
I took a bike ride last year and had this thought about ducks and geese. Three birds stood beside the path. They would have been either very small geese or very large ducks. In about 0.02 seconds the following thought shot through my head:
Maybe these are geese? They’re too small to be geese. But too large to be ducks. The odds that there’d be three equally massive ducks hanging out together on the side of the bike path seem suspiciously unlikely, but for some reason three abnormally small geese seem much more realistic. Therefore, they are geese.
Millions of neurons firing, billions of years of evolution, and this is the mind’s capstone project. Are there people who don’t have these minute, tiny thoughts constantly? My day-to-day is dominated by them, almost as much as it was as a child, when I actually dubbed a running inner monologue with its own name (“Through the Eyes of Nicky” was a sort of running reality show I kept up; I’d be boogie boarding or scootering and I’d conjure announcers, commentating my every ride, shot through lenses in my eyes). As a kid everything is greater—everything means everything. I felt that way until embarrassingly recently—that everything means everything. Sometimes I still get it. We patronize children for their lack of experience, but really their dearth of perspective is the most magical thing. Context fucks everything up. Big, grand, dominant feelings filled up my childhood. Memories from back then are accompanied by distinct, deep feelings in my stomach—some general, generic ones (embarrassment, wonder) but some so oddly specific that they feel like evolutionary malfunctions.
I have a memory of my elementary school Jog-a-Thon, for example, which even today manifests as a completely novel, undefined, specific feeling which cannot be conveyed in words. I take myself to be a rational person guided by some lodestar of logical agnosticism, whereby I maintain respect for the unknowable but ultimately defer to science; evolution, Darwin, mutation. Yet I can think of no biological impetus for the enormous associated pit which burrows in my stomach upon the consideration of my third through fifth grade Jog–a-Thons. It’s inexplicable to me. I assure you: there was nothing remarkable about these fundraising races. I’m positive I’d be hysterical at the sight of the event’s actual scale if I visited today. But it holds me. Why?
According to Freud (or is it Russell?) we die many times within our lifetimes. We’re reincarnated, transformed into a completely new self, every time we change. Our relationship with memory has always represented the strongest argument for that worldview, one which, if extrapolated out to its logical endpoint, leads to some shocking conclusions. Is there not, for example, an argument to be had that we die several times a day; nay, several times a second? That enough regularly changes within my environment, body, and mind to be able to claim that my former self perished at some undefined point not too long ago. We retain identity, of course, and memories—but I am not the same person. I died.
I can’t decide how morbid this thought is. In Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a wacky memory loss surgery is necessary to reset a relationship. Yet are the main characters the same people when they meet again, memories wiped? Or are their blind spots to their past selves so massive that they must be considered reborn? It’s fairly obvious to me that each of them died—that the characters lose so much of themselves in their respective amnesiac operations that they cease to exist as they did before the surgeries. But where do we draw the line? “Eternal Sunshine” presents a pretty obvious example. What about the 99.9% of experience we lose automatically, without a passing thought? The leaves piled up in the gutter you passed on your walk to work, the dust gathered under the floor mat in your grandfather’s Subaru, the crack in the sidewalk which rushed by half an hour ago from beyond the grimy bus window? Are these not memories we’re forgetting, incessantly, and ignoring, merely because they don’t fit into the narratives we prefer to tell ourselves about our lives? Are we not forgetting everything?
Not forgetting like you do your mom’s phone number, or your childhood address, or your girlfriend’s friend’s name (which eluded you as soon as it was uttered). I mean everything; every thought, phrase, conversation, place, person you’ve ever considered. The mundane hum of life that really makes us who we are; do we not forget all that shit? Almost immediately? Take the “Eternal Sunshine” operations and multiply them by every thought you’ve ever had. We’re dying not just every time we go to bed and wake up, but every millisecond. Our existence is a continuous chain of death and rebirth, and we’re powerless to defend against it.
How we react to this finding is, of course, a constant source of anxiety, sadness, indifference, and amusement. There are extremes across the spectrum. Some write everything down to compensate—a compulsive effort to stoke memories down the line—to put off or soften the blow of impermanence. Others—the ones who have tuned out by now—find the revelation obvious, uninteresting, pedantic. They accept this fate as the essence of existence, are fine, even happy, retaining their core identities through these vicissitudes and leaving the rest behind. Many more never think of it at all.
I, myself, am deeply troubled by the thought.
It has to do with sleep. I’ve gone through stretches—months, weeks, random days—where, just as I’m about to drift off, my body seizes up: wait, it screams. What is about to happen? Where am I about to go? Will I be the same when I return? I jolt out of bed, take a lap, try to breathe, and either convince myself that I will or get so tired that the question becomes irrelevant. Usually it’s isolated there, in my bedroom. But sometimes it’s not.
I once went months—this was the summer of 2012 (I was 14) when death was inescapable to me, a feeling compounded by my inability to fathom why everyone else didn’t feel the same as I did. I watched the Olympics that summer and gawked at the packed stadiums full of duped people, people too distracted to come to terms with their fates. I spent that summer haunted by this thought, paralyzed by its implications. I found it unbearable, inescapable, to consider not just that infinity of darkness, non-existence, waiting for us, just around the corner, but that we were too distracted to know it was coming. This memory, too, of that summer, triggers one of those distinct stomach-feelings. My chest tightens, I seize up. I’m 14 again. Until I talk, or move, or sleep, or forget.
I’d be grateful, most of the time, to avoid this hassle altogether. I’ve been successful in stretches; nights filled with deep, blissful, uninterrupted sleep, enjoyment, not fear, of spectacle, sport. Infinity, before and after me, transforms in one apparently random moment into something entirely different from a doomed life sentence. The true acknowledgement of terminable being, an unshielded stare into the pure blackness of a steeply descending sea cave, reveals an untapped liberty profound enough to render all other universal details extraneous. The previously toe-curling knowledge of the free falling elevator’s impending demise, when viewed from just a slightly different perspective, transforms into a superpower. Futility eliminates consequence.
But then something happens and I wonder how, in some twisted way, I’ve come to forget the truth. And I’m not sure which side is better, or if I’m capable of walking the line. I sense the great challenge of my adult life will be interacting with a world undergirded by the supposition of permanence—hundreds of thousands packing Olympic stadiums in the name of Earthly allegiance—while simultaneously gripping its ephemerality.
No easy feat. To perpetually hang on to one end of the dueling yet identical high wires of nonexistence—to dangle always on one side of the dialectic of infinity—means sacrificing a series of values held by most of the rest of the world which center around balance. To deny consequence is to reject balance, to rebel against the grand underlying theory of cause and effect, to challenge the logic which drives nearly every choice made in all those mundane day-to-day moments which call for them. It is to oppose both religion and the opposition of religion itself.
It’s just very important, you see—very important—that I’m able to distinguish a goose from a duck.