A Romanian by birth, Emil Cioran lived most of his life in Paris, where he died in 1995. He is best known for his trenchant, though some might call them morbid, observations about the rhythms of life and death.  In contrast to most pessimists, however, he focused not on the certainty of death but on what he called the "laughable accident" of birth.  Why, really, he asked constantly, are we born?


   It's actually a very good question.   If we are believers in God, we might respond that we're born because God wanted us to be here.  But this doesn't really answer the question; it simply pushes it to another one:  why did God want us to be here?  If we do not believe in God, however, the only way that we can respond is that, well, we just happened.  That whether through dint of pattern or circumstance, the shapes and forms of the cosmos brought us into existence.  Yet this doesn't really answer the question, either:  it merely leaves us wondering about the essence of these shapes and forms.  Why us?

      We can therefore come away from Cioran's conclusion thinking two things.  Neither gives us a complete answer to his question.  Hence, we can foist the fact of our presence onto the mysterious and impersonal permutations of the cosmos and see ourselves, as Cioran points out, accidents.  Or we can attribute our presence to a greater mystery still: God.
     Which do you prefer?

Arlington 

    Today, in America anyway, is Memorial Day.  In addition to the many barbecues and gatherings this holiday spawns, it also births numerous displays of patriotism, even, dare I say, jingoism, among the American populace.  Lots of flags, lots of parades, lots of honoring of veterans.

     Although we may differ on what justifies sending troops into combat, and though we may debate how a war should be fought, we can agree, I think, to be grateful for those who, whether through conscription or voluntarism, put themselves on the line for people, people like you and me, people they may never meet or know, for causes both clear and ambiguous.
     The price, however, is high.  Military cemeteries around the world testify to this amply.  It's tragic and unspeakably sad.  So many lost and broken lives.  And this does not include the even more numerous civilians who, through no fault of their own, are trapped and die in the middle of military conflict.
     Most of us want peace.  Peace in our families, peace in our nation, peace in the world, and peace in our hearts.  Although some wars might seem necessary, they are never good.  War will not bring peace.  It will only bring more war.
     War also reminds us that, as countless religions attest, we do not grow by seeking our own welfare and safety but those of others.  Over and above it all, we are called to seek the common good and not solely our own.
     We all want to survive, yes, but we should all want everyone else to survive, too.
     

     Memory again.  As the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov's memoir, Speak Memory, tells us, it is good to remember.  But to what end?  As we live out our lives, we indeed hope that our memory speaks to us, that we can see and hear those things which have shaped us, those things that have brought us to points of significance in our lives and which have created the individuated worlds we inhabit every day.
     We also hope, I think, that what we remember becomes the basis for what some researchers are calling "post memory."  What's post memory?  According to those working in the field, post memory is the memory that we construct from the ashes of traumatic and painful memory, the recollections that we, in a real sense, resurrect, not on the basis of what was there but on the basis of our ability to create a new world in our lives.  A post memory is a memory that has very little, if at all, physical connection to the old.
     Maybe.  In thinking about the film "The Right to Memory," I came across the testimony of someone who had been enslaved to a cult since childhood and who, although she has escaped it, knows that she will forever live with her scars from it.  We cannot fully elude our past.
     So do we seek newness in vain?  Not completely.  Newness is everywhere; we only need look for it.  Total newness, however, will not happen in this existence.  A pure post memory will never be.
     If there is a metaphysical, however, the possibility remains.  When the metaphysical irrupts into earthly existence, the transcendent in the immanent, everything, even memory, changes.  It's all new.

     Have you ever considered the "right" to memory?  Although many people talk about the right to freedom, the right to life, the right to food, health care, and shelter, and more, rarely do we hear about the right to memory.  "The Right to Memory," a film I watched recently, attempts to come to grips with this point.
     It's not an action film!  "The Right to Memory" records the recollection of a Russian man named Arseny Roginsky about his efforts to "retrieve" the memory of the many thousands and millions of people who "disappeared" during the Stalin era.  As most people know, in his fanatically paranoid compulsion to retain his power, Josef Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953, ordered the killing or imprisonment of untold millions of Russians.  It is a story which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounts in chilling detail in his many books about the gulags, the archipelago of prisons that Stalin created to kill or punish those who had offended him.
     In "The Right to Memory," Roginsky shares of how his work underscored for him, and hundreds of others, the deeply felt human need to remember those whom time and history had forgotten.  He tells of the joy survivors experienced when they, finally, had closure for the fate of their lost loved ones.  Now, he said, these people could remember.
     In his Inhuman Land, Jozef Czapski tells, in a heartbreaking way, a similar story of trying to track down people who had been left behind by the Stalinist machine.  It is a story that, sadly, has been repeated over and over and over to this day.  Witness the aftermath of the Hutu Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, the persecution of the Rohingya of Myanmar, or the "disappearance" of thousands of dissidents under the reign of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.  And too many more to list here.
     Memory is vital to who we are as human beings.  It is also essential to recognizing our place in the cosmos:  if this world is an accident, who, in the big picture, will really remember us?
     No one.

     In a nuclear age, a world in which more than a few nations possess the ability to wage a nuclear war, we wonder about ethical standards.  Historically, most people, thinking about the need to be prepared, that is, be ready to "deter" nuclear attack, have endorsed the stockpiling of nuclear weapons.  This is necessary, they say, to remove another nation's incentive to direct its nuclear armaments against their country.  It's just being realistic.  And practical.
     Out of this posture, the nuclear arms race was born.  It is a race which no one will win.  Consider an idea developed in the Fifties called MAD:  Mutually Assured Destruction.  If two nations were to engage in nuclear warfare, the end result would be the destruction of both.  In other words, the nations of the earth are are increasing their stores of nuclear weapons to prepare for something that will never happen.
     Is this logical?  Not really.  Although I have long been uneasy with the world's pursuit of nuclear weaponry, I found occasion to examine the issue afresh as I supervised a student this past year in his writing of a thesis on the ethics of nuclear proliferation.  Interestingly, while this student's initial objective was to demonstrate that nuclear proliferation was unethical but necessary, he ended up arguing that it was unethical, no qualifiers allowed. In light of the potential for global suffering and destruction as well as the illogical character of deterrence, he decided that, on balance, proliferation was unethical.  It violates every religious and secular standard about we treat our fellow human beings.
     Not surprisingly, when this student presented his thesis, a number of faculty pushed back, suggesting that he was being idealistic.  Perhaps he was.  Nonetheless, his point stands:  how can we argue that we wish to treat others as we would wish them to treat us when we are developing weapons which, in every way, enable us to do precisely the opposite?

     "Just look out the window, and you'll see God."  I've heard this phrase, or variants of it, dozens of times.  For those with any familiarity with Christian theology, you know that this sentiments refers to the idea of general revelation, that is, communications from God comprehensible to anyone who cares to listen.  In this, the fact of the natural world speaks constantly to the presence of God.
     On the other hand, quite a bit of this idea's intelligibility hinges on the attitude, mindset, or worldview of those who are listening.  Not everyone who looks at the natural world will draw the conclusion that God exists.  The composer Joseph Haydn's stirring oratorio, based on Psalm 19, that, "The heavens are telling the glory of God," is the expression of one who already believes God is there.  However much they may rejoice in the beauty of the natural world, many will nonetheless not connect it to God.  Why would they?
     So we're left with this.  We all experience, to some degree, astonishment or wonder when we look at the natural world.  We therefore need to consider why we do.  What is it about us that causes us to marvel at such beauty?  Moreover, how did such beauty come to be?
     How we answer determines, and leverages, everything.  In every way.

"I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I've read all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more.  All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places:  and suddenly nothing.  They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment.  At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think:  There wasn't much she didn't see!  But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and all its randomness--the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomble in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Profece, Tiryns, Castro talking to five thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purpose holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken--there is no place where it will all live again."

Most of us might say that the person who voiced these words has led a very full and interesting life.  This person was Simone Beauvoir, author of the ground breaking Second Sex (these words are drawn from her Force of Circumstance), long time lover of Jean Paul Sartre, and widely respected French intellectual.  Beauvoir indeed had a rich life.  Yet she is acutely aware of the implications of her mortality.  As she says, all that she has experienced, all of this, well, it will never live again.  Quite true, quite true.  And, she adds, all this life, all this wonder, and suddenly nothing.  Quite true as well.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues its journey across the planet, all of us, I think, do well to consider, once again, God or not, this all encompassing question:  what is my life really about?