Today, the Thing I Have in Common with Bilbo Baggins and the Thing he has in Common with Hamlet

Sometimes, we must face despair.

Everything goes to shit all at once and we can see no escape. In such moments, when we come to be still and have a moment with no noise but our breath, more usually than not we are faced with the inescapable fact that we are still alive. We have not the leisure of death, the one true escape, nor the mixed blessing of an appetite for self-annihilation. We have no path to us except to simply soldier on, in spite of all the leering demons we anticipate ahead of us.

Most literature asks the question, what do we do when no ways are open to us? In the deepest caves, when our friends have left us — without wishing or meaning to, perhaps, but they have — when the darkness creeps around us, and dark things creep up out of it, when we know no ways of escape, when we have no light and no tools, we still have life. Is it so very noble to, then, suffer the slings and arrows of all the wicked world and accept the inexorability of survival? I don’t know. I’ll be better suited to answering after I’ve seen what crop my actions reap.

I hope so, though. I have either the choice to accept this weird, unswerving continuity of “life,” or I can end it. The only other option is absurd: to deny reality in all its oppression and to assume it is ridiculous. I would have to give into all madness.

Though, if I continue without any awareness it is all a little ridiculous, I will likely go mad anyway. So madness in moderation must be the shape of life. A pretty predicament. The clever mind behind that system ought to write novels.

No, when all lights go out, and I feel forced to ask whether I have strength to be, the answer proves irrelevant. I am, whether I have strength for it or whether I think I do not. It is a good thing, even if it is not always a happy thing.

When the doomsayer beckons me to despair with his crooked fingers, no matter with what drudging sigh I turn to him, I am alive. That electric tingling is with me, inescapable and vibrant by definition. My life hopes, even when I feel that I cannot.

And that is a comforting thought. Whether I want it to be or not.