Not everything is for everyone. Platitudes like this are simultaneously the most eye-rollingly obvious critters running around the ecosystem of human language, but also, sometimes, when scrutinized carefully and at the right moment, distinctively revelatory, for some of us, anyway.

One morning several weeks ago, leaving our house, I was struck by the fact that I was leaving our house, where my wife and I have lived, by and large, for almost twenty years, and where our children have been raised, and where all four of us live even now. But my daughter graduated from high school this spring, and this is the last spring she’ll be living here, and so this is the last spring that the house will be for us what it has been, a synechdoche for our whole family. I know life is changing and it always is. But it always surprises me, creeping up like a tiger, a beast in the jungle. Recognition and regret seem simultaneous, in these instances, of which I have had a few; haven’t you?

It seems to me that the most important insights are driven by very small accidents, in the sense of events that are discrete and easily missable or avoidable by others. It was the particular way that I was pulling out of my driveway that morning, with the sun hitting the house and the light of morning, terrifically bright above the trees, but in air that was still cool, that reminded me of so many other mornings like that one, and also whispered to me that we do not have many more of these left. Anyone else in the car at that moment would not have connected the moment with decades of similar mornings. Anyone else wouldn’t have felt the momentum of all of those mornings coalesce into a felt sense of this is the way things should be, and then a sudden shock at the realization that they won’t be this way much longer.

It is not my daughter who hurts me, of course, nor even her imminent departure, but rather the sense that an era in my own life, and the life of our family, is coming to an end. That hurts, as it means that we will have to find a new way of living again. My reasons for loving the quotidian life that my family shares are many, but among the most profound for me was that it gave the illusion of permanence, which for a variety of reasons, speaking autobiographically, I have historically lacked, and now I perhaps over-value. Now I, and we, will have to find a way beyond this impasse into a new way of life. As Lampedusa puts it in his novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, things are going to have to change.” This is a deep truth.

Deep truths are rare; or perhaps they are not rare enough. We all are in possession of a number of deep truths. We all believe we have insights that can be communicated, and so we try to share them. Most often we end up telling people things at too large a level of generality for them to apprehend the particular value of the statements, or at too fine-grained a level of granularity for them to feel that they apply to them at all. Most often that is we miss the ability to share with one another. This is the human condition, or a big part of it.

That granularity, that non-reproducability of human experience, the indigestibility of our first-personal perspective to one another, is a simple fact about us. We experience things too vividly, and in too deeply integrated a manner—the fingerprints of our subjectivity is too much all over every moment—to allow anyone else simple access to our memories, our experiences, and to transplant them into their own lives.

And yet there must be some way that we can learn from one another. There is some communication. What that is, as pale and bled-out as it is, is inescapable. We can escape our own skulls, and emphathize, and sympathize, and imagine.

The form of the essay is a useful device for this. Like a syringe, good for injecting. It does not try to be too didactic, too direct. It offers itself, and then lets you decide how you will use it. Perhaps a blog post can be like that as well, at least in part.  Maybe movies, as well.

“Like tears in rain.” Whenever I think of wisdom, I think of the beautiful, surprising speech delivered by Rutger Hauer, in character as the “Replicant” Roy Batty, in Blade Runner. (Apparently Hauer not only recited the scene, but significantly rewrote it, the night before it was filmed.) Hauer died yesterday, which is perhaps why I’m thinking about this now. When I wonder if movies can be profound, I always return to this scene.  

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Rest in peace, Mr. Hauer