely different matter than merely slowing down time; to know you are living takes more than motion, novelty, and the mental marking of moments. Life involves involvement.
To never your live is to let your life live you: to never truly shoulder the responsibility of your choice. I would say to you that I am dying quickly, but the truth is that I’ve scarcely ever in my life been living enough even to be properly dying at all.
Now, I’m not about to suggest that either you or I do the laughable thing and try to truly live; life is of course far too harsh for that. But I’ll propose something just short of that: we’ll exchange a letter, or two.
Truly living is unsafe because so many things could happen, including death or, worse, everything going to complete shit. Living is most commonly a luxury for those who need not fear losing their life. If you allow the strange ineffable infinite transcendence to lead you on a path away from the beaten one, you may fall into a death trap. As you are falling to your death, you will think to yourself, “What was the point of that?” But if you resist the call of the infinite ultimate other, you may find yourself asking as you die, trapped, “What was the point of that?”
The rule of writing letters is to break at least one rule. You’ll know the rule when you find it, and setting yourself free of it will change you profoundly. It would almost count as truly living, except that there really are no rules about what one can write in a letter.
This is all rather silly. I’d write you a serious letter, but that would be breaking a number of rules.
Softness is pressure that builds up slowly. Hardness is sharp, without give. In an elastic medium, a sharp pressure wave is formed by the superposition of a broad spectrum of sinusoids, lined up in just the right way. But if you scatter the phases of the sinusoids, you get something else like a soft white noise.
Writing a letter is like a softer version of living. When you run into a wall while writing a letter, instead of a sharp pressure wave cracking against your eardrums and ringing your skull, you will merely have your thoughts scatter or phase in and out of awareness.
I’m aware that I have hard parts because I seek coherence, which is the way in which small disordered variations stack together to create sharpness. I like soft parts because they are pleasant to the touch. Fear makes one hard, because fear is awareness of the hardness of life, which one reflexively tries to match. I am sometimes afraid of never really living. Ufgh
Anyways. Write me, if you would. This has been a silly letter about life, transcendence, and writing letters. Your letter can be about anything at all.