The Feeling of Living

"...and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fire-flight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil-- everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble." (O'Brien, pg. 77) O'Brien describes the truths, especially of war, as "contradictory." However I believe that truths usually are. Everyone has those moments when they feel emotions intensely. When we feel so alive; we can't help but feel the horrible misery and the untainted joy of being alive. That's part of living. Just as in Cat's Cradle the people of San Lorenzo became miserable because they tried to be only happy, we must accept that moments or people do not have to be purely good or bad. That is the beauty of being human; we are so complex, so multi-dimensional that we can never quite figure ourselves, let alone each other, out. This paragraph in The Things They Carried, struck me as inexplicably beautiful. The ability to feel so alive in a time of so much death is one of the miracle of being human. I have not had an experience remotely as traumatic as war, but from my own less exciting life I can easily say that I prefer to feel some sort of pain then to feel nothing at all. Nothing can replace those moments when you feel so sublimely happy, and in the same way we are lucky to care enough to feel pain.