Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 426

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Jerusalem," by Alan Moore.

Odd phrases and occasional expressions would lodge somewhere in her mind, provide a coat-rack of precarious hooks from which she could drape tentative connecting strings, threads of conjecture and wild guesswork linking up one notion with another until Alma either had a sketchy comprehension of whatever she had eavesdropped, or had burdened herself with a convoluted and ridiculous misunderstanding that she would continue to believe for years thereafter.

One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn’t be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he’d been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He’d have been crossed off the guest list, he’d have been erased, as if he’d never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and … 

It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out of him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life’s frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.

When he looked at it objectively, he saw that the real measure of his freedom was that he was free of the illusion of free will. He was unburdened by the comforting mirage that other men took faith in, the delusion that allowed them to take walks or beat their wives or tie their shoes, apparently whenever they should wish, as if they had a choice. As if they and their lives were not the smallest and most abstract brushstroke, a pointillist dab fixed and unmoving in time’s varnish, there eternally on an immeasurable canvas, part of a design too vast for its component marks to ever glimpse or comprehend. The terror and the glory of John Vernall’s situation was that of a pigment smear made suddenly aware of its position at the corner of a masterpiece, a dot that knows that it is held in place forever on the painted surface, that it’s never going anywhere, and yet exults: “How dreadful and how fabulous!” He knew himself, knew what he was and knew that this advantaged him in certain ways above his fellow squiggles in the picture, who were not so conscious of their true predicament, its majesty, nor of its many possibilities.

There it was. The madness in the family. That was a cheery thing to think about while you were waiting for your first child to arrive, but Tom supposed there was no hiding from it. It was just a fact, part of the complicated lottery of birth that would decide whether the baby had brown hair like Doreen or black hair like Tom, whether its eyes were blue or green, if it was to be tall or short, well-built or skinny, sane or insane. Nobody had a say in how their children would be born, but then nobody had a say with most of the important things in life. All you could do was make the best of what you had. All you could do was play your cards as they’d been dealt.

“There’s really only life. Death’s an illusion of perspective that afflicts the third dimension. Only in the mortal and three-sided world do you see time as something that is passing, vanishing away behind you into nothingness. You think of time as something that one day will be used up, will all be gone. Seen from a higher plane, though, time is nothing but another distance, just the same as height or breadth or depth. Everything in the universe of space and time is going on at once, occurring in a glorious super-instant with the dawn of time on one side of it and time’s end upon the other. All the minutes in between, including those that mark the decades of your lifespan, are suspended in the grand, unchanging bubble of existence for eternity. 

“Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line’s already written while you’re starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama. In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order. Nothing in the book is changing or developing. Nothing in the book is moving save the reader’s mind as it moves through the chapters. When the story’s finished and the book is closed, it does not burst immediately into flames. The people in the story and their twists of fortune are not disappeared without a trace as though they’d not been written. All the sentences describing them are still there in the solid and unchanging tome, and at your leisure you may read the whole of it again as often as you like. 

“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”

Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?

"It’s the only plan that works. Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time."