Stories

Your life, the people that come in and out of it, the emotions that seem to take up all the space around you, that are so real and pervasive, the jobs you go through, the ups and downs with your girlfriends and boyfriends, all the letters and phone conversations, all the lies and truths, struggles, achievements, love and hate, the photographs you take, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, your personality, the sound of your voice. Your life, your story, infinitely intricate, is but one among billions on this planet. And this planet is probably just one among billions of planets that are home to sentient beings who also go through their own unique, endlessly beautiful, painful, joyful and complex stories. Both their stories and ours are written only to be forgotten shortly after death writes their final chapter. Your children might remember you, you might even be one of the few that have done something great for which millions of people remember them after they die, but there will come a day when our precious planet is annihilated along with all the life that has arisen on it. And then nobody will remember Gandhi, Beethoven, Picasso, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Queen Victoria or Kermit the Frog, let alone your life or mine. Any trace of anything that ever happened on planet Earth will be pulverised and the universe will carry on as if human history had never occurred.

How many other intelligent and conscious life forms might have existed in the universe that had a history like that of the human race, complete with civilisations, empires, technological and moral progress, art, and, most importantly, billions of little people that asked themselves what the hell was this joke called life supposed to mean? Just us? A handful of them? Billions? I'm inclined to believe the latter, but any answer seems equally puzzling to me. If indeed there are, have been and will be billions of civilisations comparable in richness to the human race, what sort of a universe is this that incessantly invents these magnificent histories/stories, a million at a time, only to mercilessly destroy them later? It conjures up the image of an extremely talented and infinitely prolific writer that threw his books in the fire just as he'd finished writing the last page. Why would he do that? Why bother writing the story in the first place? You could say that the universe, unlike an actual writer, is not aware that it is writing a story, or trillions of them, or that the stories are just writing themselves, or that it is us who choose to see things as stories. That's all very reasonable, but still, is it not striking that the most magnificent of all storytellers is not even aware that it is creating stories all the time, or that it is not aware at all, or that it is simply sprouting conscious life that then worships it or, like me, asks it what it's playing at, creating and destroying all these precious stories? What's the point of all that? Could there possibly not be a point? Really?