we were having a walk earlier tonight, and msg was in one of his moods where he's wrestling with, you know, whatever existential wibbly-wobblies he's got going on at the moment.
not like, depressed or even sad, really -- just one of those moods where you're outside and the temperature is completely out-of-this-world perfect and the breeze is blowing across your skin and through the trees and making your absolute knockout girlfriend's hair sway now and then as she's walking along beside you holding your hand, but in spite of all of that you're just not as happy as you think you ought to be.
i know, dumb, right?
only not really, because he's not a dumb guy and because he knew he needed to talk to me about it, and he did.
so the conversation started off in a sort of what's-it-all-mean kinda way -- which honestly ought to be a good thing because it ought to be a feeling of omg, the world is so amazing and people are so amazing when they put their minds to it and look at the stars right now and doesn't it just make you wonder what it all means? because it must mean something great.
but in this case it was more of an is there really any point? kind of a wondering, and i knew if i answered the real answer, he'd feel bad for not realizing that answer himself. so i came up with a horse-hockey answer that was true but was also horse-hockey because i wasn't saying the real right answer.
basically i told him that the point was, the world needs him. and of course he says, "does it really, though?" and i say, of course it does. and the goofy thing i say to convince him about that is something like this:
the world needs you and people like you because you create. because ten-thousand years from now when the aliens come down and are poking around all the empty cities human beings left behind, they're going to find the art and the music and the books people like you created, and they're not going to have any doubt about whether it was all worth it. they're going to wonder what the heck happened to these people who could bring this kind of beauty into being, but they definitely won't wonder if humans' lives had meaning, because every story and poem and even every dumb song lyric will be telling them all this meaning. and they won't have real people to compare it to, so they won't realize that your average human being wasn't as smart or kind or heroic or whatever as the people in books mostly are.
those aliens are going to think it's an absolute gift that they found all the stuff people like you left for them.
and he says, "well, don't you think they'll have their own stories and songs that do the same thing our stories and songs do, and make things out to be easier and simpler and more meaningful than real life, so they'll realize that's what our stories were doing too?"
and i tell him that it won't matter if they do. because the whole reason people create art that has a better world in it is because people want to believe in a better world. and if those aliens are like us, they'll want to believe our world was better, and that by reading about our world, they might be able to make their world better.
it will give them hope.
which, i said, is why you have meaning and why it's all worth it -- you hope for something better, and you aren't able to give up that hope even when life tries to squish it out of you, and so you keep going and creating things that sooner or later will give somebody hope. even if it's a bunch of aliens ten-thousand years after humans have disappeared.
he seemed to kind of buy this horse-hockey explanation, and i patted myself on the back for finding something to say that at least distracted him from his moodiness, probably because i had enough sense to make it a sci-fi story and he's always a sucker for that.
and like i said, i did believe was true -- even if it wasn't the real answer that would have embarrassed him and made him feel guilty.
because when you're walking along through an absolute stunner of a clear, cool night with an absolute stunner of a beautiful, brilliant, talented, wise and kind-hearted girlfriend and you think, what's it all mean? is there any point to all of this? the actual answer is, duh:
it means this. and you squeeze her hand and look in her eyes. this is the point.
and he's going to feel pretty dumb when he reads this.
but the next walk we take after he does is going to be freaking awesome.
xoxo,
claire
