"What lies there stir-less in the earth tonight, down where the worm keeps vigil?
The blind man smiles his ghostly smile. In his eternal vigil, the worm stirs, but many men are rotting in their graves tonight, and sixty-four have bullet fractures in their skull. Ten thousand more are lying in their beds tonight, living as shells live. They, too, are dead, though yet unburied. They have been dead so long they can't remember how it was to live. And many weary nights must pass before they can join the buried dead, down where the worm keeps vigil."
From You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe.
As an avid reader I have read this type of observation hundreds of times. Authors, poets - creative people who mock the pointless life of the everyday person. Their criticism is valid - most of us lead these meandering, unfulfilling lives that leave us empty and take us nowhere. We don't know who we are or what we want, so we waste this precious thing called Time. Called Life.
It fascinates me that as a person who is obsessed with death, I have never lived as if I might die tomorrow. I am trying to do that in 2022.
To do that, you have to define specifically what it is that will fill up your soul. The advantage to doing that so late in my life is that a lot of meaningless stuff has been revealed as such, leaving me the luxury of coming up with a short list.
A list I can focus on ferociously.
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