Finitude
“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
Here is a hard truth: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. It is a reality most of us want to ignore, myself very much included. But if you pause even for a moment to consider this desire, there is something quite repulsive about it. The greed conjures Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory with her whiny, insistent voice shrieking for a golden egg: “I want it, and I want it now, Daddy!”
And yet, many of us, even if we’ve learned to hide our desires better than Veruca Salt, want to be special—want to live outside the laws of the natural world—want very much to have our cake, and eat it too. This is part of the reason why I love Edna St. Vicent Millay’s poem, “My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night…” which recognizes that we can utilize our finite resources however we so choose, but they are indeed finite. Or said in even more biological terms, in Brian Doyle’s exquisite essay, Joyas Voladoras, “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”
Our finitude…the finitude of natural resources on our planet…these are things that are so hard to reckon with that most of us choose to ignore the reality. When we see footage of the fires in Australia or hear news of an acquaintances untimely demise, it is easier to bury our heads in the sand than to look at what these truths mean for our own lives.
In 2016, I wrote down the quality I most wanted to inhabit for the year: expansiveness. I wrote in in the style of Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities, which brings each quality to life with a persona. This was my description of Expansiveness: “Expansiveness wears fur coats and red lipstick in the winter. She can identify snowflake patterns by taste. On cold nights, she leaves her spare mittens in the woods for the mice, and other small creatures, to find. In summer, she carries a basket full of ripe berries and wildflowers. She always goes barefoot in the rain. One time she walked from the forest to the seashore pressing her ear up against the trunks of tress and then against conch shells. Expansiveness sailed around the world when she was a girl. Now, she does open heart surgery.”
In this paragraph I see, one of my core struggles: I want to be everything. Glamourous one day, an earth child the next; an explorer seeing everything one year, someone who is intensely dedicated to deep understanding of one organ the next. I don’t want to have to choose: I want it all.
Can you have it all, as long as it you don’t demand that you have it all right now? Over the span of a lifetime could you have it all?
While maybe not as frantically grabby and greedy as demanding, “I want it, and I want it NOW,” wanting it all over the course of a lifetime is ill fated too. In choosing breadth of experience, you generally must sacrifice depth of experience. The affirmation of one thing, is a closing of the door on thousands of other things.
It is so much easier to understand hubris in another human than it is to understand hubris in our own particular lives. As I’ve watched my dad, who was always the wisest and kindest person I know, reveal unwise and unkind parts of himself this last year, I’ve found myself reviling from his hubris of believing he could continue to engage in the same way with the family he formed in in the 1980s, and fully engage with the family he secretly formed, and then brought into the light in 2019.
His surprise at the loss—that he couldn’t have it both ways, unmoors me. And then, I remember, I share his affliction. I want all the lives. I, also want to live outside the rules of the natural world. So I am trying to not shrink back from my own hubris. Trying to not do the old routine of sticking my head in the sand, and with my fingers crossed that someday there will be a solution where a person doesn’t have to live with loss—where they just get to have all the goodies. And instead, I am trying to really, really see what I have in my life, and to love it deeply before it is gone. Because our lights are all burning out, and to have wasted the shine searching around one more corner for one more option, instead of seeing what is right here, in the glow of candle right before me, feels like the tragedy of a lifetime.
