It is a sad day when a person gains enough insight and understanding to situate every individual on a much longer timeline. People’s ambitions evanesce in a puff of smoke. Self-importance begins to seem like sadism. Even presidents and world leaders shrink to the dimensions of a tiny photo with captions in the textbooks of a distant, unseen century. At the same time, egotism becomes grotesque and celebrity, ridiculous. What does it mean that a person can no longer take the world seriously?
I suppose that depends on the definition of the word world in a mind addled by its higher-order conclusions, when reason leads to Unamuno’s trágico combate and the realization that life and reason are set against each other, that the vital is irrational and the rational, anti-vital. The only question remaining is that of tragedy itself. But that belongs to an order of questions that will always be unanswerable.
