Here Comes Oblivion

Oblivion is a hard concept to grasp, primarily since it’s so personal, referencing as it does the end of subjectivity, yours that is. For instance, you can hypothesize about the nature of time and what came before the Big Bang. Alan Lightman addressed this very subject in an article entitled  "What Came Before the Big Bang?"(Harper’s, January 2016). Such discussions weighted towards theoretical physics and cosmology have enlightenment rationalism behind them. So that while you’re left with no real answers, you’re not a lost intellectual soul, whose bearings have been ripped asunder. However, utter oblivion is a more bitter pill to swallow since it takes an important person out the discussion, you. There's a piece of scientific apocrypha that has Lavoisier blinking after his head drops from the guillotine. Most of the meditations on this have to do with the fact of whether human will could triumph in an instance where the neck is severed from the head, but the real point probably relates to the fact that there are going to be fractures to the skull when the head falls from the guillotine to the ground.  One day, regardless of your condition, you're seeing the world through a lens that's made up of a vast history of experience and associations and the next there's no one home looking at anything with the world going on like one of those old NR films which eluded the censor by avoiding a rating.