Losing the War on Rugs

Out of Office Auto-Reply

            I will be away from my office for the next two weeks with no access to telephone or email or voicemail or “text” or any of the other instruments of virtual interaction by which we lull ourselves into the belief that we are in touch. You are, doubtless, expecting reassurance that all is under control (as is de rigeiur for communiqués of this type), to wit: “I will reply to you as soon as possible.  If this is an emergency, please contact my assistant.” You can subscribe to this little fib if it dulls your anxiety, but you will be deluding yourself, just as certainly as we hope against hope that anything other than chaos and unfairness are the ingredients of the natural order.  Even if I could suspend my inclination to parsimony to bestow the legally-sanctioned minimum wage upon a fellow creature, do you really think I would entrust anything of import to a cat’s paw who goofs off whenever my back is turned, and rummages through my desk drawers in a desperate attempt to find something incriminating so as to breathe life into some long-smoldering vision of blackmail and early retirement? Are you honestly of the opinion that I am devoting even theoretical energy while I am away to the pondering of solutions to any one of your many petty “crises” that, with the virulence of weeds, pop up all over the transactional landscape despite our best attempts to sever them at their root, or, at the very least, to tamp them down with the large wooden mallet of reason so stingily doled out to your character at its genesis? Why would you think, even for a minute, even for a second, even for a unit of Planck (which is the smallest measurement of time available to physics) that, like Monsieur Rick dismissing Signor Ugarte, I would give you any thought? Especially while I am away? Prometheus played with fire and got burned. Sic semper veritas. Indeed, it may be so that the greatest kindness we can ever bestow is to shield one another from the truth. Can we even ever know the “truth?” Can you prove, for example, that you and I and the trillions upon trillions of other particles that you pretend fill the void are no more than the figment of the imagination of some other being who has forced its soul so to its own conceit that from its visage all that is appeared, and which will disappear with the next blink of its disinterested eye? And if it cannot be proven, then can you ever have the certainty that it is so?   But assuming, arguendo, that you could produce such a “proof;” that you could declare to the universe, with all the confidence and arrogance of Descartes, that you exist – what then? A hundred thousand years from now, will any of this matter very much?

What I mean to convey by this message, without tergiversating, is that I appreciate your patronage and I look forward to speaking to you upon my return.