Page 70 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
creative freedom, a large fine country house with scads of interesting friends, and a job that is so stimulating that we can’t wait to get up in the morning to go to it. Perhaps we’ll want to be born a thousand times and to live for endless forever.
Either angle is a possibility. Both exemplify to what extremes, both pessimistic and optimistic, a reckless quest for the freest possible freethinking can go. C’est la freethinking vie.
Ball falls in hole ... Hooray!
Yes, you should try to avoid meaninglessness if you’re on shaky mental-health ground. But if you at least see life with compassionate detachment, you can fight the urge for oblivion without the added burden of feeling guilty about considering oblivion. Dwelling in meaninglessness becomes simply one more inescapable aspect of the human condition. As is also dwelling in meaning. As someone said: “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?”
Humanity has a huge prejudice in favor of meaning and in opposition to meaninglessness. The other week revealed a big example of this when about forty-million Americans became ecstatically happy over a little ball rolling into a little hole.56 They took that most commonplace meaningless event — gravity causes object to fall — and turned it into a national celebration. It was the Masters Golf Tournament.
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