A number of years ago I became fascinated with the artwork of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. He is best known for his series of paintings and pastels called The Scream which has become an iconic and sometimes spoofed work. Although The Scream is generally considered his most famous work, I am intrigued by another work that has mostly fallen into obscurity. It is called Melancholy. It depicts a man sitting by the waterside. I don't particularly examine artwork to the high intensive level of a critic. I merely like a work for either its symbolism or its beauty. With Munch's work it is the symbolism that impresses me. The subject of Melancholy sits with his chin resting on his hand in a seemingly pensive mood as if something were bothering him. Is he reflecting on a distressing event in his life that he has just experienced? Perhaps he has just fallen out with his lady love? Or maybe it is a change in his life that he is having a hard time dealing with. Although the artist had his own personal inspiration for the work, another person might look at it in another way. To me, the subject, although seemingly solemn in his thoughts might have reached an epiphany of sorts. Perhaps he has come to that moment of time in his life when he has suddenly realized that he is at a crossroads. He sees time slipping by and the reason for his existence has become lost to him. He desperately seeks it again, but the grandeur novelty of youth has passed him. Beyond him, the endless shoreline disappears into infinity. He is lost...and lonely.
Friedrich Nietzsche might have summed up the man's mood when he wrote:
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history", yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened."
I can't get worked up about current events like most people do. Perhaps I would if I didn't have time to contemplate the mood of my existence, and the passage of time. It would be out of sheer necessity and the instinct of my survival that I would be forced to forget the luxury (or curse depending on how one sees it) of philosophical meditation and resort to the temporal politics of the day. Does it really matter if Trump or Clinton wins? Or...if this blog post is even written?
The car has stopped revving its engine. It is quiet now and the sky is getting dark as the sun has slipped below the horizon yet again in the western sky. My mind races back to my youth...I am riding my red Schwinn down Route 68, my bag full of newspapers. It is blistering cold, and I can see my breath as I pedal hard toward the next house where I will launch a newspaper onto the back porch. The world and future stretch out in front of me...Melancholy and infinity are the farthest things from my mind. Another day has passed on this diminutive world that we temporarily inhabit... all the while stretching toward a timeless and measureless forever...
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