If we stop for a moment on a day’s journey, sagging onto a bench in an orange grove on a rainy day or a perfectly leveled tree stump in the middle of a clearing, we might start thinking chin-in-hand a la Rodin and slowly, after a while, realize something: we live day after day, clothed and refined language-making featherless bipeds, borne aloft by language and wrapped up convincingly in the dramas of our lives as individuals on the surface of a pale blue dot in the corner of a vastly more complex, theoretically infinite universe. This stretches on in both space and time, and we are infinitesimal beings dropped—kerplunk—into the flow of this infinite continuity.
On the face of it, this seems like an improbable and ridiculous farce. It is also more alluring and mysterious than we could probably come to understand over the course of a lifetime of constant thinking, reading, and learning. And yet it is also terribly depressing—nothingness, vastness, absurd and impenetrable complexity, the emptiness of the stars, the limitless insignificance of our lives and goals. In the field of social psychology, terror-management theory asserts that we manage our fear of death by affirming ourselves and our values, egoically holding out for the prospect of our desperate survival and reproduction. By our very nature, we are encouraged to look away from the facts of reality, which we know—we know it, all right—must some day arrive at its menacing conclusion.
Every aspect of our being, for that matter, demands immersion in the things of the world, the rejection of the harsh and nihilistic whispers of the intellect, which says that we are nothing and says it with the frustrating confidence of a know-it-all. This is because the intellect is in the right and our egoic instinct, helplessly deluded—and we can do nothing to alleviate the tension. Miguel de Unamuno understood as much in writing his treatise on this human impasse, The Tragic Sense of Life, about our inner conflict between our life-denying intellect and our irrational but spiritually nourishing desire for immortality, forever at loggerheads with the apparent nature of the world and our complete triviality as tiny little human beings. (And yes, that is my intellect speaking.)
So we find ourselves seduced, troubled, and overrun; we cannot escape ourselves and our doubts from a disturbing sense of reason, nor can we find sufficient solace in our human instincts. Everything seems bleak and impossible, but there is good news: we don’t have to. It is doubting itself that is the savior of life and the value of living. Doubt gives me hope—doubt is my value, my faith, the crux of my paradoxical assertion that life is worth living, if only to hold out in the presence of nothing more than sheer possibility.
Unamuno’s title rests on the compelling assertion that life is naturally tragic, but it also serves as a commentary on the nature of asserting anything about the nature of life: there are no definitive conclusions. There is nothing in life that makes it inherently tragic, although that exists as a compelling possibility. The doubt and our painful inner tug-of-war are the facts, whereas the conclusion, our human response to these facts, exists in a state of perpetual evolution. There is no correct attitude toward life, no definitive perception; we have merely an array, an emotional continuum, where some attitudes are bright and sunlit and surprising and others, dark and overcast and disturbing. And there is always room for the glorious variety of everything between these two extremes.
Herein lies the sustenance of art and art-making together with an aesthetics that is self-renewing. Depending on the secret life of things normally overlooked, the light in the interstices and the darkness among the trees, the possibility of a hidden value that it merely postulates, art is the assertion of a possibility, held at arm’s length for us to relive in order to be revived. The artist takes the often painful unease of that inner conflict, really deriving from an uncertainty inherent to our human existence, and gives a response, a possible answer—an answer that we can never definitively affirm.
Art gives us questions, possibilities, variety. Giving an answer, whether it be tentative or dogmatic (as with religion), is blotting out the wonderful mystery of the question, the emotive quest of searching for an answer that might not even exist. Answers also undervalue the question, which stands alone as an element unto itself, something that maybe would never have existed otherwise.
And here we are, walking the fine line between certainty and curiosity, comfort and wonder, delusion and disturbance, fulfillment and emptiness. Many people think that falling to one side or the other is not only necessary but inevitable, and they find themselves flopping out early to put a stop to the endless indecision. And yet I find myself, time and again, in the perpetual temptation of the game, the good-old human game: to balance and balance again, then to keep on balancing. And that is because indecision, ladies and gentleman, is life itself; life, I have to conclude, is a matter far too delicate to decide.
