James Earl Jones and The Arrow of Time (nonfiction)

Just some questionably connected thoughts I wanted to get out of my brain. ~Eric

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Like pretty much everyone else with even the vaguest interest in science fiction, fantasy, or film, I learned about the death of James Earl Jones over the weekend. I won’t pretend that I was overly shocked by the news. The man was in his 90s. Frankly, it’s a testament to his constitution and medical care that he lasted so long and remained as active as he did. It was, however, still a jarring moment for me. He was the voice of Darth Vader, and Vader, unlike the man who voiced him, is vaguely immortal in the way that all fictional characters are vaguely immortal. All I need to do to see Vader again is watch one of the Star Wars original trilogy films. All you need to do to revisit any fictional character is reread or rewatch the thing where you originally found them.

While my sense of reality is more than firmly entrenched enough to distinguish between what is real and what is fictional, our brains still have a way of making erroneous assumptions based on erroneous perceptions. That odd, quasi-immortal quality that all fictional characters possess can give us a false sense that the people who played them are also vaguely eternal in some way. That, when we decide to check in on them via the Stalkernet, er, um, I mean the entirely wholesome resource we call the internet, they will be fine and doing something celebrity-ish in places that most of us will never go, like Monaco, or the French Riviera, or Ibiza. Yet, eventually, that will cease to be true.

All of that brought to mind this concept in physics and, to a lesser extent, mathematics and philosophy called the Arrow of Time. I’m going to spare you an extended lecture on epistemology, the difficulties in establishing causal relationships, the problems of human perception and memory, and give you the reader-friendly explanation of the concept. It basically boils down to this: time moves in one direction. Before anyone starts talking about quantum entanglement in the comments, I’m relating this to the human experience which happens on the macroscopic scale where time does, indeed, seem to move in one direction.

Like anyone else, I had formative moments in my youth and teen years. Watching the Star Wars movies was on that list. But those certainly weren’t the only things. A lot of those experiences were tied to public figures that were, in one way or another, iconic. And the last few years have not been kind to the icons of my past. A short list of people who have fallen before the arrow of time that were on my list include James Earl Jones, Barbara Walters, Sidney Potier, Meat Loaf, David Crosby, Anne Rice, Julian Sands, Raquel Welch, Tina Turner, Hal Holbrook, Sinead O’Connor, Bob Barker, Sandra Day O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Betty White, Joan Didion, and Christopher Plummer. Now, I’ll grant that not everyone in that list is going to be iconic for everyone, but they were all falsely lodged in my psyche with a vaguely immortal status because they got imprinted there when my brain matter was younger and less well-trained in critical thinking and because death is kind of sad to think about, so I try to give it limited real estate in my active thoughts.

However, I’m old enough now that watching a who’s who of iconic people in my brain dying in droves is enough to make me reflect on matters of mortality. I’m not especially somber about it. There’s no point. The long sleep is coming for everyone. Obsessing over it is both unhealthy and unhelpful. Remaining mindful of it, on the other hand, can prove beneficial. It’s an absolute frame of reference in a world where everyone from the media to politicians are trying to undermine the very concept of an absolute anything. (Something I’m very much against, in case you were wondering, but that’s blog post for another day.) The inescapable fact and magnitude of death is kind of mental yardstick against which you can measure things and assign them a value.

For example, my cat did something that pissed me off. How important is that relative to the inevitable fact that I will die? If you’re sane, it’s not very important, which means it probably shouldn’t get that much of your attention and energy. On the opposite end of things, for me, is something like, I didn’t write anything today. How important is that relative to my inevitable end? Since I view writing books as the thing I was probably meant to do with my finite number of minutes on Earth, it’s pretty goddamned important. Which may or may not help people understand why I seem to have an inhuman work ethic at times. While I know that I’ll never write all of the books I have in me, I do want to write as many of them as can. Keeping in mind that I really don’t have forever helps to keep me focused and on-task.

I suspect that a lot of the people on my list had intuited something similar when you consider the rather extensive body of works most of them left behind in one way or another. This isn’t some kind of an endorsement of a workaholic lifestyle. Not everyone sees professional achievement as particularly valuable. Instead, it’s about using your time and energy on what you see as valuable, instead of dumping it into things you don’t. The world is painfully ripe with distractions. More so now than probably at any other time in human history. It’s almost hideously easy to go down rabbit trails you honestly don’t care that much about in real life that soak up your time and energy and give you nothing in return.

Case in point, focusing on the admittedly sad fact that James Earl Jones will never again put that amazing voice and prodigious talent of his to work again. That is a loss for us all, but the real tragedy is the grief his family is experiencing right now. Instead of pouring energy in that sense of loss, use his death as a personal reminder that we all only get so much time. Reflect on the things you value. Look for ways you can put more energy into those things and less energy into things you don’t really care that much about. You may never become as iconic James Earl Jones (or Darth Vader), but you may find that you like your life a little better.