Call Me the Witness: The Wisdom of Ecclesiastes for Our Time

By Joel Carlman

What is the meaning of life? Why strive after success, achievement, or wealth just to watch it all go up in smoke in the end? Where does one turn to after all the pleasures of life leave us still lacking something? 

Living in the 21st century, the human race has access to more technology, wealth, information, and agency than has ever

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joel Carlman
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087854403

Book preview

Chapter 1

These are the words of someone who has seen the world from a privileged perch. I have lived my life like royalty—rich and powerful. I’ve had opportunities that other people can only dream of. The words are my final report back to you. You can call me your Witness.

My findings? I’ll skip to the punchline. Everything in life that we chase after is like smoke. I don’t know if any of you readers will truly hear this—is ready to hear this—but everything we desire is like a fine mist, like grasping at fog.

What does someone get for a lifetime of ambition? After a lifetime’s worth of our striving, what’s left? We grow old—just like our parents and theirs before them. What do we really leave behind? The dust we were made from? What, if anything is permanent? Are we just temporary energy, waiting to be given up to the ether?

We are a dot on a dot on a dot on a sliver of time that is part of a rhythm and grand current that we do not control. Think of the rising and setting of the sun, the round-trip itinerary of the wind. Things always return to where they have already been.

The endless offerings of the streams never satisfy the thirst of the sea. For all the pouring out, the basin never fills. Instead, the sky steals water from the sea; the earth steals water from the sky. The same water coursing to the sea was stolen by creeks and ditches from the soil—and on and on it goes.

It’s like this with ideas. Any idea a person could have is already tired before it enters their head. We think that we are original, but really, we’re just singing cover songs of tired oldies from humanity’s played-out catalog. We know this in our gut. No matter how nouveau the album art, how catchy the tune, our eyes are bored, and our ears can’t be satisfied.

For all the new in our culture, or our world, there is nothing truly new. We’re just reliving history. If we think we’ve found something new, just give it time. Time reveals it to be derivative of something that