makeshiftmind

I found a very powerful quote today on a blog that I just happened to stumble across through an unrelated Google search.  I’m unfamiliar with the author, though a quick Wikipedia search revealed that Charles Bukowski was an American poet who wrote about “…the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.”  He writes:

“What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”

This is, perhaps, the 20th century Socratic observation that the unexamined life is not worth living.  It is a reminder that the historical impact of our endeavors and social impact of our relationships are the only sources of immortality we will ever have.  And every day we get new chances to make the most of them.

EDIT: For clarity and more to the point, this quote is really about not filling our lives with the meaningless, so that when we do die something of value is actually left behind.  Not simply the mundane.