Love is immortality
Love is immortality, Jason Silva said.
The irony was not lost on me. A lot of the love stories I’ve heard of didn’t live to see the light of day. Worse, other tales died prematurely, a painful sting of disappointment that I know often leaves a beautiful, but nonetheless hideous mark, to last for the entire span of a lifetime.
Only the scar, you might think, is immortality.
The internet defines surefire or sure-fire as an adjective for something that is “certain to succeed”. Listening to John Legend’s new song I’m thinking the word means something completely different. “We are surefire”. It felt like something that’s destined to burst into flames. Yes, “we’re dead meat” was more like it.
My dark sarcasm did not amuse me.
I am usually the optimist in the crowd. In fact, I have enough positivity to light a whole city. But there I was, doubting love’s ability to crawl, let alone run. I was more like Pink Floyd’s wish you were here, heartfelt, but also angrily unimpressed.
Then 9gag decides it’s funny to share: love decreases your productivity – know what you don’t know. What the hell is wrong with the world? The truth is, we are undeserving of love. Undeserving of its fiery grip. We have no time to love, nor relish in its exquisite blessing. But we do have time to infinitely scroll an Instagram feed to educate ourselves with horrible pieces of information like this one. At that point, I wanted to beat whoever created that post with a bat, or some other painful object.
The world we live in tarnishes the purity of what it means to be in love. Silva is right, Love is indeed immortality. Love is that thing that makes us want to beat the grips of time. It is, as Iris Murdoch says, the extremely difficult realization that something, other than oneself, is real. I do not merely refer to romantic love here, even though I do place a heavy weight, and a heavy heart, on the latter.
9 to 5 was the problem. 10 to 10 in my case, would be the problem. But no. mankind was not destined to be fully consumed by this capitalist, robotic journey. Having said that, and as you may have noticed, this rant could stretch an entire immortality, I kid you not. But given our above-mentioned tight schedules, and growing apathy, I will stop here.
To end on a positive note however, I would say that love is that silver lining in this tragedy we call the human condition. While we have all taken its painful hit, I urge you, and my terror-struck self, to give it another go.
