Mortality
Last month I was at the Huntington Library and Gardens. It’s the remainder of the trust of a very rich Mr. Huntington – a man after whom much of southern California is named. Although he is dead his legacy remains through the gardens and other facilities he left for the public to have access to.
It’s strange to look at the plants there and take into account how old they are. I definitely got a sense of mortality. Each of the pod cacti was along the order of 90 years old, and some of the benign looking palm trees have been there for a century. Amongst the plants there are older things; these were only the ones of which I took notice.
There are a few ponds in the gardens as well in which you see a lot of Nishikigoi (koi). These special fish, developed by the Japanese, have been known to last for 200 years. Often they are passed from one generation to the next, a birthright of sorts. It must put things into perspective for so small an animal to outlive the histories and ambitions of men.
One of my foibles is gluttonizing on life around me. I wish I could read every book, watch every film, listen to every track, talk to each person, and experience every novelty that I come across. It’s exhausting to move from thing to thing without time or space for real digestion. Even when circumstance forces my life into a more simplified mode I’m on the look out for what’s new, what’s fresh, what's truth, and what’s intriguing enough to put on my radar.
The opposite of this, I know, is detachment. A college friend of mine moved back one semester with a plastic bag containing a change of clothes and one book, tattered and well read. I’ve never been more fascinated in my life after seeing up close the choices a person can make for their life.
Buddhists have the most refined detachment although every religion I can think of espouses some form of it1. Even hedonism (do anything you want for pleasure) seeks detachment from morality and having a conscience trouble you about your actions. There are many legendary stories of Buddhist detachment: asceticism at its best if you like. The objective of the Buddhist is to end suffering by ending attachment.
Another form of detachment is willful ignorance. Quite simply, the logic is to ignore what surrounds you and hence make your life a better one. A variation of this is to only take into account what you would like to see and attach to that. We are all guilty of that but I’ve observed common extremes around certain groups of people. People who as a group decide to have a mutually ignorant view of the world are perhaps the most dangerous of all.
Buddhist detachment appeals to me because all the false pretension that is this world is frustrating and absolutely causes human heartache. However, every time I find myself too piggish about experiencing life and consider detachment, I come back to a few core beliefs that make it untenable in any form.
Even though Nishikigoi, trees, and cacti outlast the span of a normal human life, a human life is never lived in isolation. Our lives are a continuation of something else and after we’re gone there is a form of permanence that our existence makes. Mr. Huntington is an example of this in his attempt to live through his garden and trust, influencing people and making them think, even after he died. I am my father’s spirit now as I live; not in a mystical, metaphysical sense: I carry his values, I carry his assumptions, I mix his world with mine and add to it.
I guess the word that sums it up is posterity, and that is why I cannot detach. One day I’ll plant a tree that will live long after I’m dead, but even more than that I will fight for my life meaning something and influencing other people. There will be the deliberate influences but more than that, I suspect, will be the subtleties people will pick off of me. Last night I met a group from Ireland doing a documentary here in the Midwest. The camera assistant, I discovered after digging, was a closet film maker. His subtle involvement with the world around him inspired me. He’ll probably never know about it and I doubt that I’ll see him again, but it was nice to meet someone else, struggling against time, operating on the world rather than detachedly waiting.
1Detachment is antithetical to Christianity, but that would probably take a long time to expand upon. The "in the but not of the world..." bit.
11:48:20 PM 
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