The 2084 Precept
Page 9
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This is perhaps a good moment, on the off-chance that you are desirous of knowing a little more about me, for me to digress.
Now…let me see. I believe I can claim to be one of the more normal specimens of human being wandering around the planet, albeit characterized by certain of the distinctive singularities peculiar to my type.
Some say that you can divide the human race into two types, extroverts and introverts, and I hold that to be true. Others say that you can divide it into two other types, optimists and pessimists, and I hold that to be true as well. But there is more to it than that. A type is defined by several other traits, influences, behavioral characteristics and, for most types anyway, specific peculiarities.
My name is Peter O'Donoghue, 'POD' to my few friends—a word I do not confuse with acquaintances by the way, whether good, casual or undesired—for reasons you don't have to think much about. I am thirty eight years of age and therefore I statistically have another 520 months to go. Well over two thousand weeks, not too bad.
I look younger according to what most women tell me and they tend to know about such things. Fairly dark brown hair, blue eyes, decent body, a bit on the lean side if you will, but more than acceptable. In other words I am pretty happy with the luck of the draw except for being too tall, close to two meters high. But such is the world, you can't have everything, it doesn't trouble me.
The surname comes from my great grandfather and I am one-eighth Irish, a matter of utter insignificance, we are all a mixture of something or other, I only mention it in case you are interested in such things. I was a single child and both parents ended up under the turf while I was still a teenager. Or, if you are that way inclined, ended up in the sky. Actually, to be more accurate, only my mother was buried. My father was incinerated, and my only surviving relation, an uncle, proceeded down the same path soon thereafter. Sad you might say and indeed it is and indeed it was, but then time heals everything you might also say, and indeed it does and indeed it did.
I do not pretend to be one of the masses. My type is a minority type.
First of all, I am an honest person in all things that matter. None of us are totally honest of course, even if it's because you lie to your children about Father Christmas. Children are very trusting, they believe anything we tell them—which is why the religions like to catch them young, a fact, oh yes—but the moment children learn the truth about Father Christmas is the very moment in their small, brief lives when they realize for the first time that you can't trust the grown-ups. Because, if it suits their purpose, even your own mother and father will lie to you and mislead you. What's more, for a prolonged period of time if they feel like it.
And yes, I admit it; in things that don't matter, I can also, on occasion, be significantly dishonest.
Secondly, I am a cynic, something you may of course have already decided for yourself.
Someone once described a cynic as a person who, when he smells flowers, looks around to see where the coffin is. But I am not that kind of cynic. We (my type) are simply cynics of the kind who are censorious of all things that we do not understand or with which we disagree, and for which there is no available proof to the contrary. This type of cynic is not something the vast majority of people appreciate and that is why cynics of this kind tend to prefer the company of other, similar, cynics. We are indeed a minority slice of the social pie.
Furthermore, the word cynic itself has a somewhat derogatory connotation attached to it, one implying a certain churlishness, a certain derisory attitude on the part of the person to whom the word is being applied. But a cynic is merely a sceptic, as normal as any non-cynic, and perhaps, as a result, a more honest person into the bargain. So we need to be careful. If you are of the inclination to categorize all negative persons as cynics, I would not necessarily disagree with you. But if you were wishing to categorize all cynics as negative persons, you and I would have to disagree. A false assumption, if ever there was one.
I am also an agnostic. Ah hah, I hear you asking, and what else would one possibly expect of a cynic? Well, I wouldn't know, but hopefully you are not confusing the term with the word atheist. An atheist does not believe in the existence of God, or of any god from the wide variety available to us on this planet to choose from. Statistically, if you don’t mind my saying so, you are quite likely to be worshipping one of them yourself.
An agnostic, on the other hand, merely holds that nothing is provably known, nor is likely to be provably known, of the existence of a God or gods and as a consequence he neither accepts nor rejects these concepts. This philosophy has absolutely no negative or depressing effects on the agnostic's life. Quite the contrary, he is more often than not an affable, contented and relaxed fellow, swimming serenely, sedately and imperturbably through life's ocean with his lifebelt of 'don't know, don't believe, don't disbelieve' firmly attached.
That's me alright. I enjoy life. Even in unpleasant and troublesome times I apply the motto 'If life were not so great, it could be difficult sometimes'.
My type is also what you would call opinionated. We have opinions on just about everything, including on matters with which we are not necessarily adequately acquainted. We are consequently not always right. You have occasionally come across our type, I'm sure. Possibly you consider us to be insufferable assholes. Fair enough I say—but hopefully you have no appreciation for those creatures who have no opinions at all, or who do have opinions but rarely express them, which in effect has the same result. These types are far worse. The former are stupid and the latter are reptilian. They are death on a plate.
I have already indicated that I am a fairly honest type and it would therefore be remiss of me to leave you with these few autobiographical fragments without referring to a defect of mine. As a matter of fact, I have many defects, commencing with the admittedly dismal and disgusting one of being a smoker, but the defect I wish to refer to here is a specific characteristic of my type. I am a pessimist.
Optimists and pessimists have been described in various ways over the centuries. The optimist, as someone once said, is a person who believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist is a person who fears this is so. A pessimist, as someone else once said, is best described as a person who has been forced to live for a prolonged period of time together with an optimist. An optimist commences the Sunday Times crossword with a pen, the pessimist with a pencil. And so on and so forth.
A pessimist is not to be confused with a negative person. I, like most of my type, am a notably positive person. A positive pessimist, that is the best way to describe me. There is nothing depressing about that. I just look at the current facts pertaining to our planet, sufficient on their own, in my view, to turn any thinking person into a pessimist, and then I envisage the future, the evolution to come, decide there is nothing to be done about it, least of all by me, and I am therefore pessimistic about that also.
And, having arrived at this conclusion, I decided that the only intelligent thing to do about it is to ignore it all. Forget about it, immerse yourself in life, get on with it, swim with the ocean waves, enjoy the whole thing for the amount of time allotted to you. Which isn't much, a miserly amount in my opinion, but there is nothing to be done about that either, is there? As I see it, a logical and positive way of embracing the whole situation.
So being a cynic with regard to many things, including Mr. Jeremy Parker's current fascinating fables, by no means signifies that I am a cynic with regard to life itself. I will go so far as to say that optimists have not the slightest idea of how many wonderful and pleasant surprises the average positive pessimist or cynic experiences during the course of his or her lifetime.
I have been frank. I do not believe I need to add more. I have provided you with a miniature and blotchy sketch of my physiological landscape. Not a particularly congenial chap, you might say; an unacceptably opinionated fellow with an air of provocation about him, not one that I would especially single out for
my dinner table. And I wouldn't disagree with you. That is the impression we (my type) tend to portray. But impressions are only impressions and hopefully you will forgive me if I make the suggestion that one day you invite me to dinner. I make quite a pleasant guest.