Ephemeral

I am writing this post directly into blogger from a computer in the science building of my school.  My computer is currently about sixteen feet away in the possession of the school's IT help desk, awaiting attention from the technicians.  With luck, they will be able to clear up some of the lingering virus trouble I've been having.  In the meantime, I am depending on the computer facilities around campus.  I hope this will not be an extended state of being.

There are many things I could discuss related to my current dilemma.  But today is not a day to complain.  I am more intrigued by this post itself and how it is unique.  After I have posted this, these words will exist nowhere else in the world.  Nowhere.  Having spent all last night making sure everything else I wrote was copied and copied again, this is jarring.  I have a tendency to want things to last, just in case I might want to come back to them at some other time.

Then again, there is value in that sense of impermanence.  Music and theatre, when performed live, are never the same twice, and that gives them a form of life to which recordings cannot compare.  There are artists, too, whose only record of their art is a photograph.  Andy Goldsworthy comes to mind: his art includes only natural resources, and as the pieces are exposed to the elements, they change and fall apart and are gone.  By only appearing once, these things become rare, valuable, and special in many ways.

Far be it from me to suggest that this pithy little post, written fourteen minutes before class, is in any way significant to anyone's life or point of view.  But there is value to the things that disappear.  Maybe it would be better not to hold on so carefully to what we have done in the past.