Towards Rebirth
The Final Chapter of my unpublished manuscript
I have spent a long time looking back.
Not out of nostalgia, though there is beauty in the backward glance that I will not pretend to have transcended. But out of necessity. Because the question I set out to answer — what does it mean to live a meaningful life, in this world, at this moment, with what we know and cannot unknow — required me to understand how we got here before I could say anything honest about where we might go.
So I looked back. Into the halls of memory, which are also the halls of history, which are also, in the end, the same hall. I walked them slowly. I made notes. I took my time.
What I found there was beauty and horror in proportions that I was not fully prepared for, though I thought I was. The beauty is real. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. The Magnificat. The Analects. The geometry of a Gothic arch. The moment when Beethoven, deaf, conducted the Ninth and turned around afterward to see the audience applauding because he could not hear them. The night the Berlin Wall came down. The ordinary afternoon in an ordinary kitchen when someone who loves you makes you something to eat without being asked. These things happened. They are part of what is real. They are evidence of something the purely materialist account of existence cannot accommodate, which is that consciousness, when it orients itself outward — toward the other, toward the unknown, toward the not-yet — produces things of such improbable beauty that the universe seems to have been waiting for them.
The horror is also real. I will not catalog it here. You know it. You carry some of it. The point is not to enumerate the suffering but to acknowledge that it exists in the same world as the Ninth Symphony, that both are real, and that any account of meaning that cannot hold both is not an account of meaning but a form of escape.
I have made my notes. I have taken my leave.
I am done looking back.
