The art of living

“Echo” I call into the void.

“Echo” the void calls back.

I leap to my feet. How many days have I rested here? How many times have I yelled words, words of greeting, words of nonsense, called out whatever came to mind to see if anything would answer? Days, months, years, sometimes while I walked past on my way to my life, sometimes while I perched on the edge, my legs hanging over empty space. All those times, I heard only my own voice then silence, teasing silence. But now—ha!—now I receive my answer and in another voice. Quick! I must ask everything I’ve wanted to, all the questions that bend around me like the bars of a cage until I can hardly move. Quick! Now! While I have the attention of eternity!

And so I throw everything I can think of into the abyss. Knowing me, they are light and small these questions I hurl, hardly more than pebbles really, yet they still take two hands to lift.

“Is life just a joke?”

“Is ours a laughing god?”

“Should we keep living because we have lived?”

“Is history more than a recurring nightmare?”

“Is the human imagination for cruelty truly unbounded?”

These and more I cast into the abyss. These and more, and when I am panting with exertion I heave in my final question:

“What am I?”

My hands fall to my knees as I breathe heavily. I seek below me some motion, some life, or some sign. I know from habit, from seeking it so often, I will not find it, but still I squint into the darkness. When at last I grow tired of standing that way, hunched over and squinting, I lower myself to the ground and take up a watchful position. Surely the void hasn’t fallen asleep while I spoke? I didn’t bore it until it dozed off, did I? How could eternity grow bored so easily as that? Yes, it was I who spoke after all, and that may be cause in its own right for eyes to turn to glass, but does the abyss even have eyes? Or did I merely ask it so much and all at once that it needs a moment to think? Ah, yes, that must be it. It is considering what to toss back up to me in exchange for the small and light pebbles I have lobbed. Well, I can wait. Answers will surely come if I am patient. And I am. Or at least I can be.

So I wait.

I have nowhere more important to be.

So I wait.

But even I, who am patient—or at least can be—begin eventually to fidget. The void must know the answers. Eternity must know—or else nothing does. I open my mouth but close it without making a sound. I try again, open then closed. Every time I think to speak, I break off again with the fear that I will begin to say something meaningless just as the answer comes, and my words will drown out the wisdom of the ages. At last, though, I push myself up. I have waited so long. I must eventually get on with my life. What’s the point of living after all if you spend all life waiting? And so I open my mouth once more.

“Echo?” I call into the void. This time it truly is only a pebble I toss, not a boulder like what I tried before. Maybe a pebble is easier to digest.

I wait.

The answer, when it comes, is silence.