Diary Entry
5.31.26
I often experience a kind of preemptive nostalgia. I miss things before they’re gone.
I remember feeling this way as a child. Every Friday night my family would have Shabbat dinner with my grandparents. Even then, while sitting at the table, I was aware that this ritual was temporary. My grandparents would not always be there. Someday I would grow up. Someday the dinners would stop. What should have been a source of comfort was often tinged with sadness because I could already feel its future absence.
I could have sworn there was an XKCD comic I saw in high school that contained the line, “All things are temporary, treat them as such.” I spent ten minutes looking for it just now and couldn’t find it anywhere. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I fused together a dozen different things I had read into a single sentence that never actually existed.
In any case, it expresses an idea I’ve spent most of my life struggling to internalize.
The insight animates most Eastern philosophies, though by the time it reaches contemporary America it tends to get laundered into a kind of therapeutic jargon about attachment that makes me want to kill myself. Still, beneath all the wellness-industry clichés lies something profound: everything passes away.
Our high priests of modern medicine might classify what I’m describing as an anxiety disorder. An unhealthy preoccupation with endings. Attachment issues. Catastrophizing, maybe. But as soon as something beautiful begins, I find myself anticipating its conclusion. A vacation starts and I am already stressed that it will end. A relationship deepens and I become conscious of its fragility. A play opens and I can already feel closing night approaching.
The thing that has helped me most is the realization that finitude is not a defect in life but the precondition that makes life meaningful in the first place.
During the pandemic I kept reading and rereading Martin Hägglund, trying to hammer this idea into my skull. I’m a dense person. I often need to hear the same thing twenty times before I understand it. Hägglund’s argument is simple and, like all great insights, obvious only after someone says it: if something lasted forever, nothing about it would matter. We care because things can be lost. We love because the people we love are finite. Time is precious precisely because it runs out.
The tragedy of impermanence and the beauty of impermanence are the same thing viewed from different angles.
Tonight was one of those nights when I felt the truth of this particularly strongly.
A play I’ve been doing readings of since September closed. The play itself is about the ending of a scene, but its final performance seemed to coincide with the ending of something else as well. I’m not entirely sure what. Not a friendship. Not a chapter. Not anything I can name. Just the vague but unmistakable feeling that some period of life had quietly reached its conclusion.
The show was great. The house was packed. The cast is full of people I admire enormously. Afterward we gathered for a party and I looked around the room at faces both familiar and new. Some of these people I’ve known for years now. Others only recently entered my life. But there was a warmth in the room that felt tangible. Even if the music was loud and I somehow ended up accidentally ordering an entire lobster and steak. It’s difficult to hold a conversation while cracking lobster claws in a crowded restaurant, I discovered.
And then, as always, I found myself doing that thing I do.
I was sitting in the middle of it, already missing it.
Whitman whispers to me:
“You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.”
For most of my life I’ve regarded this tendency as a flaw. A failure to be present. But lately I’ve begun to wonder if there is something worthwhile buried inside it. Maybe what I am actually feeling in those moments is gratitude struggling to express itself. Maybe sadness is simply the price we pay for recognizing that something matters.
Perhaps that’s why theatre affects me so deeply. More than any other art form, it wears its impermanence on its sleeve. A novel remains on a shelf. A film can be replayed. A painting hangs on a wall. But a performance disappears as it unfolds. The moment it exists, it is already vanishing.
All things are temporary, treat them as such.
Whether the quote exists or not, I think it’s true.