my room

Here I have known the worst pain in my life. And yet I'm grateful for it. I trust it to contain my pain. Here I find oblivion, and sometimes dream. But even if I lie awake in agony, at least I lie awake alone. I have no one to answer to. I don't have to put up a front. In my room I can let the longing and the obsession do their worst. No one has to know. Here they lie in wait for me. Here they keep me company.

non-existence

That is perhaps the hardest pill to swallow. I can deal with the sadness, the regrets - they mean that there once was someone, someone who occupied my thoughts. But as Kurt Vonnegut says in Mother Night:

"There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead."

So all my thoughts can't benefit anyone. I might as well forget. 

And another one - for the survivors:

"I was like almost everybody who came through the war. ... Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other."

evolution

"I don't want what you want, I don't feel what you feel."

So this book I've been reading is a bowl of laughs. Its premise is that there is no purpose to life, it's all an illusion perpetrated by adaptation to make us get out of bed, and if you can't deal with it, there's Prozac.

Here's a quote from it:

"Introspection can't provide a good reason to go on living because there isn't any. ... But introspection keeps hoping, looking, trying to find a reason to go on.  Since there really isn't one, those who look hard eventually become troubled."

Troubled is a nice way of putting it.  The first quote is a lyric my son kept coming back to, so much so that he joked he would have it tattooed on his forehead.  I said in my book that he wasn't well-adjusted, that he couldn't be fooled.  He saw through the meaninglessness of it all.   He didn't buy into the whole getting out of bed for no reason but to perpetuate a bunch of molecules.  Of course, any body wants to keep going, but he fooled his by driving it to death.  No, he didn't will it, because there is no free will, but he slipped one by evolution.