“And all the days of Mathusala were nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and he died.”1
I was recently musing about the fragility of life. Perhaps it is because I am halfway through my life that I am starting to think more and more about my purpose, death, and the life hereafter. I have started focusing on questions such as: What is the point of life? Why am I here? How have I changed since birth? Have I fulfilled my life’s mission and purpose? I recently revisited my father’s death and read his obituary, which summarized his approximately 60 years of life as an Army veteran, truck driver, and mechanic who enjoyed football, fishing, and beer. The sad part is that even if I wanted to learn more about my father, I cannot as he has passed. To that point, I know even less about my grandfather and nothing about generations before him. After all, Mathusala lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and all that is mentioned about his life was that he was the father to some children, and then he died. We exist, and one day, we die.
One of my nightly routines includes reading. The experience of reading to me is best articulated by Machiavelli in his letter to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513, in which he says:
“The evening being come, I return home and go to my study; at the entrance I pull off my peasant-clothes, covered with dust and dirt, and put on my noble court dress, and thus becomingly re-clothed I pass into the ancient courts of the men of old, where, being lovingly received by them, I am fed with that food which is mine alone; where I do not hesitate to speak with them, and to ask for the reason of their actions, and they in their benignity answer me; and for four hours I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, poverty does not dismay, death does not terrify me; I am possessed entirely by those great men.”
During one of these nights, I encountered Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography. In the first paragraph of the first book, he wrote:
“All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty.”2
I will be well past forty by the time I finish writing this. While “anything of excellence” sounds like an easily attainable goal, only the reader of this work will ultimately be qualified to judge whether or not I fall into that category. Often, I feel more like Dante at the beginning of his Inferno3: having just woken up halfway through life and in a dark wood only to find that I have lost the straight way. Similarly, I also identify with the class of people whom Dostoevsky describes in “The Idiot” as the “clever ordinary man.” The entire class of ordinary individuals includes those that are wealthy, of good family, of decent appearance, fairly well educated, rather intelligent, even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special trait, no peculiarity even, not to one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like everyone else.” Clever ordinary men are a subset whose vanity makes them self-aware of their ordinary classification, ultimately driving them to utter despair.4
Writing my autobiography will, in part, serve as a method to explore philosophy, share what I have learned, describe how I have changed, and contemplate my purpose. Ultimately, though, I will reach the same conclusion as King Solomon in Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. Let us all hear the conclusion of the discourse: Fear God and keep his commandments.5
Amen.
- Genesis 5:27 ↩︎
- Cellini, B. (1910). The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (C. Eliot, Ed.; J. A. Symonds, Trans.). P. F. Collier & Son. ↩︎
- Alighieri, D. (1996). Divina Commedia: Inferno. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- Dostoevsky, F. (1956). The Idiot (A. Yarmolinsky, Ed.; C. Garnett, Trans.). The Heritage Press. ↩︎
- Ecclesiastes 12:13 ↩︎