Tuesday 3 August 2004

Pic of the day: Not so late bloom; screenshot from City of Heroes.

Fast forward

My wrist still hurts; perhaps it always will. But right now I'm busy with reading Marmalade Boy, a romantic comedy manga. It's really cute and very decent; it must be written for girls. I hope to live to review it for you later.

After all, this kind of stuff is the only (human) love in my life now, and will presumably remain so for the rest of my life. Unless the same fate befalls me as the Norwegian poet I recently read about, Olav H. Hauge from Hardanger, whose love life did not take off until his late 60es. (Incidentally, he also wrote a diary for like 70 years.) The truth is however that when reading about his late bloom, I felt sad for him.

Yes, I can see the value of completing - as far as possible - the human experience, while still alive. I have written before, we who live in such a powerful time, and live for such a long time, we should be expected to surpass numerous destinies in a single lifetime. But even so, coming to love at such an age seems like running the cart before the horse.

Then again, Hauge was hampered by self-doubt for most of his life. This is certainly not the case for me. Oh, I consider myself rather unimportant, but that's just realism. More to the point, I consider other people utterly unimportant as well. In a million year, nobody knows we were here, nobody has any idea what kind of beings we were. It is not even enough time to wear down the mountains that stood guard over my childhood home. They may change shape somewhat, depending on whether we continue to get periodic ice ages (as I suspect there will be), but they would still be recognizable. But our civilization will be as unknown as the poetry of the dinosaurs.

Yet even if the world ends tomorrow (highly unlikely, although it just might in 2007), those who love will still do so, and those who hate will die doing so, and the cynics will remain cynical, unless somehow they surpass yet another destiny while they are still alive.