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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: latest bright thought
Message-ID: <1691@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Jan-84 05:43:59 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1691
Posted: Mon Jan 23 05:43:59 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Jan-84 05:55:37 EST
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 37

I am writing a reasonably large essay right now contrasting Soren Kierkegaard
on despair with Camus on despair. All of a sudden this hit me -- Camus (or
at any rate, certain of his characters) doesn't know how to live at all. They
think that a life *is* *a* *thing* -- not a process. Thus they are obsessed
with death since it is only after this that you can get enough of a view
to say "oh yeah, that is what so-and-so really was". 

I think that this is horrible. It is one thing to be responsible for the
NOW, but must one carry all one's past misdeeds with one? Certain moral
theories would have this. I remember being told that "god will sit there and
tell you all your sins, every last one, on judgement day and you will be
responsible for eery one". Hmm. I did a lot of awful things as a child,
most of which I would not do now. I am not the same person. I find it hard
to take responsibility for things that "the-I-that-was" did -- I have enough
to worry about with "the-I-that-is". 

I can sit with an amused detatchment and wonder at the person that I was,
but I feel very little (perhaps none? it is hard to say) attatchment for
that person. I feel the same sort of detatched copmpassion that I can summon
for any human being. As I move closer to the present I feel more of an
attatchment, and the sins of 2 years ago still weigh upon me -- but I can see
that in a few years they too will be gone, as I commit them to the past. 

It is a very eerie feeling. I am sure that I am supposed to "have a past"
and "have a future" -- where else would the expressions come from? But
I do not feel that I have one. Ought I not feel more connected to my past
than anybody else' past? Right now, I can't feel it -- it all seems like
some sort of amusing game that was played...

Perhaps I am merely in a strange mood, and it will all come back tomorrow.
Perhaps not. it rather botches any idea I had of responsibility, though,
so there must be something here that I am missing...

Anybody been here before?

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura