Through the magnifying glass

Lisa’s framework of life and time—that is, her idea that the present is the lens of a magnifying glass—afforded her a healthy acceptance of death, a view completely free of fear. Ever since the image of the magnifying glass and the gigantic map occurred to her (which was unannounced and unforeseen, not unlike the big bang), it stuck in her mind, and she referred back to it as needed. It translated quite smoothly into the liberating idea that death is simply stepping back and seeing the entire map. She imagined details about that glorious day when she could really see what she’d been staring at. She pictured the freedom of movement she would experience after putting down the magnifying glass and stretching her fingers, her arms, her back, and standing up straight for the first time in her existence. She imagined her eyes adjusting to the picture as a whole, and the thousand tiny sparks that would race around in her mind as she comprehended connections between details and overarching themes that were too big to see at that minute level. She pictured an impressionist painting that was made of tiny little brush marks, that only form a picture when one sees it from far away. She imagined looking over both shoulders and seeing everyone she knew, also stepping back, blinking, stretching, dropping their magnifying glasses, slightly disoriented, as if they had just woken up, feeling the kinks and the range of motion of their forgotten bodies, looking around in awe at the people around them, people they knew from the map but never fathomed that they had been standing right next to them the whole time, people with whom she had wanted desperately to make a personal connection but could not because it had to be through the map; that is, it has to be through language, which obscures meaning; a connection has to bridge perspectives, to transcend—and, she was sure, these connections that she craved would be possible when she stepped back from the map and could shake someone’s hand, give them a hug and a kiss, instead of just seeing their shadowy, false tableau on the map.

Healthy? If Lisa thinks of death as a liberation, a positive thing, an “afterlife” that is really real life and the life she knows now is, to her, a preface, as misleading as a façade, why is that healthy? Not only is she remarkably unafraid of death, but sometimes she almost looks forward to it, on days when taking out the recycling seems at once too trivial and too much. On days when existence is just too heavy a burden, too expansive, she imagines that one day, one non-earthly day, she will somehow know what it was all about, why nothing is too much or too little, how the laws of energy and their fanatical economy prove true about relationships and moods as well: for every action a reaction, no motion wasted or created or destroyed, only reused, in a most sensible, traceable, necessary way. Days when she feels she has done nothing substantial at all, she remembers that if she just waits long enough, some day she will be able to step back, look over the map, and begin her real life, wherein lies real importance, knowing fully well why everything is as it is, and why she had to go through all this in the first place. Because in her mind, what you see on the map, when you see the whole thing, is a reason for living.

(What a paradox, that you can’t see the reason for living until after you’ve lived. Can that be right?)

But healthy? Is that healthy? Shouldn’t one fear the thing that happens to everyone in the world, yet no one has lived to tell of it? What is death, and does it hurt, or is it tedious, or is it nothingness, and are we punished for things we don’t know we did or for doing things we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do?

These questions have never bothered Lisa, although she knows they exist, because almost everyone she knew was afraid of death. She had even heard some of them say they wish they could live forever. The prospect of immortality terrified Lisa. If something awful happened to her, if she became paralyzed or deaf or both, then she would just have to wait till she died, and it would all be all right. But if she were immortal and those things happened, then she would have no hope of ever walking or hearing again. Again, this was obvious to her, but she could never tell anyone because they would accuse of her being morbid. How is that morbid? To her, the idea that death is necessarily something bad is far more morbid than her idea that it might conceivably be good. To live forever would mean an infinity of wasted afternoons, tiredness, speeding tickets, not being able to think of the right word, lost things, slivers, rising gas prices, wondering, indecision, back pain, dieting, loneliness, allergies, not having enough money, feeling selfish, feeling guilty, wondering if it could have been different. When we all step back, she believed, we will see all these things as they are—as details that are so tiny they can’t be seen without a magnifying glass.