Figuring

by Maria Popova

How can a single person be both a stratospheric success and a failure bordering on the pathetic? Why do we seek narratives that move from less to more rather than from more to less, if the sum total is the same? Why do we consider it a failure when a long and loving relationship eventually grows troubled and ends, but celebrate romances bedeviled by innumerable obstacles that the lovers overcome before settling into a comfortable love? Why do we prefer the stories of lives that begin in poverty or obscurity and end in riches or fame to the stories of those that attain achievement early and end in poverty or oblivion? We long for perpetual motion out of the same impetus—a stubborn refusal to recognize that cessation is the ultimate nature of all things, and that any dynamism, wherever in time it may fall, however briefly, is cause for celebration. “No amount of effort can save you from oblivion,” Kurt Cobain would write in his journal.