Ars longa, life ain’t shit

Another prose experiment from graduate school, this essay is based on the ancient aphorism “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

My life doesn’t mean shit.

I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m not depressed. I’m not having a bad day. I’m just recognizing what I believe is a basic truth of existence—at least for my existence.

In one of my graduate school writing classes, the professor once told us students, “Your feelings don’t matter. What matters is the writing.” Our pain, our fears, all our personal quirks that interfere with the writing process—get over them or don’t write, he said. The writing is what’s important.

That kind of statement is enough to make anybody, especially sensitive, suffering writer types like me, feel just a little bit hurt. Yet what the professor said reminded me of my old boss from my longest lived undergraduate student job, who would shrug off many problems by saying “One hundred years from now, what difference will it make?” I thought about what my old boss used to say as the professor scolded my class about what was wrong with our writing. I thought about my own struggles with hammering my brain-burning memories into something for public comprehension. My feelings don’t matter?

But then, what has a better chance of existing 100 years from now, my writing or myself? No contest there. What do I write for? Money? Fame? My self-satisfaction?

When people think of Vincent Van Gogh, a few quick bits of information may come to mind: went nuts, cut off his ear, paintings now worth tens of millions of dollars. One may learn about how abjectly miserable his life was, that nobody, not even his supportive, steady-job holding brother, saw his work as great or even good while he lived—but the multi-million-dollar status his work holds today outshines all that in the eyes of the living now. His suffering was “worth it” because everybody knows he was a genius now. I’m sure Van Gogh would have appreciated people letting him know this when he was living in a hole and couldn’t sell a single painting. But he’s dead now, and nobody’s alive who would shed tears in mourning for him.

Van Gogh’s life doesn’t mean shit. Nobody would give a damn if he hadn’t left something he created behind when he left this life with a self-inflicted gunshot in 1890.

I’m a typical human being in that the state of my life matters more than almost anything. My financial well-being, my health, my happiness—those are important to me because I live in my skin all by myself. Nobody sees what I see or feels what I feel. I’m one person out of 7 billion and counting who has the ultimate burden of feeding, clothing, housing and contenting herself. And one day, I’m going to be dead. Sure, I have friends, family and other loved ones who’ll miss me when I’m gone, but they’ll all be dead eventually, too.

My individual life, what I’m experiencing now, this moment, is not important. I am nothing but the speck of the earth in the eye of the sun, alive but infinitesimally tiny.

Some of everything beautiful and horrible has happened to me. More comedy and tragedy may come. But 100 years from now nobody will be crying over my traumas or smiling over my delights — or maybe they will, because I write.

I may not even make a living as a writer, not less get rich and famous. I may suffer and die miserably. I may hit the Lotto and live to be 100 on a few million dollars. Either way, it doesn’t matter if I don’t leave something lasting behind when I die.

Why do I write? Why do I live? So I can create something that people might experience 100 years from now.

If I really accept that my life as I live now doesn’t mean jack, I feel that I may be close to freedom. I’ve spent so much of my life in worry and fear. I have written all my life, and every day I write I add something to my cultural and the collective human legacy. If I died tomorrow, I’d have over 40 years of creativity on paper for someone, someday, to appreciate. If I lived to be 100, I’d have more time to leave even more and better work for posterity. Whether I succeed or not in this life doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I wish I could see forever. I would like to see eternity without the burden of being one of the living. My ego wants to know if my work lives in people’s minds after me. I would like to let go of the big “I” that won’t let go. I want to be free of my self.

I hold no beliefs in gods or spirits, but I need the egoless release from the self that many people turn to religion to receive. Conceding to the insignificance of my life to my art, to the art that eventually will not belong to me, but to the living, feels close to that release to me.