Considerations: A collection of thoughts about the peculiarity of existence

By Gabriel Noland

This book is a collection of some of my favorite journal entries written between 2017 & 2022. They mostly consist of short exerpts where I attempt to think through my most prevalent curiousities: an effort to understand myself and the predicament of my existance. I consider concepts such as life, death, happiness, and the human condition. I intend

• Language: English
• Publisher: Honest Literature
• Release date: Dec 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798888627518

Book preview

1

Between Life & Death

It’s both reassuring and dreadful that life and death are separated only by a moment. One indivisible oscillation of time. We are alive until we reach a vague threshold when we are considered to be dying, a state wherein we exist between life and death. These moments of in-betweenness capture my curiosity far more than whatever may follow them.

Are we pulled toward death, as a raindrop is pulled to the sea by the mass of the earth, embraced and assimilated into that from which it came?

Or are we pushed away from life, as a fallen tree is pushed down the river, never again to feel the fertile ground its roots once gripped so tightly? 

Are we aware of the transition from one state into the next? Is it binary, from 1 to 0, or is there a gradation of irrational numbers between the two states?

Does our consciousness abandon our body as it senses deaths approach or are we shackled to our flesh until the very instant we lose its service? 

I imagine in those final moments I’ll consider myself, my life, and my experience, as a completed story. One with both a beginning and an end. For most of our lives, we are only a piece of ourselves, the future having its own unimaginable storyline. There is always, until those final few moments, a piece of us which we are not, that which we might become. This does not prevent us from trying to uncover who it is we feel we are and become what we desire of ourselves, but that does not exist. Not until that final moment. One may imagine that they have finally discovered themselves, but that is merely a delusion which does not acknowledge the freedom of the future.

2

Art

I used to have the compulsion to share the art that I resonated with, and I would more often than not feel let down when it wouldn't resonate with my peers in the same way. I failed to consider all of the factors external to the art itself that contribute to our interpretations of its beauty. 

Maybe this is a defining characteristic of art, that it is wholly individual in its effect. Equal appreciation does not require equal reason. Equal reverence can be justified by different observations, interpreted with different words, and magnified by different circumstances. A song, at a place, at a time,  is fine. The song, at that place, that one time, is profound. Not to say that art cannot or should not be shared, but that it is the feeling of experience that we can share and not the totality of the experience itself. Perhaps that is what makes it so beautiful; Its resonance with the piece of ourselves which is so uniquely individual and personal, which yearns so desperately for connection due to its idiosyncratic nature. It cannot be described, it cannot be understood, and therefore it is beautiful.

3

Mind

It is a bizarre experience to be in possession of a mind, and even more bizarre to become aware of it. How beautifully we have been designed to be able to turn electrical synapses into modern existence.

One might say that existence does not require a mind, and as justification, he may point to an object such as a rock and say See, it has no mind and yet it exists. Therefore, existence must not require a mind.

But a second man  might come along and argue 

Wait. Your perception of the rock in which you speak is formed only by that very mind which observes it, and without that mind, there would be nothing to do the perceiving of that which you use as proof. How then can you be so certain that that rock exists without the presence of a mind to perceive it?

That's easy interjects the man of science. 

We can design a system of tests which prove with high certainty that the components of matter which we call a rock is in fact materialized outside of our perception of it; And from these experiments, we can say with confidence that the structure of matter which we call a rock is just as real as the mind itself.

But aren't your experiments designed by that very mind which they seek to circumvent?, the second man continues. How could something which is fabricated by the processes of the mind also undermine its necessity? And how could this endeavor of the mind prove anything besides its power?

Now annoyed the man of science retorts

"It is of no question that there are variations in the universal soup, and those variations can be observed, measured, and categorized by the mind, but to suggest that the mind puts them there is