irrelevance

Did  you sleep all right?  No matter how well or badly one sleeps, it's not  usually timor mortis that keeps one awake. I think it's because we mortals can't focus for very long on our mortality and immortality is too difficult a concept to grasp. 

Years ago when I was a bright, far-too-young student of literature, the academic trend was to study the work and not the author, so we knew very little if anything of the private life of the creator of the pieces we were studying.  I was half-way through my Master's year, working on my thesis on W.H. Auden when I discovered by accident that he was gay. At that time, of course, homosexuality was still a taboo and illegal, but still - I should have been told. 

Just recently in the past couple of years two biographies of Aldous Huxley have been published, telling me (just from the reviews; I didn't read the books) more than I ever knew about him. This is not to say I was not influenced by his writing and his thoughts.  I thought he was an iconoclast and frightening and I banned myself from reading him on Sundays.  (Yeah, I know, I was a nerd.)  But I remember something he wrote that has stayed with me for half a century now.  He said, and I can't tell you where,  i.e. in what book - I read all his novels. (As I say, we studied the creation and not the creator.)  But somewhere I read this line and kept it ever since:

"Man's hope is his capacity for irrelevance."

Yup. That's why I can sleep at night even after beginning my assault on the gates of eternity.  (Or whatever.)  Is that all there is?  What next?  Are you ready?  

I'm not, but that's irrelevant, isn't it?