The temptation to NOT exist

[Nemonymous]

Can nobody be 'not-remembered'?

[Odalisque]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

Our lives are useless. Every second we live we waste energy, our dreams are fruitless, our entire lives are going to be forgotten sooner or later, so what's the purpose of living another day? What reason do we have to exist?

Because we enjoy it? I'm just hazarding a guess, here. ;) It is possible to have a bit of fun.

[Russell Nash]

Odalisque: I live (simply) because I enjoy it (my wife's answer), unfortunately is a relative answer. For example: If I lived in Bahamas, in a 4 million dollar home, with plenty of money in a bank account, with very good health, of course, I'd say I live because I enjoy it. But, if I have to be amputated in the middle of a battlefield with no anesthesia, I wouldn't say that. Or if I had to be that pilot that fired at American citizens (9/11 incident) and killed them all, I wouldn't how to live after with my own conscience. Or how many people in TLO would be Capos, and how many refugees in a concentration camp? Did both live because they enjoy it? I live because I enjoy it is a relative answer. Unless one explains how you are enjoying yourself, doesn't say much. How many Nazis enjoyed being that, and when captured regretted what they did? Why not face the consequences of your pleasure? Or what about that crazy man who enjoy killing? To derive meaning from pleasure, like "I exist (or live) because I enjoy it" sounds to me hedonism.

Nemonymous: Everybody seems to love being remembered. Example: the writer who instead of writing what he truly thinks writers what his editor, or his "readers" want. Following the slogan "do anything but be published". The writer who promotes his book back and forth. The person who doesn't tell his boss, "f*@# off", who does everything to keep a job, instead of saying, "f*@# the world, I do what I want, even if I have to live under a bridge". This is also another example of trying to be somebody (the modern illusion of being somebody), to be in the world a little longer, to be remembered. Why don't we go to an island and forget the world...? We all love to be remembered, to be "someone", to see our names flashing on a book, even though we all know that all that effort is useless, that only earth abides, for now.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Odalisque

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash Our lives are useless. Every second we live we waste energy, our dreams are fruitless, our entire lives are going to be forgotten sooner or later, so what's the purpose of living another day? What reason do we have to exist? Because we enjoy it? I'm just hazarding a guess, here. ;) It is possible to have a bit of fun.

I suppose it's how you define one's 'fun' goals. Some get fun from studying Pessimism and Nihilism. And extrapolating self in those connections.
Bring a bottle.

[Russell Nash]

This is the oldest human footprint we know of. 3.7 million years ago, a person was walking somewhere in Tanzania, one of us. Doesn't have a name, but he or she was one of us.

Google Image Result for http://cafescicolorado.org/images/Laetoli%20footprint.jpg

This is a modern day footprint

Google Image Result for http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TtoVkBF0Gro/RqElODVOgdI/AAAAAAAABCA/VH_5y_BgZ0Y/s400/Neil_Armstrong_Footprint.jpg

We know that it belongs to Neil Armstrong. It has a name (copyright too?). In thousands of years, if still there it is going to belong to Armstrong, he was still one of us, but somehow, something changed. Fame? A wish to be remembered? But the first one, it's pure, it's the footprint of a human being, without name.

Why are we trying to be remembered?

[alogos]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

II just want to state that I exist because I breathe, and while I breathe I exist and I live. That's it. It's not much for a "reason" but doesn't look like someone has a better reason to exist.

How about better the devil you know the devil you don't? I mean none of us can honestly know what is like to not be? Existing- whatever the difficulties, is at least something that we have managed to get some kind of handle on.

That's objective or at least objective enough for all conscious beings

[Cryptic]

It's difficult for me to stand on either side of the fence on this particular issue. For personal reasons as well as a general sense of empathy for people who have similar reasons as I have. The temptation to not exist, I think, appears far more beautiful, far more elegant, than it really is. I'm not sure if anyone feels that same majestic inclination towards death or have the same thoughts of it. I don't, as said before, want lack of any feeling. When I'm in those moods where the temptation seems to overwhelm my other thoughts, I think that it would be a beautiful thing to not have anything. No thought, no feeling, no consciousness. Absolutely nothing. I don't even want to appreciate the nothingness for myself. In those times, I just want to not be, and imagining any alternative to that is horrendous (while in this state of mind). Along with that comes the non-existence of the good, which I'm also fine with.

The temptation becomes more unbearable the longer I think of life and the inherent suffering in it. For myself, I can only ever recall one period of time, quite recently, where I was truly happy. When I build a Cost-to-Benefit comparison of living and not living, I find that the cost seems too much for the small, if insignificant, benefit. It should probably be stated that while I'm in one of these 'moods', I'm actually experiencing severe depression, which happens to be common in my family. So, my thoughts are skewed.

I can imagine an instance where I can see no light and no escape path from the despair I've entered at the time. There's hopelessness, there's bitterness, anger and hatred. But most of all, there's suffering. Internal suffering that seems to have no end. Suffering that prevents you from sleep and prevents you from wanting to get out of the house, or even from getting out of bed. As someone said before, it truly is a Hell. It should also be noted that I don't have belief in the afterlife or any reincarnation. Which might be why death sounds so magnificent at times. Other times I feel the complete opposite. It's a mood-by-mood basis.

[Russell Nash]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Can nobody be 'not-remembered'?

Excerpt from "Graffiti" (1924), in "The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories", by Ivan Bunin, Penguin Books.


[...] 'Do you know what's just struck me?' he continued. 'All the places I've visited in my lifetime and all the inscriptions I've seen: it's impossible to begin counting them. Inscriptions made with rings on the mirrors of private rooms in restaurants. Cuneiform inscriptions. Inscriptions on a bell in the downgraded town of Chernava, the name of a merchant of some guild or other, the originator of this bell. Hieroglyphs on obelisks and on the ruined temples of Karnak. Inscriptions on the triumphal arches of the Caesars. A pencilled scrawl on the azurite beside a holy well in the impenetrable depths of the Kerzhenets forest: "Visited by the sinners Yefim and Praskovya." Those marvellously intricate in­scriptions in the mosque of Omar, in Saint Sophia, in Damascus and in Cairo. Thousands of names and initials on old trees and on seats in country estates and cities, in Oryol and Kislovodsk, in Tsarskoye Selo and Oreanda, in Neskuchny and Versailles, Weimar and Rome, Dresden and Palermo. Most of all, of course, epitaphs. Where? Again, it's hard to begin counting them. On wooden and stone crosses, on every sort of mausoleum, on granite and sycamore sarcophagi, on the casings of mummies, on copper plaques, on iron slabs, on urns and stelae, on the precious shawls draped over the coffins of caliphs, on the slippery floors of medieval cathedrals and on sandstone pillars. I've gazed on these sepulchral passports in steppes and deserts, in the Chernava graveyard and in the Con­stantinople Fields of Death, at the Volkovo cemetery and outside Damascus, where countless saddle-shaped, horned hillocks of clay stand out amid the sands, in Moscow's Donskoy Monastery and in the Valley of Jehoshaphat near Jerusalem, in the Peter-and-Paul Cathedral and the catacombs along the Appian Way, on the shores of Brittany and in Syrian crypts, over Dante's remains and over the grave of an idiot called Fenya in Zadonsk. Yes, there's good reason to indulge in paradox, Madame! You'll say that's not what you were talking about. Are you, like so many others, disgusted by inscriptions like the ones in this belvedere, that is the type that zigzag all over romantic castles and towers, inside the turret above the dome of St Peter's in Rome, at the entrance to the Baydar Pass, at the top of the pyramid of Cheops, on the cliffs of the Daryal Gorge, and in the Alps where they catch the eye a long way off, written by provident travellers in red and white paint? Are you roused to indignation by this display of banality, or vulgarity as people call such things, by the impudence of the ordinary citizen, putting his mark wherever he goes?'

[...] In the same way as initials on seats and trees carved to com­memorate the fact that "It was a wonderful spring," that "Like a lily, white and fair, Among the trees stood she." Again that's just the same. Does it matter whose are the names or the initials -Goethe's or Fritz's, Ogaryov's or Epikhodov's, Liza's (from A Nest of Gentry) or her maid's? What's important here is that there was "blood which suffused her cheeks" and a secret garden seat, that "the crimson wild-rose bloomed" (and naturally faded in due course), that blissful hours don't last and that it's necessary, indeed vital (why, God only knows, but it is vital) somehow to preserve something, that is to oppose death, to oppose the fading of the wild-rose. It's our eternal, tireless struggle with "the river of obli­vion . But you'll say, surely this struggle doesn't achieve anything? Surely it's completely fruitless? No, a thousand times no! For you see, if the opposite were the case, then everything would go to the devil - all art, all poetry, all the chronicles of mankind. Why would all those things exist if we didn't live by them, that is, in other words, if we didn't continue and maintain the life of everything that we call the past or days gone by? But all these things do exist. For three thousand years tears have come to people's eyes whenever they read about the tears of Andromache, saying farewell to Hector with their child in her arms. For forty years I have been moved whenever I remember the emotion with which Yefim and Praskovya painstakingly pencilled their scrawl. And so, long live, for all eternity, Andromache, and Praskovya, and Werther, and Fritz, and Gogol, and Ivan Nikiforovich who a hundred and fifty years ago ate a melon in Mirgorod and recorded the event!'

[Russell Nash]

Quote Originally Posted by Jeff Coleman

[...] I cannot unmake my own birth. In other words, I cannot make myself unexist absolutely. Even if I kill myself now, I can't escape the problem that I existed in the first place, and that problem will continue to exist even if I am no longer here to experience it.

Tonight I was thinking about how impossible is to "unexist absolutely". In literature we find very good examples that, in fact, may validate this possibility.

1) Disappearing act (1953), Richard Matheson. Later, an episode in Twilight Zone, "And When the Sky was Opened".

[Richard Matheson was first represented on the Twilight Zone with the December 11, 1959 episode "And When the Sky Was Opened," adapted by Rod Serling from Matheson's short story "Disappearing Act." After an experimental space flight crash-lands, the three crew members -- who have miraculously survived -- begin experiencing strange sensations. As the episode develops, it becomes obvious that no one but the crewmen have any memory of the crash. . .and before long, no one has any memory whatsoever of the crew itself!] The Twilight Zone: And When the Sky Was Opened Synopsis

2) It didn't happen (1963), Fredric Brown. This is the first of all 4 stories that I'm mentioning here, that I read. For me, then, the other stories look more or less the same.

3) The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada (2002), in Nemonymous two.

4) I may add "His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House", in "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land", by Thomas Ligotti.

[This is a story of labels. Many words become catch phrases (eg Twilight Talk, Uncreated Grave, Ascrobius Escapade etc) and reputations earned by people as well as things, ‘the charlatan Dr Klatt’, ‘the Uncreated Grave’ etc, many wrapped within “ “ (as I said before, to exact purity for words outside the impingement of any deceptive ‘tabula rasa’?). The “annulment of existence” (as the story tells), a parthenogenetic late-labelling...
Twilight Talk’s Mrs Glimm (another Purity Ghost?) has a lodging-house or a brothel? Reputations proceed as well as follow. The use of a disfigured body as another body’s headstone...most disturbing image. Genius!
With such weak glimmering twilight, can there be a shadow at all let alone a higher house (or astrological mansion)?
I found myself “thinking” about this story even before I first read it (this was a second reading of it). It was as if I had known about this story (which I didn’t) before inventing the word ‘Nemonymous’ because uncreation has to come before creation or because one needs a ‘tabula rasa’ to create anything at all.] (Review written by Nemonymous In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK)

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Can nobody be 'not-remembered'?

Yes. Eleanor Rigby.