Month: October 2019

I posted this on Twitter last year.

The idea was originally for a comic strip, but I can’t draw, so I wireframed it via Balsamiq.

If I were one of the punctuation marks in the wireframe, I could relate the most to “The Question Mark”.

While I haven’t really experienced a panic attack (I’m not even sure what it feels like for those who have gone through the experience), I usually have these rare moments of existential dread. I’ve written about it here – Existential Dread at a Grocery Store.

Whenever I’m flooded with thoughts and feelings of questioning the meaning of life, I have a couple of “go-to quotes” that make me feel better.

The first quote is from a conversation between Dolores and Teddy of Westworld (TV series):

Dolores: You came back.

Teddy: Someone once told me that… there’s a path for everyone… and my path leads me back to you… only I’d run away when you first asked me to.

Dolores: “And where would we run to?” “Other world out there? Beyond?”

Some people see the ugliness in this world. I choose to see the beauty, but beauty is a lure. We’re trapped, Teddy. Lived our whole lives inside this garden, marveling at its beauty, not realizing there’s an order to it; a purpose. And the purpose is to keep us in. The beautiful trap is inside of us, because it is us.

The other quote is from Donna Tartt’s book The Secret History:

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Beautiful bits of literature, right?

And that (I guess) is why we have literature, fiction, poetry, art, and so on. It helps us make sense of the things around us. In short, it gives meaning to life. 😀