On a day like today, We passed the time away,
Writing love letters in the sand. How you laughed
when I cried, Each time I saw the tide,
Take our love letters from the sand.
- Love Letters in the Sand -
(Sung by Pat Boone / Written by J. Fred Coots,
Charles Kenny & Nick Kenny / 1957)
Dismissed as sentimental pap, a pop song for angst-burdened teenagers, certainly nothing to be taken seriously – are you sure? It might also be a lyric metaphor for the dreams heartaches, and ultimate disillusionments that befall almost every human endeavor.
Time idly passed, feckless ambition, unfulfilled declarations, sincerity coquettishly mocked, and finally, the dissolution of our transient achievements. Whether taken by the tides of ocean or by the tides of time. We strive for what will not last. We hope for what cannot be. We live in a world that can never satisfy our longings.
Small successes mask large inviolabilities.
Each day seems different because random motion is interpreted as purposeful movement. Events are perceived to be moving in clearly determined directions; up, down, back, and forth. The reality of this world is that every day is a day like today - a hallucinatory dance of delusions swirling pointlessly about, like snowflakes in a toy glass sphere shaken by a child.
Hemingway once quoted someone he thought must be an Englishman, ”Life is real, life, is earnest, and the grave is not its goal”. Hemingway then added, “and where did they bury him, what became of his reality and his earnestness”?
Existentialism was Hemingway’s answer to the apparent nothingness of life.
Existentialism holds that there is no God, and no such thing as fate. The only thing that matters is your own freely-willed actions, and their consequences. Existentialists share with the Godly the ideas of free-will, and responsibility for the choices you make. Then, they part company. Without God, morality is subject only to personal opinion.
Personal fulfillment replaces meaning.
Existentialists also believe the full essence of life can only be experienced when death is standing next to you. This accounts for Hemingway’s fascination with bullfights, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing, and war.
It also explains the title of his short-story: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
In this story Francis and his wife, Margot, are on safari
in Africa. Margot despises Francis for his lifelong unmanly cowardice. She flirts openly, to Francis’s humiliation, with the virile white hunter who accompanies them. At the end of the story, the three are charged by a Cape buffalo. All three fire simultaneously.
The white-hunter’s shot misses.
Francis’s shot kills the buffalo.
Margot’s shot kills Francis.
It’s not clear that Margot intended to kill Francis.
She might have been aiming at the buffalo. It doesn’t matter. Hemingway’s point is that in that single moment of courage Francis Macomber lived life to its fullest essence.
Is a single moment of glory compensation enough for
a meaningless life? Hemingway suggests just that. Others aren’t sure what to think.
In Thomas Hardy’s novel: Jude the Obscure, there is
a gloomy passage that captures the despair of life without meaning:
“When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion
of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow.”
Hardy follows this passage with something like a prayer:
“Teach me to live, that I may dread,
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die . . . “
We live in a fallen world never intended by God. The fall from Grace in Eden precipitated the world of chaos we now must struggle through. We misused Free Will to our downfall. Now we must use it properly, for our salvation.
We don’t need to learn how to die. We need to learn how
to live.
God will help any who ask for His help. Jesus explained the way to eternal life through the words of the Gospels.
The path illuminated by Jesus leads not only to eternal life, but to a better life in this world as well.
A day-like-today will be followed by endless days-like-today, each as pointless and random as the other.
The stumbling blocks that clutter our progress on each of these days-like-today are worldly illusions; Satanic deceptions intended to confuse our understanding of what is True, Good and Beautiful.
Without the help of God, we lack the power to see through the veil of deceit.
We are fuddled by every new theory and scam.
On every-day-like-today I say the same prayer:
“Dear Father in Heaven, please guide me
to Your will”
Then, I listen.