...I have one life and it’s short and unimportant.
Do you feel that you are really just here for a moment and
gone forever after that?
It’s not so much that I feel it that I know it. Our obsession
with “surviving our own deaths”, as Dawkins says, is… er… I mean the very idea
that it might not be the case just reeks so much of fantasy that it must be
wrong.
But how people like you might live on is in your art: you
create stuff…there is a feeling here, that, “I have created something here
which is substantive and will tell people a little bit about who I am.”
It’s a lovely thought, and there’s no doubt that when people
you love die, you take comfort in remembering the things they did. Whether they’re
just making good porridge, whatever it is, whatever small things you will remember
about them...and we can live for as
long as those memories last in peoples’ minds.
But it’s sort of not of interest to me; “My legacy”. Even if you do live
in the memories of a couple of generations, it’s so fleeting that it’s
insignificant. But none of this is depressing. In fact it’s awe inspiringly
awesome that this event has happened: one’s own existence; the idea that, after
all this space, there’s you, and then there’s not you: and you are faced with the question of how you
are going to spend that time. It’s so much more profound than any hypothesis
about some pathetic garden with unicorns and hugs that goes forever. People don’t
even know how to spend their Saturday afternoons. What do I want with eternity?
(i have been digging around on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/find-a-castaway and loving it. radio 4 you are a star.)
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