Death and Meaning

My concept of purpose and meaning has a stubborn relationship with my death. What I look for in determining purpose and value in my life seems to constantly refer to what outlasts myself, what persists in social or physical meanings, rather than in any transitory moments of fulfillment. There is a weird persistence to the things that matter, because they are often quite mediated. A quality of writing is its permanence: a quality of self-knowledge is your sense of having a history, which requires writing as a means of constructing itself. We write meaning into past events – literally (no pun) in history books, much of history education concerns reading history books and constructing meaning from them. The field of history as academics involves the verification and solidification of events into appropriately textual events. Also, because we acquire so little information about the world first hand, meaning as an everyday experience is embodied by the movement of images, texts and gestures in the form of durable symbols. Knowledge has at least a semi-permanent status as a newspaper or other text, and I figure meaning for myself as a product of this semi-permanence: I don’t feel a gesture or act acquires meaning until it circulates, and in some sense, outlives the act. The accumulation of acts into a life, the assumed meaning it has similarly outlives itself, becomes social, becomes more than something flickering out with breath, embodied or signaling in ways I may not know or intend, but in some way persisting.

Duncan