Yeah yeah, I know there's no such thing as immortality.. just... suspend your disbelief for a moment. This thought struck me after my last accident. If one were immortal, what would be the immediate tell-tale signs? Sure there's the obvious idea that you outlive everybody around you, but what if they were all immortal too?
What if your entire life were one long hell and every once in a while your memory and reality are just sort of "reset"? Sartre already covered this in a way with his play "No Exit" where his main character says in the end : "Hell is other people". The difference is that his characters were aware that they were in hell. And I understand, too, that his idea was that our own worry of self perception basically crucifies us on a daily basis... but that's subjective. I mean other people's opinions don't matter at all to a lot of people, so a hell with other people would be nothing, really.
For those who live more in their heads, perhaps an eternal illusion would be more of a hell. I live in my head most of the time, I admit, and I am constantly recalling the world around me and using things I read to form a basis for a thought or an opinion. Often I reach the conclusion that there is no reality at all, that it is just an image in my mind. The old floating brain idea. I guess I'm kind of stuck there, honestly. From there a million different explanations can be created to explain away my perceptions. The human condition seems to be that we constantly strive for something that isn't there.. That, to me, sounds like hell. A constant struggle to make a ripple with no way to.
And I'm not speaking of my own personal ripples, but rather great movements that, though they create a splash initially, seem to leave no ripples. People may still believe in the basic ideas they expressed, but nothing changes, there are no ripples. The ideas that are expressed are just expressions of ideas that were already there. Absurdists weren't the first to think that there was no rhyme or reason to life. That's age old. When the fog of our prehistoric minds began to clear we began to form language and make advances in order to make some form of order out of the chaos around us.. an attempt to make sense of something as absurd as life...
So there are no ideas that are new... it's a hard bitter pill to swallow. That's not to say there isn't plenty more to discover in our physical confines, but the idea itself... that pure immutable... the "form" was noted by Aristotle and dropped. Even he didn't create it, he didn't call it into being by remarking it was there. If anything, man seems to have gone as far from that idea as possible. Various religions sprung up and grew and seemed to go in the opposite direction from what should have been taken from that thought.
If idea is god, then do we just exist to give it a way to enter the physical reality? Or is idea our way to escape physical reality? Seems apt either way. Men get ideas, which seem to already exist, and when it enters their minds they begin the act of creation and that idea receives a physical expression. In this way, ripples abound! If you look at things in this way, there are waves out there stories high!
But it feels too "New Age" to say that ideas are an entity separate from us that moves and intersects us like some dimension expressed in string theory or something. That's the limits of my understanding... I constantly pace the edges like a caged tiger, looking for any weakness in the perimeter, but I can never find it due to limited knowledge and comprehension - which leads to the idea that this is hell. A guilded cage. Perhaps we're in some alium's zoo.
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