The Long Movie (But Not Long Enough)

Think of life as a movie. At some point you realize you're sitting in a theater with a lot of other people, having this experience. Then you notice that every now and then an usher comes down the aisle, taps a fellow moviegoer on the shoulder, and escorts him out of the auditorium. None of those ushered out come back. You don't know where they're going -- the ushers aren't talking -- but some of the people sitting around you are only too happy to offer elaborate explanations. They seem to feel very strongly about their theories, even fight over them, though as far as you can tell they're all just guesswork, fantasies, fever dreams. Still, some people find them very seductive, and become more concerned with them than with the movie.

You're pretty sure that outside the theater there is -- nothing. This is a troubling thought, even a tragic one, but not terrifying. The true challenge is to appreciate the movie, to experience it as fully and valuably as possible, while knowing that it will all be taken from you, or (the same thing) you from it. The movie is all there is. There is nothing else to be conscious of. Without it, there is nothing for your self to function upon. In order to be, you need the movie. Without it, you will cease to exist.

So the fact of your eventual removal from the theater is a great misfortune. The end of everything. But if it is so, it is so. What is not so is that some further experience will follow this one. This movie has no sequel -- no green mansions, no rapture, no camphor fields, no lake of fire, no returning to another body.

So there's good news and bad news: You got into the theater. But for one night only.

This is the hypothesis. Still to come: why it's worth embracing.