                           19970730.00

     You have said it very eloquently:

>   Is "nothing" any more imaginary than "something"?
>   The nothing that I am comtemplating is that aspect
>   of "being" which annihilates and/or bounds the
>   something that we think we are.  It is the negative
>   aspect of life and meaning that reveals itself
>   in the gaps, changes, and decay inherent in our
>   experience of the world....
>   A way of life that is defined by the "critique"
>   without the tools necessary to construct a life
>   after it has been deconstructed by thought.

     Does life need to be "constructed"? Doesn't it come into
being, grow, blossom, bear fruit, wither and die, of itself
without our intervention. "Behold the lilies of the field ..."

     Perhaps "the gaps, changes, and decay inherent in our
experience of the world,"  constitute just that existence which
we ought not to deprecate or to reject. No serious physician
would try to persuade his patient that life should be free of
toil and sorrow, of disease and death; but the circumstance that
life encompasses toil, sorrow and disease, and is itself
encompassed by death, does not, at least in my logic, imply the
nothingness of life. Each one of us, I think, comes to terms with
the limitations of (his) existence in his own way.  I know of no
"method", and should be surprised if, given our diversity, a
single method adequate to all souls could be found. Some of us
commit suicide, some commit crimes (a form of social suicide),
some of us ruin ourselves with drugs, some drink ourselves to
death, some of us write "King Lear", or the Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, or the Well-Tempered Clavier, and some
do nothing more than publish an occasional letter on the
Internet.  Kierkegaard called the process "becoming a subject" or
"becoming subjective."

     And in the end we all die and are all forgotten.

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