What's it like to live on the moon? I know you're an American Hero because you live there, planting flags like a space age Johnny Appleseed, scaring off the commies who would try to take over the world above you. Me, I don't do anything so important.
Above: Artist's representation of the moon. Sometimes, I like to build sandcastles by the shore, just to watch them be washed away. One day, I made one as a testament to the futility of man's hubris. It was my intention that the waves would crash over it and tear it apart. Yet, the tide went further out and my castle stood for the rest of the day. Obviously, my attempt to show futility was itself futile. Writers refer to this as irony. What I've learned from other sandcastles is in the surf you can dig a hole, but you can't make a hill. You can accentuate the void, but you can't create excess. Sometimes, in life, you're in the surf. Of course, eventually the waves will fill the hole back in themselves. But to try to build something is an exercise in futility. Microsoft Bookshelf says of the word futile, the central meaning of the word is "producing no result or effect." Everything would be the same one way or the other. I tend to be a bit of a determinist sometimes. Not that my final fate will be approximately with my input or without, but that my very input is itself predetermined and not subject to change. The world is the way it is and will be the way it will be. How could it be any other way? To speak of the world being different is equivalent to denying the "realness" of reality. If the world could be like the hypothetical world, why do we say ours is the "real" world and the hypothetical world is merely an abstraction?
Above: Unprocessed sandcastle raw material. What else can we say but "reality is"? A cold bare fact, which we must deal with in our attempt to understand the sense data which floods our consciousness. Perhaps all is futile in the sense that there is nothing larger for us to produce an effect or result in. We are, that's all. Like sandcastles on the shore, we were built for the amusement of someone or thing, and time and tide wears us away sooner or later. There is no way for a sandcastle to escape it's demise. Even away from the sea, wind, erosion, the explosion of the sun in 5 billion years, the heat death of the universe, something will cause the untimely end of the sandcastle. But then, why should we want sandcastles to last forever, as though they were foot prints on the sterile surface of the moon? Things are the way they are, and perhaps we should be glad at that much. Let me know what you think Neil.