Random Notebook #7: Heaven or Hell, You Decide

Not much to write today, other than I ran some errands and got a copy of “Camus at Combat.”  It wasn’t so much an impulse buying, since I considered for nearly an hour.  What is beginning to appeal to me at the present seems to be the sort of “Journals of…” or “The Collected Letters of…”  The reason behind this is, of course, the way I am ruminating on this journal, as if I had the interesting life of these accomplished people.  All I have done, really, is lose things—that’s what I am good at.  A cover of a magazine also got my attention this week, and I ended up (again, not on impulse) buying this magazine right off the rack.  The cover story is “First Love, First Loss: How Early Experience Shapes You.”  When I think of this, I think of that first couple of times, interestingly enough, how many of those experiences over so many years have been with people whose name began with the letter M.  Perhaps it is a coincidence, or the manifest of some undercurrent in my mind.  With this I mean something deploy embedded in my mind.  But I haven’t read the magazine article and I am already speculating on idiotic premises.  Crazy things happen for a reason—I remember how, while helping my sister clean a Catholic church back home, I sort of fell in love with the face of the Virgin Mary in one of the statues in the backroom where my sister took her lunch.  Why was this wonderful and beautiful statue in the backroom, I will never know.  Years later, while reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce, I would return to those moments when I stood mesmerized by the statue’s beautiful face.  Of course I am no Stephen Dedalus, and my fixation was not as terrible as his, but it is a wonder every time we discover that experiences we consider our very own (especially when they are this distorted), end up being as universal as birth and dead and taxes.  And then we don’t feel so special.  Then, the only thing we can do is to feel the sadness at our lack of originality, but soon we feel kinship with the so many others that are still with us, or came before us.  I know this is overly complex; I could simply say that every time this has happened it has simply been a coincidence.  Of course, one also begins to think of human existence in general—that is to say, when we read about the Romans and how they lived so many thousands of years ago, and how they all died, one begins to doubt.  Where do all of those souls go?  How many are in heaven and how many are in hell?  But those dichotomies do not answer even the most fundamental of all questions—could it actually be that the end is the end, and not one thing or the other?  For if we, by faith, stipulate the direction our souls take then who is to say that perhaps a person has decided not to stick to the dichotomy of the one or the other?  For example, a man who lives a life of extreme sexual lust might want to direct his soul in a way where he ends up living eternity in a personal harem with endless women of infinite variety, per secula seculorum.  Another example is the person who wants more than anything to encounter his family in the afterlife.  Couldn’t he or she determine in some way, out of sheer desire?  I suppose that that specific desire (of reuniting with family members for eternity) might not be of much interest today.  I say that humorously, of course, and I could keep an interminable line of examples, each as unique as that who desires it, but perhaps I have already proven my point at least partially.  And I mean partially because who really knows where we go?