thoughts of a dying nihilist
Reading Chekhov recommends me back to Santayana: "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval", and Chekhov, with his inimitable plenitude, quietly reveals the brutal flash of insight: life is nothing but finding ways to pass time. Once eternity creeps into the edges of one's vision, it's impossible to escape the sense of futility, and if thought moulds language, then the word "Why" was created just for this very thought: why live?
Perspective is a curse and a blessing. If the pursuit of meaning in one's life is the key to satisfaction, then to see the shape of one's existence strung between two cosmic blinks threatens the attainability of this satisfaction. Take your mind's eye far out enough, and indeed everything ceases to have meaning. And to become increasingly conscious of this drive for everyone to do something, to fill one's life, is to become increasingly astonished at the sheer determination it takes to exist.
Still, to find happiness in the small things, and in the never-ending possibilities of the present - that is the antidote. Or perhaps in the never-ending pursuit of meaning in one's life - a meaning that one carves for oneself out of the slate-grey neutrality of existence. And only the most perversely cynical nihilists would find the search for meaning meaningless, in and of itself.
(like me, for example)
There was a time I thought that to abandon this macro-perspective was to regress. Having once looked up at the stars and cowered in the face of eternity, lowering one's head to stare intently at the curl of a frond, and thus to studiously ignore the eternal glare of the stars, was sheer cowardice. To be utterly unconscious seemed less criminal than to have been conscious and chosen ignorance.
But, no more! late night shishas, camaraderie, laying plans for a bright future, curling up with a good book, finding small reasons to smile, late-night driving expeditions, the promise of new days: these things texture our existence, so that we no longer merely exist, but live.
I suppose by inference, I would choose the blue pill over the red, while disagreeing with the premise that blue = ignorance and red = doubt. The problem with the choice scenario in the Matrix is that one pill is mutually exclusive of the other: i.e., if you return to the Matrix, having been in the real world, you must rescind your experience of the truth. This, I disagree with. To truly love the ephemeral is to situate it within the context of the eternal, and hold both in your mind, simultaneously. Only thus, I believe, can we avoid both the descent into nihilism, and the ignorance of the endless starry skies above.