A Little Lecture

If you’re in Chicago and you get on a plane and go to New York, at that point Chicago becomes another city where you are not, where within whose boundaries you are not to be found. Maybe some traces, but not you, the one who wakes up in the morning and goes to sleep at night. Of course you’re always somewhere, but therefore, and just as certainly, you’re in absentia from all those innumerable other locations---in fact all the places everywhere, except the one where you happen to be at a particular time.

All of which, you might say, is so obvious, how can it possibly be worth mentioning? Well, for instance, I say, when someone dies, from this rather broad perspective what has happened, location-wise, is that just one place, one tiny fraction compared to all those other places (where the now-deceased person wasn’t anyway), is added to those innumerable others, increasing the sum of those places only infinitesimally, so to speak. Now there’s only one more place where that person is not to be found. So it’s just a matter of a little solace, a touch of top-down processing in which the more recent-brainy frontal cortex lectures the emotional centers submerged deeper in the older brain. It’s not much, but at least it’s true.

As for that old-time religion instead, here once more is what Friedrich Nietzsche has to say: There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.