...Or Maybe I Just Need A Bit More Sleep

There are, if one is lucky, at least two seminal points of transition in our emotional and intellectual development as humans. The first is from child to adult, having mostly to do with recognizing responsibility, realizing one's agency and earning a perspective that allows the benificent combination of reason, compassion, wisdom and some sense of calm. Please note that this transition is by no means automatic, as a mere function of accumulated age. Most of us know several people very old indeed whose primary achievement in that time is simply to not have yet died.

The second transition point, even less common than the first one, is from adult to mortal. It's trickier than the first one as the point of departure is almost always one of deep Kierkegaardian crisis, where a person not just sort of guesses at, but finally and irrevocably knows they will one day die. Imagining the moment the last light is translated into images by your eyes is not a jolly good time, not by any stretch. It does make one drive a bit more safely. The really really old folks doing 35 in the right-hand lane on the freeway haven't succumbed to any cliché gerontological atrophy; they've simply put it together that life is too precious to risk on your spatial relationship to a yellow light. Plus, dang, look at that tree, young person. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

Recognizing someone who's made that switch to the latter is hard though because there are swarms and swarms of pretenders. The good news is, the pretenders aren't that hard to spot. It's the eyeliner that generally gives them away.

If you do find yourself in the company of an honest-to-Jeebus mortal, do yourself a favor and stay put. These are people who have grasped the black, yawning awe of finitude and don't rush to embrace it, but nod to it with knowing reverence. They know. And as a result, they have little time for the petty hysterics of demagoguery or factionalism or any of the self-limiting thought systems that pretend to know and thus insist on their self-perpetuating dogma versus that other lot who know just as well, but in exactly the opposite way. As a result, the actual mortals are immune to the allure of surety. There's no buy-in to anything whose primary selling point is the "mystery" of its own internal contradictions. The only real human depth is in truth and the only real human truth is "I don't know." Everything else is unverifiable.

If I seem a bit maudlin and mawkish, it's because I've been made so by a series of slow circumstances as I watch public figures I admire grapple with disease and waste away to nothing before my eyes. Had I made the last transition myself, I'd observe with more stoicism and resigned dignity, not just on my behalf but for theirs as well. Instead I choose to be grumpy about it and succumb to fits of unwarranted melancholia, resulting in the teenage-girl sop you've had the misfortune to read here.

Christopher Hitchens is a controversialist and kind of a motherfucker, but how many American public intellectuals do we actually have? Sure, we had to import him, but he's still with us. I'm not an atheist, but he sometimes makes me wish I were. Now he's got esophageal cancer and the odds are not good.

One of my great heroes, the writer and satirist Terry Pratchett, has been beset with early onset Alzheimer's which renders him unable to speak coherently or smoothly (though he can still write) so that even in this clip he has to have a surrogate deliver the speech he wrote (he's actually the guy in the long beard, nodding along in silence). I get to watch his own brain squeeze itself out of existence.

Roger Ebert, the Fat Guy Film Critic, has lost his voice and his ability to eat because of various cancer-related illnesses in the mouth and neck. Luckily he can still write. Sneaky, sometimes heartbreaking essays about various and sundry things that I regard much higher than his film criticism as it seems like now everything he reviews starts with a minumum level of three stars (out of four). His condition seems to have mellowed some of his more strident critical points of attack (bad movies are small things), in exchange for a blossoming of human understanding.

What they have in common is the late-game mastery of the collision of rationality and love. A stark practicality rooted in human betterment, even against our wills. The trouble is the rest of us, in for a pound on the distractions of the moment, are too distracted by the car-alarm of the everyday to listen with the attention their perspectives deserve.

It might just be that I really don't want to put up Christmas decorations. I don't think my kids will buy any of these arguments from perspective. Not unless they're delivered via NintendoDS-3D.