...mortality...

Rest in peace, Richard O'Brien, 1990-2010.

I went to his memorial service today, and now I'm thinking about death. He was nineteen, a freshman in college, had just joined a fraternity, is the protaganist in many funny stories told by his friends and usually involving the consumption of too much alcohol. He died in a skiing accident, three days ago - he hit a tree, and ski patrol said that he died instantly.

It's not fair. He wasn't ready.

I guess I've never been this close to death before. I know people who have died, but they were old, or I was young. Richard's death is shockingly, startlingly, unsettlingly close to home. It opens up a wide and terrifying possibility... a world where any of the happy, healthy, brilliantly alive people around me could leave and never come back. Never. Somebody said to me the other day that he thinks "never" is one of the most powerful words, along with "always." I have to agree, and (thank you, liberal arts) I have to relate it to one of my classes.

This class is about Magical Realism, the literary genre, and the texts we've been reading deal a lot with time: stretching it, flipping it, reversing it. We read a story for class today that tries to create a literary möbius strip out of the life of a nineteenth century Cuban aristocrat; time advances backwards, beginning with the events leading to his death, and ending with the events leading to his birth. It's confusing, and complicated, and imperfect as a realization of the concept... but it illustrates the force of time.

"Never" and "always" are scary in their establishment of the infinite. In the creation, or de-creation (what magical realism scholars might call "desvivir" or "deshacer"), there is a permanence unaffected by any human action. There is an inevitability to that infinite - like the infinity of a möbius strip - that is terrifying in its utterly unshakeable power.

Human mortality is a finite manifestation of that power.