A Lovely Hypothetical

I'm going to attempt to prove something that is obvious. Hopefully the realizations that I am trying to lead you to have the same striking effect on you as they have had on me.

To begin, here is a brief caveat, which bolsters the point I'm trying to make by unfairly casting aside the criticisms of one who might not get it. You might not get it. You might be one of those ambitious folks, who believes in the power of materials, the power of greed and the power of power, in the superiority of quantity over quality. Such a materialistic view of experience, a worldview that dictates that a vast collection of mediocre memories is superior to a indulgence in a select, prime and dearly-held memories, is not necessarily wrong. I would deeply disagree with it, maybe even discourage it and blame such a worldview and its relatives for the many problems human bees have created in the world today.

So the proposition is this. You have a choice to make, a choice between immortality and love. If you choose immortality you will be immortal, in a way. You will never die. You won't die of natural causes and you won't die of any injury you suffer. You can choose to live as whatever age you desire, from infancy to senility, if you choose. In this scenario you could theoretically live until the end of the universe, beyond the extinction of human beings, beyond the destruction of the sun and beyond the point in time when the earth becomes unlivable for all living things.

You can die, if you want to. This is not true immortality. You can commit suicide, or if the ritual does not suit you, you could just will yourself to death. As long as you want death, it will come to you. As long as you want life, you will live forever.

The catch to this scenario is that your life will be dull. You would not be capable of really feeling any extreme or worthwhile emotion. It wouldn't exactly be shades of grey, but the colors would certainly be some faded, pastel shadow of what they could be. There'd be laughter and enjoyment, distress and anger. You'd still be able to taste and enjoy or dislike food. But nothing will taste as good or as bad as it should. Additionally, no person will be able to stir any emotion in you at all. Human beings become fleshy companions, incapable of intellectually, physically, emotionally or sexually satisfying you. But you pretty much immortal.

The other choice is simple. Start by imagining the perfect person, the most attractive and alluring person you can possibly imagine. Now picture spending the perfect day with that person. Imagine the feeling that comes with that experience, the knowledge that nothing can be any better than the moments, no feeling more enjoyable and no love more fulfilling that this set of 24 consecutive hours.

You can do anything with anyone. You can have a 24 hour sex session with Beyonce (or Ryan Gosling etc.) or spend a day discussing scientific theories with Albert Einstein or Madame Curie etc) or have a 24 hour long physics conversation while having sex with a person who has Beyonce's looks and Albert Einstein's intelligence. Whatever you and up doing and with whomever you end up doing it, there are two guarantees. The first is that's during this day, you will be the happiest you ever have been or could be. The second is that, when you look at that person, whatever sexy Frankenstein's monster you concoct, your heart will become unhealthily bloated with love and adoration.

Actually, there's a third guarantee. At the end of the day, you drop dead.

I assume that, despite the dropping dead part, most people would go with the second option without much thought. Everyone to whom I have posed this scenario did.

So let's make it a little less appealing. What if the duration that that perfect experience is only twelve hours? What if it's only one? What if its half and hour or even just a minute or two?

What if this happens. You walk down a busy street and see the most beautiful person you ever laid eyes on. (S)he looks up at just the right moment and the two of you lock eyes. In just that half second of mutual gazing, you feel more love than you've ever felt, than you ever thought you could feel. Inexplicably, you feel happier than can be imagined and you start laughing and crying and jumping up and down and waving your hands. That's how joyous you are in this fifth of a second. You feel like a full pint of beer, so filled over that the foamy head starts bubbling down the sides of the glass.

Then, after exactly one second full of this feeling passes, you collapse to the sidewalk, dead.

What would you give up for even just a second of that feeling?

Snape’s Redemption

I stumbled across this picture while browsing reddit, so this isn’t a completely random post written years after the conclusion of the Harry Potter series. I mean it is, but it isn’t random to me.

Snape is an interesting character. He’s smart and witty and (for most of the series) he is completely and nearly irredeemably evil. He is irredeemable because, although Snape doesn’t spend the entirety of the books as the villain (even before the grand reveal in the final novel), Harry Potter, the character through the events of the story are filtered never comes to trust him. In the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry accuses Snape of performing some elaborate curse on his broom to kill him, or worse: ruin Gryffindor’s chances to win the House Quidditch Cup.

Then, at the end of the story, Harry, Ron and Hermione learn that Professor Quirrel was performing the curse and it was Snape who saved Harry’s life by performing the necessary counter curse to keep Harry’s broom in the air. Hermione latches onto this, Snape’s first redemptive quality, and internalizes it for the rest of the story. She is the only one of the trio and her belief in Snape is quickly labeled as a naïve trust in all things authorial and professorial. Harry continues to see Snape well within the spectrum evil, even after Snape saves him from Barty Crouch Jr. at the end of the Goblet of Fire and even while Snape is teaching Harry Occulmency to protect his mind from Voldemort in the Order of the Phoenix. Every single one of Harry’s assertions, and everyone else’s suspicions about the Snape’s true nature are confirmed when he kill Albus Dumbledore.

It just goes to show you that you should never ever trust a biased narrator.

Because we eventually learn the truth about Snape, his motivations and his place in the battle between good and evil. And, most importantly, we learn that love was the key to it all. Snape’s love for Lily Potter was what drove him from Voldemort and the Death Eaters. It was what convinced Dumbledore to put his absolute, highest trust in Snape. It is what convinced the Potions professor to die so Harry Potter could die…and then live, again.

And thus, finally, Severus Snape is wholly redeemed. One of Harry’s children is named in his honor. Fans clamor around the hero they once reviled. You see, he was a double agent the whole time! His soul, quite unlike his greying, frayed underpants, is in fact pure and clean. And so the people draw the kinds of pictures seen above, of Severus slouching against the Mirror of Erised with his one true dream, his only love trapped in the glass behind him, immortalizing what was once an unimaginable perspective of Severus Snape.

Wrap a bow on that folks, because that’s the moral of this story. Love conquers all. Lily’s love for Harry protected him from Voldemort’s killing curse. Snape’s love for Lily allowed Harry to avenge Voldemort’s death. Rowling wants us to cheer for him.

But I still hate him.

In my eyes, Snape is still that slimy, jealous prick who I reviled for the first six novels of the series. His story has an added twist and it makes it particularly tragic and even sympathetic because imagine loving someone and never being able to requite that love. Imagine watching your childhood crush date, marry and have a child with your childhood bully. Then imagine joining an organization of pure evil, pitting yourself against the single person you ever claimed to love. Imagine standing by as your comrades kill thousands, torment millions of innocent wizards and defenseless muggles, again as the one person you love struggles to fight against you.

Sure, it was a mistake. He let the spite he felt for James to consume him. He allowed that hatred to overpower the love he harbored for Lily. Then Severus spent the rest of his life in an attempt to fix it. And maybe that’s the point. He fought for the redemption of an entirely irredeemable act because of a love that was once so easily squashed by hatred. And we are convinced he is redeemed?

He can’t be redeemed, not in my eyes. Snape was as much, if not more, motivated by guilt and regret as he was by love. Lily was gilded by the memories the two shared and precious to Snape. But their relationship never survived through adolescence. One of the memories Harry sees during the Order of the Phoenix is one of the final interactions we see between Snape and Lily. After Lily convinces James to extinguish his Levicorpus spell, Snape shouts at her. He calls her a filthy mudblood. And he storms away.

People can talk about mistakes. People can talk about getting lost in a moment. People can convince themselves that change is possible. But you cannot persuade me to think that Snape does not absolutely hate with a boiling passion Lily in that moment. He hurls this horrible epithet at the only one he loves and then he retreats to a place he doesn’t come back from until her death.

What makes Snape so horrible to me, what makes him irredeemable (as I have so many times called him) is that he gave up. He didn’t love Lily, at least not enough to actually love her, not enough to keep her away from James, not enough to protect her from Voldemort. He convinced himself, possibly after a long and drawn out mental exercise, that he hated her, that he couldn’t love her, that she was exactly what he called her down by the lake, that she was a filthy, vermin mudblood.

That is his sin. He didn’t kill Lily Potter. He didn’t kill James either, although he must have wanted to. He isn’t even guilty of murdering Dumbledore (unless you haven’t finished Deathly Hallows). He gave up on love. He gave up on himself. And when he realized the grave error that he had made, it was much too late to make it right.

The Hipster: Death of Sincerity?

If the recent rise of the Hipster is at all to represent the attitude of a future generation of adults, it seems as if the world will in trouble. At least that’s what some people think. And they could be right.

Let’s first define the Hipster. He is an individual who does not care. He or she thinks caring is stupid or uncool. Instead, the Hipster’s perception is filtered with a heavy sense of sarcasm. They don’t like (insert here anything that the Hipster would claim to “like”) because it gives them pleasure or enjoyment or a sense of accomplishment. They like (insert here anything that the Hipster would claim to “like”) because of some ironic statement they are able to apply to it. His self-conception is that of a lone rebel. But his rebellion is carefully constructed and entirely artificial. His identity superficially defined by arbitrary statements to be made against “the man” and/or “the system.”

Fundamental to the Hipster is this attitude. He sneers instead of smiles. He slowly nods his head in pretentious affirmation, instead of bobbing it in in excited agreement. He gives a restrained roll of the eyes to signify dismissal, instead of an angry outburst. Nothing is unfettered from the bonds of pretense. Nothing is sincere and everything is contrived.[1]

The greatest threat to the Hipster, and thus its most important target, is sincerity. Genuine expression, pure and straight from the heart, burns the soul of the Hipster like sunlight burns the skin of a glittering vampire. True love of anything stabs their heart like a knife. So they mock it. Soft chuckles and rolls of the eyes are the Hipster’s main weapons against any sincere desire, any unfiltered passion.

So what will happen without sincerity? Simply put, things get dull. Announcing one’s deepest and most personal desires, sharing unabashedly one’s purest joys, creates vulnerability. Vulnerability risks pain and rejection (perhaps why some cloak themselves so heavily in sarcasm and cynicism). But that vulnerability, if one can endure it endure it, brings with it understanding, of the self and of others. It brings the highest joy, this unrestrained indulgence in pure passion. Here is the emotional equivalent of walking a tightrope with not safety gear or of surviving a firefight with a group of close buddies.

The baring of one’s soul is the riskiest decision a human can make, but it can sometimes be the most rewarding.

And the Hipster could change all of that. Expression has already become more ironic. Justin Bieber recently met with the Prime Minister of his home country and, instead of allowing himself to be actually excited about the invitation, he preemptively mocked the entire event by showing up in some bullshit overall outfit. That is the pervasion of the Hipster ethic. Love will disappear, and instead everyone will tell long term partners they “like-like them.” In every picture, instead of posing and smiling normally, people will make funny faces, embarrassing themselves on purpose to prevent anyone from making fun of them.

I’m reminded of Danny Zuko chasing after Sandra Dee. He was laid back; he had a cool flying car and he had a neat hairstyle. Then he met a girl and sincerely applied himself in an attempt to win her over. He joined the track team. He sucked up to the coach. He embarrassed himself by wearing really short running shorts in public. He even ran. He did everything that he could in order to reverse the image that he had created of being the totally cool bad boy.

And all the while, throughout all of this sincerity, this genuine expression, his friends, his social group – actually most of the school – laugh at him. They mock him. They cannot understand – or do not seem capable of understanding – what would take cause such a cool kid to recklessly toss aside his coolness. These young punks failed to realize what it means to truly care, to care so much about one thing that caring about other things just doesn’t matter as much.

Maybe “The Hipster” and her sense of irony has deep roots. But his rise to near societal dominance is recent. Hopefully the tide in the war for sincerity can be turned.

It’s alright to love and look stupid. You should celebrate when you jump with excitement and fall flat on your face. You should relish the moments when you reach out your hand and get slapped in the face. Because one day you’ll hug someone without any pretension and you’ll feel their heart beating against your chest and you’ll understand why the world exists. At least I hope so.

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[1] Please consider the attitude of the person before labeling them as “Hipster.” The Hipster, or at least the truly dangerous Hipster, are not people who wear plaid shirts. They don’t wear thick-rimmed glasses. They don’t wear skinny jeans.

Back in the 70’s my mom had long hair and wore bellbottoms and flower prints. But she was as much of a conservative WASP as can be imagined.

Trapped

Darkness.

“Hello?”

There was just darkness.

“Hello?”

Still darkness.

Had he just woken up? Had he been here the whole time?

He rested his head against the wood behind him. They could be anywhere by now. Could they have left him here? Could they have left him here, alone?

Certainly not.

At least he hoped.

His breath puffed in and out the steady and staccato beat of a man on the verge of panic.

He stomped down with the heel of his foot, which hit with a depressing thump. Maybe there was a way to get through this. Maybe there was a way to get out.

At least he hoped.

He slowly pressed his hands forwards, palms facing away from him. He didn’t know why. Already in the back of his mind, a tiny voice was whispering, encouraging him, assuring him that giving up isn’t all that bad, especially in a situation like this one.

What can you expect? He was trapped in some dark place, isolated from the rest of the world. He was as good as dead. He might as well be dead. What does it matter, anyway?

He thought about Julia.

He took a refreshing breath of dank air and thought of Julia.

She was smiling. She was smiling at him. And he smiled back at her. He could see his hands reaching out for her smiling face. He felt his heartbeat crashing through his body as a trembling pinky from his right hand traced its way down her cheek. The trembling pinky stiffened, then jerked away.

Had she not shaven?

But it was the pine he was feeling. He opened his eyes to darkness, through which his hands must be hidden. His lover’s cheeks had been replaced by a pine board, the lid to his box, the box of his demise.

How had he gotten here? Why?

Why?

Another deep breath brought more thoughts of Julia. But now he thought of Julia in the way a starved child thought of food. He knew exactly what he needed. He knew exactly how to get it. He knew perfectly that he never could.

He had to do something, right? Right?

He couldn’t just sit here. He could just sit in a box and wait for death.

He had to do something. He had to do something grand, something big, something important.

Something that would impress her.

He kicked with his foot again, this time with his toe, this time upwards. The fury cracked through the wooden plank above.

He could do it. He could break down the wall. He could get out and get to his dream. It was only flimsy pine.

The he felt dirt. Cold dirt began streaming through his escape hatch and pile at his ankles.

So he would fight through that too. The dirt, after all, was just dirt. He was a man, a man with passion, a man with a dream. How much dirt could there be? How hard could it-

The board above him creaked. It creaked and it bowed. All that weight had pushed his hands back about an inch closer to his face.

Perhaps it was impossible.

The worm of defeat had slinked deeper into his mind. Its voice was at full volume and it, not the dirt, was commanding his attention during this dire time.

The pain will stop if you give up.

The pain will stop if you accept it.

The pain will stop if you relax, if you let it be, if you let go.

The pain can stop.

He closed his eyes and saw the sunshine. It was warm and comfortable.

He was walking along the deck of a ship, pine boards were coarse beneath his bare feet. Julia’s hand was smooth in his. He looked at her. He smiled. She smiled.

She smiled.

She smiled and his heart stopped.

She smiled and his heart coughed to life, like the engine of the neglected family car. It sputtered and spat while the children sat in the driveway, waiting for their trip to Disney. Mom and dad had promised. Little Kate and Little Nick wanted to go to Disney and they had promised.

Then the engine roared. The children skipped to the backseat and buckled up.

These were the dreams that could come true.

But he was still in the box. He was alone in the box, with nothing but his thoughts of Julia.

He wished he had met her. He always wanted her.

Was she even real?

The engine kept roaring. His hands thrashed against the pine, first as claws. His finger nails raked chaotically as he scratched the wood. His fingertips filled with needling splinters while the nails themselves were slowly levered away from their beds.

One broke free and rested on his cheek. Then another. Raw flesh grated against the rough surface. His teeth ground into a grimace while his lips flapped desperately around them. His lungs whined for cool air, but were given nothing but stale. Blood dripping from his fingers seared metallic against his tongue.

With nothing left to scratch with, he curled his nubs into fists and beat furiously.

What would he do if he got out of box? What about the dirt? What about the world above that? What would he even do up there? Would it be any different?

But he kept beating, only on the downbeats and in a steady eighth note rhythm. He punched and he lashed, all the while wheezing.

There was a crack. Was that the box? Where was the dirt? Would it be over now?

But the crack was accompanied by a more immediate pain than asphyxiation. He paused for a moment and brought his hands closer to his face to inspect them in the darkness. His right hand was caught in a horrible tremor, but otherwise couldn’t be felt. Perhaps it just hung there limply. His left was searing in pain, but just as useless as its brother. Something had broken and, now that the adrenaline had worn off, now that the engine had cool, nothing could be done.

A third deep, deliberate breath.

He tried to think of Julia, but his thoughts were interrupted.

With a final moaning creak the pine above him split and a current of dirt cascaded around him.

It pressed against his eyes. It filled his nostrils and, after he decided to open his mouth, it clogged his throat.

Darkness.

It was over.