Monday, December 18, 2006
(3:11 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
What Heaven Will Be Like
Something is not working. For close to three weeks now, I've been sitting idle, just doing what I have to, skipping everything else. It could be the Christmas season, or it could be environmental factors, or it could be simple burn-out. In any case, I'm bored, lonely, and depressed. I assume this period will end, presumably once I've slept off my traditional New Years despair, but I don't have any concrete idea of what it would look like for it to end. It really feels like I could indefinitely continue to barely slide by -- work enough to pay the bills, have a decent social life but no prospect of a relationship, competently make my way through the PhD program (probably at a slower pace), and otherwise just sit around. No alarms and no surprises, as they say -- I could even continue to listen to the same old music over and over.Heaven will not be like that. I had a discussion of this the other day. My interlocutor thought that heaven would be like a party, etc., which wouldn't be bad. Sometimes I think that I could go a long time just going out with friends every night and sleeping it off. But for me, heaven would be somehow internal to this life that I've led -- a retracing of this same life. Not everyone can say this, since there are some things that really are unredeemable, but I've been spared that -- and maybe that makes this cheap and trite. (In fact the image that comes to mind is something that all of us people of good taste have "outgrown," the death scene in American Beauty.)
My image of heaven would be a repetition of my life, "just a little different" -- the minimal difference being perhaps even merely the formal difference of being a repetition, of holding it a little more loosely. This is the kind of redemption that I would want. Even in terms of "this world," my ideals are not ideals in the traditional sense -- they have all been actualized. My ideal of feminine beauty is not a list of properties, but an actual person I have known. My ideal relationship is something that I have already experienced, at least for a moment.
But here we come to this strange disjuncture in my life -- on the one hand, I've arranged basically everything around "career" concerns, but on the other hand, the only thing that seems to me to have any real meaning is love. Not family, not even marriage -- the intensity of the one-on-one. Sometimes, even though it's ridiculous, I think that I've already had that, reached my quota -- and so the finding of a girlfriend or a wife could become a simple utilitarian affair (Do we get along? Are our domestic habits compatible? Do we have similar goals?).
In my moments of weakness, I keep aspiring to be the knight of infinite resignation -- but really, I want the "just a little different" now. I want things to shift a fraction of a millimeter. Or at least sometimes I do -- sometimes I want very much not to want that.
