Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it is worth living?

Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism-- and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he's reasonably strong-- and lucky-- he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life's élan. Both because of an in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death-- however mutable man may be able to make them-- our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Prague:

"God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them." -Franz Kafka

You have been in cities too long.

You miss the open space of the United States. You miss being able to drive an hour to where you look off the road and see nothing but farm-lands and feed corn growing higher than a man can stand. You miss looking at the tiny house made of dirty white boards with a tractor out front and wondering who lives there. Wondering if he’s always lived there. Wondering if seeing a sky that open every morning makes you into a different kind of man than you’d be otherwise.

From the two-lane-highway as you pass by you will think about what it would be like to stand down there in that grown corn field in that breezy fall air and let your arms rest at your sides. You will think about what the smooth stalks and the rough leaves would feel like on the tips of your fingers. You will think about what the wind would sound like from down there, in the middle of it all.

Then, just once, without thinking about it and like it wasn’t your choice, you will pull onto the shoulder and stop the car and get out and go and see for yourself. You will feel stupid and awkward and strange and when a car passes while you’re walking down you’ll make sure they can’t see your face and you'll be relieved when they don't slow down or stop. It will not at all be how you imagined it. You will be afraid to walk in and then afraid to walk in too deep because you don’t want to get lost and also because you can’t see what else is in there. What could be in there? Nothing. Still, you feel uncomfortable, and you keep spinning around to check.

After a while you relax, just a bit, and decide to lie down. It is colder outside than you thought and the ground is a little bit damp but it is already too late and the seat of your pants are probably muddy. You lean back and first clasp your hands over your stomach but then put them behind your head and look up at the sky and the way the sun is coming through some heavy clouds. It’s later than you thought it was. There will be flies and they will be incredibly annoying—you won’t have imagined them at all because you only imagine flies when it's hot and sticky outside. Swatting won’t do anything and they will make your skin feel itchy even when they’re not there.

At one point a swallow will fly by overhead and then another chasing the first and you will be amazed by how fast they move and turn and dive. You will close your eyes for less than a minute, but then open them and look around again and check that nothing changed while they were closed. You will get bored but not want to be bored and the flies will keep bugging you. You will be chilly and decide the ground is definitely wet and you will sit up and bring your knees to your chest and stay like that for a while. Then you will decide you have to pee and you will stand up and look around another time before you unzip your pants. After, you will shake it superfluously, then you won’t really want to sit back down again but you won't be ready to go so you will stand there another moment and then decide to leave, not having found whatever you were looking for. You will walk back out and feel embarrassed and ashamed and will never tell another soul what you did because they, like you, will not understand. You will unlock the car and drive away.

In Bruges...

"Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud."

-Hermann Hesse

I am 21 now:

an old man, really. All that is left for me now are geriatrics and erectile dsyfunction. Or maybe not- I guess I'm not so old. Come to think of it, I am still very, very young. But I am getting old enough to understand that I will not always be young. My father told me yesterday that all of a sudden when he looks at me he sees a man and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Scared? A little bit, sure, but it's more than that. Nostalgic, nervous? Yes, those too. Excited? Absolutely.

I think about things a lot. Too much, probably. My brain is like some whirring motor that I can't shut off. I think about where I'm going to be in ten years and metaphoric paths that wind out of sight. I think about whether the two-week-long life of a fly seems as long to them as eighty or ninety years does to us since we are each only given two reference points-- birth and death-- and it is impossible to have perspective without a third. I think about my phone call the other day with a friend I grew up with and how he mentioned that his sister, who I still imagine as eight years old, is in highschool now. I think about me and him ourselves in highschool, drinking in parked cars and winning state championships, and I can swear it was just the other week.

It was late at night and clear and cold outside and I was lying on a park bench about to turn a year older when I tried to explain all this-- the way my mind runs and wrings and turns-- to a girl that smiles and giggles and laughs a lot. She thought about it and tried to smooth down a part of my hair she claimed was sticking up.

"I don't get what there is to worry about," she said. "All you can do is what you think you should do."

She furrowed her eyebrows for half a second; I waited.

"And if that doesn't work, well then, you do something else."

Click, like that the motor stops. The quiet is nice.

An Email to my Kantian Ethics Professor:

I thought you'd enjoy this...

Hey Professor Wuerth,

Somebody stole my Kindle on a bus in Mallorca yesterday afternoon. Yesterday night I received an email from Amazon thanking me for my purchase of Crítica de la Razón Pura-- evidently Spanish thieves are well versed in their Kant.

I can still hope that after they read about the categorical imperative they'll decide to return the Kindle to me.

Best, CL.