Ephemerality; or, The Life of an Insect

Painting by Jan van Kessel

There's a small, winged insect dead of old age on top of my refrigerator. I first saw it a week ago, but it's still there. It seems to be the corpse of a lacewing, but I might be wrong. It must have been there for a while when I first saw it, having lost its green color. Lacewings can live for a few months. A regular mosquito, on the other hand, lives between ten and fifty days, more or less, I think. It depends on whether it's male or female. Males live a few days. Females can live more than a month. I think the Aedes aegypti mosquito lives about the same amount of time. They are ephemeral beings. Even the cockroaches of the species Periplaneta americana that infest our streets and houses in Rio de Janeiro, which can live up to two to three years, are ephemeral beings. In fact, even the giant Galápagos tortoises, the longest-lived land animals, are transient. Yes, they can reach 190 years or more, but they still have fleeting existences. We humans, too. Every hundred years, it's as if there's a complete reset, as if the toilet is flushed and everyone — or practically everyone — who was alive becomes just stories, at best.

It's funny. We talk so much about "leaving a legacy" by having children, but we don't leave any legacy even when we have them. The vast majority of us don't know the names of all our great-grandparents. I certainly don't. In the case of great-great-grandparents, it's even worse. They died, that's it. And now here we are, for a very limited period. It's as if our great-great-grandparents acted in a play in their time, only to thank the audience of the howling void and leave forever, being replaced by other younger actors, their offspring. And now it's our turn to act on this sad stage. We walk down the street, unintentionally stepping on countless tiny insects. We don't even consider these beings in the calculations of our daily lives. "They are fleeting," we think, at most. But we are fleeting too. That's why it's so messed up that we live in a world where our brief existences largely serve the interests of some metamorphosis that lies outside of ourselves. We serve the metamorphosis of universal religion, or we serve the metamorphosis of profit, or we serve the metamorphosis of a utopian golden age that will supposedly occur at the "end of history." For many of us, our blood can and should lubricate the machinery that drives these metamorphoses.

Imagine creating new consciousnesses to serve as cannon fodder in wars for God or for men? What a load of crap! When it comes to this, I prefer that they have children for the most selfish reasons possible — not that having a child in the name of God or in the name of humanity isn't selfishness; it is, and of the worst kind. But, honestly, I prefer that they tell me: "I had them because I wanted to," and not "because God commanded it" or "because I want them to help the right side of history win the fight against the wrong side." At least they are being selfish for something that is a little more concrete, tangible. I will never understand or readily accept that those who live in literal war zones create new consciousnesses so that they may be born, grow, and participate in battles, however just those battles may seem, however just they may actually be. It's better that they say they created these new consciousnesses in the hope that one of them will become a rich football player than that they created them in the hope that they will serve as soldiers for a spiritual or material cause. But, to a certain extent, we all live in a forced labor camp surrounded by landmines, ready to be executed by the lottery of existence at any moment, but not without suffering first, so it amounts to the same thing.

When I stop to think that we could be living our lives normally and suddenly an apocalyptic torrent of mud could come traveling between 150 and 200 kilometers per hour and destroy everything around us, including ourselves, in the blink of an eye, I am terrified by the depths of our ephemerality. That's exactly what happened in the Himalayas, between Nepal and Tibet, a few days ago, after I saw a dead insect on my refrigerator for the first time, an insect that's still there, as I said. The images of the tragedy in Nepal are shocking. Now we even have a grotesque factory of videos generated by artificial intelligence whose purpose is to obtain millions of clicks and advertising revenue on social media. The real videos of the tragedy, made by human beings who lost their homes, jobs, and loved ones, are already harrowing, but the vultures seeking profit are not content and multiply them even further with the artificiality of computer graphics generated from stolen images.

I was impressed by the amount of people that did die in this tragedy. I think the abundance of images made me expect something even bigger. For example, there were more images of the 2011 tsunami in Japan than of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It almost seems like it was a greater catastrophe. But the Japanese tsunami killed just under 20,000 people, while the Indian Ocean tsunami killed between 227,000 and 230,000 people in several countries, mainly Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. Yes, both were two gigantic tragedies, but one was more than ten times greater than the other. Anyway, just look at the disaster in Nepal: a huge glacier, on one of the many mountains of the Himalayas, broke off, resulting in a gigantic avalanche that generated a chain reaction along a valley where thousands of people live on the banks of the Trishuli River, which is fed by the mountain glaciers. This river, which normally sustains the lives of the communities living around it, suddenly brought death in the form of complete destruction. To date, just under a thousand deaths have been confirmed, while more than three thousand people remain missing.

But we, humanity, we don't only suffer from grand, cinematic tragedies. Individual tragedies also play a great part. These are the things that devastate us the most every day. For example, between five and six thousand people are run over by vehicles and killed annually in Brazil, most of them elderly. That's at least fifteen deaths from being run over every day. Fifteen tragedies that shatter fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren, and friends, leaving a trail of sadness and emptiness behind. One moment, everything is fine. The next, it's as if the tsunami came to hit only that one person you love so much, and no one else. Your pain is not part of a greater pain, it's not a pain that makes the news around the world. It's only yours and that of those close to you. The same is true for the leading causes of death in Brazil, which are cardiovascular diseases, neoplasms, and respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia. Except for the recent pandemic we experienced, in which death from respiratory syndrome became a collective tragedy, all these "common" deaths, which have recently claimed the lives of about one and a half million Brazilians annually, are personal disasters that break most of our hearts and remind us of the transience of life. This pattern repeats itself similarly in the rest of the world, with cardiovascular diseases tending to come in second place in more advanced countries, while neoplasms take first place. It makes sense: the longer we live, the greater the possibility of cells dividing incorrectly and producing tumors.

Perhaps the healthiest thing we can do to endure life day after day, although it doesn't solve existence in my view, is to imagine ourselves as transient and fleeting as the animals we see around us and know will die soon: cockroaches, rats, pigeons, bats, squirrels, or whatever. I say it's healthier because I think living in a world that denies death and horror like ours is unhealthy. However, I say that it doesn't solve the problem of existence, because constantly thinking about the ephemeral nature of everything is a truly bitter remedy. Unfortunately, in the end, we can only endure the ordeal of this fleeting, painful, and meaningless life through illusions and distractions. That's all that's truly left for us. Living courageously, heroically, is very beautiful, but it ends up being impractical — and I don't mean impractical for most; it's impractical for everyone. Whoever tries, goes crazy. It's poetic, it's beautiful to sing that we need to love people as if there were no tomorrow, because if we stop to think about it, there really isn't. However, living like that all the time is a recipe not for beautiful things, but for complete paranoia or depression. Imagine always hugging your mother or whoever you love most in this life every day thinking, "This will be the last time I do this." It's asking to live in eternal sadness, or to live in complete neurosis. I don't know which of the two is worse.

We are, therefore, in a bind, without a real solution. The pseudo-solutions end up being the small distractions that fill a good part of our time and everything I spoke against a moment ago: the metamorphoses of profit, religion, and the golden age of humanity, that is, the farces of profit, religion, and the purpose of human history. Sometimes, the pseudo-solutions are all these things mixed together, as is common in this stage of capitalism, when there is no shortage of peddlers of metaphysical faith, who have always existed, but also an abundance of peddlers of historical and materialistic utopia, the fake revolutionaries who will never make any revolution, because they know very well that it is impossible not only to carry them out, but also to maintain them. It always has been. Be that as it may, no matter what else happens, I only hope that many of us will be good to each other, or at least that we will be as "little bad" as possible to each other, in this short time we have in this universe. I say we should try to be as "little bad" as possible to each other, because things are already difficult enough simply by virtue of existing and being fleeting. We don't need to add the compound interest of misfortunes we've invented ourselves, misfortunes with no basis other than our imagination, on top of all this ephemerality.

Therefore, I think the best thing I can do now is ask you to go and hug that important person in your life. Go apologize. Try to fix what can be fixed. Tell them how much they make your existence better in this universe where nothing is stable and where we pass by so quickly, and tell them how much you would like to see them again, forever, in all possible universes, however much you may hate having been born in the first place. Go now. I don't want you to become paranoid, but it may really be one of the last times you can do this. We never know when a flood, an earthquake, a landslide, or some other more common misfortune, those private "tsunamis," like cancers, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory syndromes, "old age," accidents of all kinds, or murders will take away from us those people who so greatly improve our fleeting existences, those beings without whom everything in life becomes even more unbearable and meaningless. You don't need to do this all the time. As I said, I think it's a recipe for depression and paranoia to think about it constantly. But do it at least once, or occasionally. Hug your mother, hug your child, your dear friends, in short, whoever is good to you. These are the most important things we have amidst all of this.

Sadness has no end
Happiness does

(Vinícius de Moraes, Happiness)

by Fernando Olszewski