Birds Eye View

As discovered from Timothy "Speed" Levitch in one of my favorites films Waking Life, Thomas Mann admitted that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories. As a writer this must have meant that while he was writing his stories, he would have preferred to be somewhere else. To me, this could have been for two possible reasons. One, a physical problem: he was in a situation where he couldn't actually participate. Maybe he was stuck in the hospital or his wife was away. Two, a mental problem: perhaps even though he said he would rather participate, his personality prevents him from doing so. Either he prefers to just watch as the world goes by from a birds eye view, or he sees things that are unfolding in front of him that he would rather now be involved in. I consider the latter to be a possibility because some folks wish that they were ignorant so that they could be happy. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss.

In a sense, what Mann is saying is that he would rather live a fully content day-to-day life instead of writing at all. Being a Wistful Author, he writes about things that bother him. If nothing bothered him, he might abstain from writing altogether. You start thinking about people's ratios of participation and observation. What Mann is describing is 100% participation. While this is not possible due to human's ability to think and find faults, it would probably be everyone's preference; it would be equivalent to pure bliss. Imagine a love-long orgasm, a permanent lovers embrace, or a constant state of the 'holy moment' acted out in the film.

Timothy goes on to say that 'an assumption develops' that you cannot live and understand life simultaneously. In my opinion some folks spend an excess amount of time trying to understand this absurd life. Well-known authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche and possibly David Wallace ended their own lives because they thought too much, to the point of madness. I'm making a huge assumption here, but bare with me while I attempt to make a point. Being very intelligent and logical, their happiness came from understanding. In their tireless quest to understand, the life in which they knew became meaningless to the point of not worth living. In a depressing sort of way, their suicides proved this assumption right.

Adding his own belief, Timothy says that 'life understood is life lived'. I don't agree entirely. One of the biggest reasons is that I don't believe it is possible for humans to fully understand life. But at the same time like Nietzsche, I cannot stop trying to figure it out; it's in my nature and is what I get most of my fulfillment from. I would tweak the quote a bit by saying that even though it may be impossible to understand life completely, the quality of life depends entirely on the undertaking. Depending wholly on the person and their need to understand, failing in that attempt will prove to be an empty life. With the realization though that you can never hope to understand life to any final degree, you can learn to balance your evolving comprehension with the rest of your human instincts. With this in mind, you can avoid the fate of some of the greatest thinkers in history.