Friday, August 10, 2018

Courting Oblivion



Oblivion is around the corner. First of all it is something that all living forms face, a precipice that’s as dramatic as birth. From the moment you’re born, you begin to face its prospect. It’s like a black hole since it disposes of material essence. The minute you cross the event horizon of oblivion you become forgettable and eventually you’re no longer even a memory or footnote, since history itself is sucked into the juggernaut of non-being. But oblivion is also metaphorical. When you’re going through a particularly self-abnegating period, you toy with oblivion when you do things of a self-destructive or maladaptive nature. You sport the kind of devil-may-care attitude you might have been more cautious to exhibit at a period when you liked yourself and took the gift of life more seriously. You do something dangerous or something which makes you feel horrible about yourself, indulging an addiction or falling victim to some kind of predatory perversion, a chain reaction of transgression, an infernal machine that can only be satisfied by constantly raising the ante. Sometimes, in fact, those caught up in maelstroms of self-hatred don’t realize that they’re courting oblivion until it’s too late. You read stories about people popping too many pills, but how many of them are conscious of the fact that they're on the way to the longest sleep they’ll ever take? You can throw yourself off a cliff, or do something that's so shameful and abhorrent that by doing it you have already stepped over the line.

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