Nothing Lasts Forever

The cyclical nature of the universe and the impermanence of all things and situations are closely linked.

When we are young, we don’t think about death. We feel life is limitless. Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited called it the ‘languor of youth’ – those heady days when we are young and everything is ahead of us, when everything seems possible. We can waste as much time as we want, because there is so much ahead. But time is not limitless. We must use it well.

In his book The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles wrote that because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well and, yet, everything happens only a certain number of times.

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five more times? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless”.

A hundred or so years ago, Somerset Maughan wrote The Moon and a Sixpence, a book about the painter Paul Gaugin. For that era, the book was very perceptive. Maughan writes at one point:

“Civilised man practices a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life”.

Later Maughan writes: “Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates, and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd”.

The overriding theme of Maughan’s book, and the later period of Gauguin’s life, is that we should do whatever drives us on, and not let anything get in the way. Life is short.

Most people lead mediocre lives because they never followed their desires, and for all his monumental failings, Gauguin at least cannot be accused of that. He literally ‘left everything behind’, money, wife, kids, house, well-paid job, to live in poverty so he could paint. He didn’t worry about what people thought. How many people can say that? Society is policed by its own citizens because nobody wants to step out of line and ‘seem different’. Of course, it goes without saying that our lifestyle choices should never hurt others.

Charlie Kaufman wrote three of my favourite film scripts, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (about wiping memories of past loves so you can start afresh, free), Being John Malkovitch (about stepping inside the mind of another person), and Adaptation (about how we must change to progress through life). His fourth film script, Synecdoche, New York, was about our journey through life, the slow annihilation of hope as we slip towards death.

Or as he put it towards the end of the film:

“When do we finally admit our exciting future is now behind us?”.

We must accept though that nothing lasts forever. Eckhart Tolle summed it up well when recounting in The Power of Now the words that a Buddhist monk once told him:

“All I have learned in twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know”.

7 June 2022

[Book review: Somerset Maughan – “The Moon and a Sixpence”]