Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - February 2020: On and On and On (No and No and No)

Good morning/afternoon/evening!

In Sartre's No Exit, Garcin must spend his afterlife in a drab little room with no way out. Two other souls become his roommates--and because this room lacks mirrors or even reflective surfaces, Garcin can only see himself if he stares deeply enough into one of his companions' pupils. Here, sleep is obsolete, impossible, as is blinking. Why would a ghost need eyelids? 

No Exit might be the most frightening story I've ever read.

I wonder what happens after we die. Often, I envision coming back to earth as something else. Reincarnation seems like a logical possibility, but so does total oblivion--and whether you fall somewhere on or beyond this belief spectrum, you're bound to have questions. If reincarnation is real, why don't we remember previous lives? By that same token, if any afterlife is real, why don't we remember it here on earth?

"Because there's nothing," some might reply. "If there were anything other than oblivion, we'd know."

Would we? Every sentence of this newsletter could be a question. Maybe we're programmed to forget past lives. After all, what actor rehearses for roles they already played? Even immortals would probably enjoy downtime and the anticipation of resting their eyes. "So it comes to this; one doesn't need rest," Garcin says. "Why bother about sleep if one isn't sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn't it? Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break."

This needs to feel like our only life. What's the point in learning lessons if you know you have eternity to procrastinate? If you gave me a machine that produced unlimited cold-brew coffee at no cost, I'd soon hate the stuff--while at the same time imbibing until my heart exploded. If reincarnation is real, the fact that we remember nothing but this life might be a feature, not a bug, with eternity a traumatic experience--something we cry and scream out of our systems upon birth.

Do people sleep in Heaven? 

Does the sun rise and set there?

I think about how much I could accomplish if I didn't have to rest, but this calls to mind a world lit in fluorescent lights. I love my eyelids. I love blinking almost as much as the soft weight of my cardigan and the smell of fresh coffee, and perhaps life gets value from its tendency to run out. My coffee, if I never touched it, might evaporate, drawn over some massive length of time back into the air.

Why yes, I have had an existential crisis.

Then again, who hasn't? What valuable thing are you not afraid of losing? I write because even the electronic data that make up these words will someday vanish--and even if I really do have all the time in the multiverse, something must be at stake right now. This coffee's actually been sitting out for a day, a ghostly evaporation ring circling the mug's inside like a high-water mark. Time must feel like it's running out, and maybe we may get born in order to finally rest, to take a break from eternity and defy an existence with no exit. 

And if it turns out we get to come back to life again and again, may we never know.

Infinite Regards,

Jay