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Pretzelbrain
Mar. 1st, 2024 11:55 pmToday I sat in the hot bathtub and listened to some nice piano music.
The air felt warm and very humid in my lungs, and it was quiet. For a while I imagined I was a well-to-do Greek citizen, taking an outdoor bath on a hillside on a summer evening, thousands of years ago in southern Greece. Then I thought about all the people yet unborn, in the future, who will take quiet baths in idyllic settings.
I could just as easily feel a kinship with them. They could be just as exotic to a person living in the present. Just as the anonymous Greek person I imagine a kinship with, I have potential kinship in this moment, with millions of other people in the future as well as the past.
All of those moments proceeded like this one, in comfortable isolation and silence. In fact, the isolation is such a part of the setting that the only way to feel connected with these people is by imagining them. If we could communicate, and actually did, it would be some other kind of moment.
So there’s a set of people taking a bath in the past, the future, and the present. And among them is a set of people who are imagining a kinship with all the others doing the same. And within that set is a group of people who realize that the isolation is a fundamental part of the situation, and real connection can never happen. And so, four levels of nesting deep, I arrive at a group of people that I can currently feel kinship with: We share this very realization, here in this un-share-able moment.
There are millions of us here.
And every one of us wrestles with the idea that this is just an idea. And then we set it aside, and accept that all we can do is be alone and present for this unique iteration of now. Embracing what is simultaneously infinite and nothing.
On this imaginary Grecian mountainside, I feel the air pass over my shoulders, bearing remnants of heat from the sunset farther up on the hill, as it eases down towards the ocean, split into a gallery along the walls of my bath by dark fluted columns, cut and stacked by hands that were already dust long before I was born, and I look up through the missing roof at the stars where distant future humans will live long after I am dust… And I do my best to be here, and not think about it, as the invisible crowd presses in.
The air felt warm and very humid in my lungs, and it was quiet. For a while I imagined I was a well-to-do Greek citizen, taking an outdoor bath on a hillside on a summer evening, thousands of years ago in southern Greece. Then I thought about all the people yet unborn, in the future, who will take quiet baths in idyllic settings.
I could just as easily feel a kinship with them. They could be just as exotic to a person living in the present. Just as the anonymous Greek person I imagine a kinship with, I have potential kinship in this moment, with millions of other people in the future as well as the past.
All of those moments proceeded like this one, in comfortable isolation and silence. In fact, the isolation is such a part of the setting that the only way to feel connected with these people is by imagining them. If we could communicate, and actually did, it would be some other kind of moment.
So there’s a set of people taking a bath in the past, the future, and the present. And among them is a set of people who are imagining a kinship with all the others doing the same. And within that set is a group of people who realize that the isolation is a fundamental part of the situation, and real connection can never happen. And so, four levels of nesting deep, I arrive at a group of people that I can currently feel kinship with: We share this very realization, here in this un-share-able moment.
There are millions of us here.
And every one of us wrestles with the idea that this is just an idea. And then we set it aside, and accept that all we can do is be alone and present for this unique iteration of now. Embracing what is simultaneously infinite and nothing.
On this imaginary Grecian mountainside, I feel the air pass over my shoulders, bearing remnants of heat from the sunset farther up on the hill, as it eases down towards the ocean, split into a gallery along the walls of my bath by dark fluted columns, cut and stacked by hands that were already dust long before I was born, and I look up through the missing roof at the stars where distant future humans will live long after I am dust… And I do my best to be here, and not think about it, as the invisible crowd presses in.
