You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker is the rare 21st century music that has managed to influence me. The album was released two weeks prior to his death in 2016, he was 82, and the theme of death is ever present through out its 36 minutes.

Generally speaking, the modern world has tended to lionize the youthful artist only to relegate them to museum pieces as they age. Too many people want artists, particularly musicians, to simply repeat the same things they did decades ago. And when they are no longer able to satisfactorily recreate those glory days, the artist is demeaned by some of those same people that rabidly cheered them on when they were much younger. The phrase “past their prime” is commonly used. Aging artists are often derided as those who bank on greatest hits and past masterpieces. We often read the opinions that “they are too old”. Or more to the point are told “they should just give it up!”

At times, perhaps, that criticism may have some validity. But only in so far as it is a call out that an artist is no longer capable of replicating the past. Sometimes an artist does stop evolving and does seem to behave like a product. This becomes problematic when your younger self was capable of seemingly endless wild performative acrobatics, or precise details that require the dexterity and eyesight and physicality of a much younger artist. An older artist will inevitably find one day they are not quite able to mimic that particular task anymore. Much like an Olympic sprinter who is only one second slower, they are no longer competitive with their younger peers. Or their former self. Everyone notices.

There are exceptions, however. When both fan and artist remove the expectations of the past, and the artist meets the art where they are in the moment and evolves using that moment as the starting line rather than the finish line, the aging artist often demonstrates they continue to have relevant things to share.

Regardless, no one should tell an artist they should no longer be such. Their decision to wander onwards is their personal choice and theirs alone. At least until life, or lack thereof, demands otherwise.

The art I seek most tends to reflect the struggles of every day human encounters through learned experiences. If one is lucky, life is not always a constant struggle. However, even when one is lucky, there will be some struggle. For others, most moments is a constant struggle. Survival is struggle and survival is inherent to the biological condition. It is relatable to all even if we disagree on the magnitude each person endures as we move from person to person.

When the artist meets the moment and reflects those struggles through abstractions, there is something poignant that becomes available to us from which we can learn. An aging artist can have the ability to articulate a point of view that draws from a broader palette from this thing we call “life”. That broader palette is accrued from the wealth of experiences we obtained over time. Our passage across time changes our perspectives by placing us into ever changing vantage points.

One will be drug forward into the future whether one wishes to or not. Aging into death is nothing if not an endless struggle of adapting to change. With respect to our biological lives, it is a one direction journey. The longer the journey, the longer the struggle. Nothing in life is constant. Every day your body changes. People come and go. Jobs change. Circumstances change. Every day something is not as it was.

Until death. The great unifier.

Life is endless uncertainty about a future that includes a terminal event that was a forgone conclusion the moment you were born. Struggle is a constant companion along that journey.

Leonard Cohen, to the very end, used his palette of a long life of experiences to reflect and ponder that struggle towards death. I am thankful for his brave and forthright reflections. They help bridge gaps in my experiences by provisioning new perspectives not previously visible to me. They help bolster an understanding that while I, and each of us, ultimately go through the mortality struggle on our own, we are not really alone as we all undergo this experience. These are shared experiences experienced individually. Cohen’s art, music, and poetry, permits a window into his struggles from his perspective. While I am not able to, nor desire to, have his specific experiences, I am able to at least commiserate and extrapolate them against my own.

Like many people, I imagine, the music and art that most heavily influenced me was the music and art I was subjected to and consumed when I was in my youth. I was more easily influenced by the world around me when I was younger. My brain was more or less empty of content. Something had to begin filling it. Who was I? What was I? Who did I want to be? I knew nothing and my survival minded brain rapidly built a library to enable me to survive this often very fucked up word. When we are young our minds are vacuums that suck up everything with ease. Our brains are malleable and willing to naturally and easily retain information.

The development of that library required educators. Some of my educators were formal. Some were accidental. Some were people. Some were books. Some I chose. Some were foisted upon me. Some taught me that I did not wish to know more of what they had to offer. Some, through their own wretched behaviors, taught me more than I bargained for, even if they unironically and unsuccessfully attempted to teach me to be wretched.

Music was one component of that education and it was prominent in that education. There is something powerful and alluring in music that transcends other forms of communication. It is both complex and simple as to why it appeals to us. We associate it with particular events, moments in our lives and it can be used as a form of tribal identity of sorts that is capable of superseding political and geographical boundaries. It changes the world, and though it doesn’t seem capable of solving the worlds problems, it does provide a therapy in that it can help us feel not quite so alone when we may otherwise feel we are on our lonely psychological islands. Music builds allegorical bridges between like minded people.

You Want It Darker is one such bridge in my life. A rare bridge in that it was built later in my life. It is therefore a newer bridge. It is not so much that the older bridges built in my youth are entirely decayed and I needed a new bridge to replace old bridges. True, some bridges are perhaps a bit worn down or used infrequently. I seem unable to relate to the angst of grunge in the manner I felt acutely back in the 90s, for example. It’s not that I now find the music lacks quality. It is simply that I no longer require or desire to travel the roads that take me to them. At least presently.

These days I have different experiences and needs than I did decades ago. I am in need of new bridges to connect me to new destinations. I have never encountered the aging process in the manner I now experience. I need new bridges to help me enter into those lands.

At this moment I have found I have aged into the “middle aged” zone of life. That is what modern culture tells me anyways. I am told I am not formally accepted by the elderly community quite yet. Modern culture suggests anyone between 40 and 64 is middle aged. I find suggestions that I am middle age as a wildly and entirely misleading speculative statement. The average life expectancy for a male living in my neck of the woods is 76.5. That is roughly what it was when I was a child. Some years the data moves slightly upwards and sometimes downwards. A literal middle age would be, using present life expectancy data, would suggest 38.25. I am at the moment of this writing 56. This falls well beyond midpoint as I am not going to be 112. I hope not anyways as I think such an experience would be a bit of a waste for me.

There are no guarantees one way or the other. My life could have ended with any number of lethal disasters prior to the moment I wrote this. I knowingly lucked out and avoided a few instances. Who knows how many lethal accidents or encounters I unknowingly avoided due to blind luck? I have no idea. Sure, it is theoretically possible I could possibly perhaps maybe be placed in an involuntary stasis one day and will unknowingly biologically “live” until I am 500, but the general odds are against this.

I also live in a fucked up world. A very fucked up world. It could get even more fucked up. I am a student of history. Everyone should be a student of history if you want to understand humanity. While humans can also do great and wonderful things, we also know very well just how brutal and shitty humans can be to one another. History captures this. We are also now collectively capable enough to destroy the planet, make it inhabitable for life and both intentionally and non intentionally run our species into extinction. Unfortunately, we see those brutal and shitty behaviors that could permit such are anything but clearly in our rearview mirror. It is telling that humans keep a doomsday clock that is close to midnight. We keep chopping away the nanoseconds daily as we refuse to change, a single hasty finger away from some dipshit ending it all for everyone of us. As hard as it is to believe, there are sick bastards out there who actively root for this.

Regardless, there is simply no way to know when my midlife was. When we say a fifty year old is midlife, we seem to be playing a funny game with math. We love to deceive ourselves. Middle age has become more of a “feels” than a data point. I read the other day 60 is the new 40. That seems like complete nonsense. I could still do most of the things I did at 30 when I was 40. I cannot do some of those things now. I am old enough to recall when 40 was the new 30 and before that 30 was considered middle age. Middle age is an ever changing fictional narrative.

I may not yet be considered elderly, but I do consider myself well past midlife. As such, I increasinglyI live in a state where I am aware that it could all end at any moment and I know mathematically speaking it is highly unlikely I will not live to be 112. I also am unable to read shampoo bottles, have thinning hair, a greying beard, skin that is slowly losing its elasticity and is becoming weather beaten and I can no longer hear so well in crowded rooms. And I am slower and have to increasingly struggle to get off the floor after sitting on it.

Personally, I consider myself am well past my midlife. I am unarguably closer to death by far than I am to my birth.

I am ok with that. I will die. This will happen. I am not bothered by this conceptually. To be sure, this does not mean I have the ability to override my body’s biological imperative to survive. The actual dying process is hard to look at with acceptance because we associate that with pain and we are wired to do whatever we can to avoid pain. Were I to suddenly find myself in a car submerged in water, unable to obtain air, I am quite confident my body would violently demand I struggle to survive to avoid the pain of dying. The chemicals of adrenaline would course through my body and insist that I desperately find a means, any means, to escape death’s clutches. It would do so until the last of the oxygen was sapped out of my blood and my biological body ceased to function.

What happens next is anyones guess. No one knows. Even well meaning pretenders.

But conceptually I am not bothered by the notion of death itself.

Others are not as comfortable or accepting with the actuality of death. They have strong phobias and aversions to it. The term “void” is referenced a lot along with an acute fear of such a void. The suggestion of a sudden absence of self, when first considered by a person, is often terrifying to many. Some may become paralyzed by the very thought of it. Or feel a state of panic. When the topic comes up in conversation they may rapidly change the topic as though one can avoid it providing we never speak its name.

Others will try to rationalize its presence perpetually into a future as though one can avoid it through procrastination.

Decades ago when I was in graduate school. I lived with a great aunt and great uncle. They were of my grandparents age and two generations older than me at that time and about ten years older than I am now. We would commonly eat dinner together each night. They had a practice of reading the obituaries after dinner as we sat at the table. I have no idea why that was the time they chose to perform this activity. It was just a thing they regularly did. They had lived in the same community for decades, and knew many of the citizens that found their way into the paper as they met their ends one way or the other.

What was always astounding to me was that regardless how old a person may have been when they died, it was often worded as too soon and too young. “Joe Bob died. Lung cancer. 76. Had he not smoked he would not have died so young and so early.” It was as though death was something that one could avoid were one to have simply made all the correct choices to along the way.

Having known several people by that time who were my age who died through various actions, I was often a bit offended by that. I was amendable to the notion that young 14 year old Billy, who died because a drunk driver plowed through his vehicle, died too young and too soon. But in my mind, when Joe Bob died at 76 due to lung cancer after smoking two packs a day since he was 14, well, Joe Bob was fortunate and very lucky to have had such a long life and living it on the terms he chose. Honestly, we should probably applaud Joe Bob for his success. I just couldn’t see these as equitable experiences.

I never said such, though. In part this was me being polite and non argumentative. I was living with them, more or less, for free while going to graduate school. I was quite thankful for that. I watched their dogs when they went to Hawaii once a year for a two week vacation. I would mow the lawn. I would help chop and stack wood so we could heat the house in winter. It was common gratitude that I had a place to live so I did not wish to be argumentative on this point of a 76 year old dying “too young, too soon”.

But I also didn’t say anything because I considered that maybe, just maybe it was my youthful naivety that permitted me to dismiss a 76 year old as “too young”. I was conscious enough to understand by then I did not have the vantage point of perspectives beyond my own. I was beginning to understand that we are all basically stupid outside of our own singular vantage point. Maybe, just maybe, when I was older and been exposed to other perspectives I would no longer feel that way; perhaps I would learn something from a vantage point closer to theirs that would sway me to believe that Joe Bob dying at 76 was too young and too soon. Probably not, but maybe. So I just sat there silently while these things were uttered and tucked the experience away for later consideration.

My Great Aunt did not quite reach her average life expectancy. My Great Uncle exceeded his average life expectancy. Neither avoided death.

Decades later, I doubt I will outgrow the perspective I had back then. While I confess to not knowing precisely when it is inappropriate to say “too young, too soon”, I think when we approach the median life expectancy, we should maybe work on being increasingly accepting people will depart from us with increased frequency as time progresses that time onward. Perhaps we ought not indirectly chide or chastise them when things do not work out favorably in every instance.

Personally, were I to suddenly drop dead, it would not be “too young, too soon”, but I say that knowing I lived a life full of many intentional decisions and both intentional and unintentional experiences that were well beyond what I imagined as child. I long ago exceeded the apparently meager expectations I set for myself. And it continues to be wildly brilliant despite me asking for nothing more.

I know the data, but I also know the data is just data. Our own personal experience will be whatever it will be. We can do some things to put the odds of delaying the inevitable aside for as long as possible. But there are zero garantees, so fuck the data. But accept that your time, whatever it may be, is limited. I Simply feel I did not lolligag, dilly dally or frivolously waste opportunities as they presented themselves. I conisder myself a crazily lucky person and did not waste it.

That said, my perspective is just that. It is my perspective. Some one looking at this from around another corner has a different vantage point. Neither is better or worse as each has different information. Most of us our doing our best with what we have available to us. Or at least many of us. Who am I to say? Who am I to say that my information is better when I may lack information?

Given that, I try my best to be sympathetic and remember that for many people, death is a very terrifying thing to accept. To many death is a negative topic that should not be uttered and discussed. It is not difficult for me to get into that mind-space. I was not born accepting that I would die. When I was a child it was something that did terrify me. What happens when we die? Why should we die? Why can we not live forever?

When I was around ten or eleven two of my dogs died when they were puppies. Within a year or so of each other. One drowned. The other was hit by a car and I saw her get hit. I was bereft with grief. I could not comprehend the concept of death. The finality of it. I stayed awake all night crying, unable to move forward. I recall feeling that it would simply be impossible, absolutely impossible, for me to move forward due to the incomprehensibility of it. It took time for me to move onwards and build enough strength within myself to accept the reality of the situation.

Whenever I feel I am too blithe and insensitive about death I need only to go back to the child I as at that time to recollect how death was a terrifying experience for me once upon a time. I can easily recall it as a cruel monster that could suddenly take that which you loved most forever away from you. And in making those recollections, I am able to relate to what others when I see them struggle with these concepts and realities we inevitably encounter in our lives and be sensitive to their circumstances.

Not willing to permit myself to be possessed by fear, those experiences demanded that I look at death directly. One thing, even at that young age, I was adamant about was that I wasn’t going to let a fear rule my life, fear of death included. I understood it was a going to be a constant companion for me and everyone around me, everyone I loved. It was a truth.

So I worked on accepting that truth and placed that into my mental library. So where along the line I made peace with that truth. That peace has its limits, but they lay before me. While I feel it is healthy to learn to accept that death occurs, I also think it is entirely unhealthy to desire others to die. I’m cut from a type cloth that can’t find pleasure in the death of others.

That’s my perspective. What do I know? Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps we are nothing more than base animals and I am nothing more but guilty of over elevating humans as a species when I suggest that we are a species that ought to do much better.

Though I find I am less influenced by others as I age, I don’t believe I am simply stuck in my ways and unable to grow or acquire new truths. I consciously try to be open minded. I consciously try to expand my horizons. I challenge myself to find aspects of myself to improve.

I’m a terribly flawed individual, but not abhorrent.

I think. I try anyways.

I actively remind myself that others may see the same thing from different perspectives and we do not all share the same information. We probably don’t need to be universally aligned on everything. Regardless, I don’t own the truth. I know few truths. I feel lucky to know any.

That said, it is easy for me to fall into the trap of lazy thinking. Or even not thinking at all. As I scan the digital horizon this seems to be the case with many, if not most, others. Just as our bones become more calcified and resisted to flexibility, so too, apparently, does our mind as we age towards our coffins. Aging erodes mental acuity. Worse yet are the environmental factors that actually insist we not use our minds at all. Fabrications of intelligence repositories are increasingly thrust upon us demanding that we let something else be intelligent for us. Why should we bother when we can farm it out? Let others, or something else, do our thinking for us.

If my ability to learn and think for myself was removed, there would be no point in me.

But less is not zero. Just like I now need to be more mindful of stretching and using my muscles to slow the natural tendency for them to atrophy as we age, I must also consciously insist my brain be open to new experiences, ways of doing things and different perespectives as I age. The over used adage use it or lose it is appropriate here.

Knowing that as each day passes I am this much closer to an unknown oblivion of sorts that lay directly beyond this mortal biological life is an experience that heightens for me as time passes along. In many ways it is a conscious choice. I gave myself into my mid thirties before I considered it more likely than not that my life could be more than half complete. While not entirely hedonistic, I can say I fully enjoyed my youth. I left it largely unbounded and followed whatever paths I chose. It was great fun.

Now, however, I meditate and reflect on my mortality. I do this not out of morbid fascination, but rather as a preparatory act of sorts to see what I can learn from the experience itself. I don’t pretend I will understand it, not fully anyways, but I can learn from how I interact with it.

You Want It Darker is something that has provided me a new perspective to contemplate and engage. It offers an opportunity to learn from that perspective. In doing such I acquire grounding and considerations I had not yet encountered.

I will also misunderstand this perspective correctly, apply inaccurate meanings to it, subconsciously biasing it with my own foolish notions, misgivings and ignorance.

Perhaps it is Cohen’s adjacent association with Buddhist practices that resonate with me? I am comfortable, and quite frankly prefer, that he provides no concrete answers. He provides a perspective. The perpspective he provides is personal. Yet I find comfort in it and it resonates with me. He and I need not agree on the meaning of his own lyrics. The artist loses control of the created narrative once it is set free into the world. Sometimes I will find common ground and understanding with his perspective. Sometimes I will entirely disagree or grossly misunderstand it. Either way, any way, in several ways, I find his words often more honest, truthful and thought provoking than many other offerings that broach the topic of death. I don’t have any explanations for why this is so. I don’t need them. Why doesn’t matter. And it is beside the point. Provoking thought is sufficient.

To a certain extent, if one examines the entirety of Cohen’s catalogue, it is explainable that his last couple of albums highly center on death, love and mortality. It also makes sense that it resonates with me even as I have no urgency and as far as I know am not otherwise standing on the threshold of death’s door. It is authentic. Credible. Believeable. There are not answers. I wasn’t looking for them. I was looking for validation. And I feel he provides it. It makes me curious to search further into its darkness.

It is not unusual that You Want it Darker influences me. To a certain extent I’ve always thrived best through ambiguity. There is an honesty in ambiguity. I find comfort when I encounter it.

Every life has an arc to it. Boiled into its critical essence: we are born, we live, we die. Even were we to hate the arc, the arc remains. We are

There is one constant truth for every biological creature on this planet: eventually we die. All of us. Not a single exception. The end of the road will come. The tarmac will run out. The biological road is not endlessly paved. It is, as they say, just a matter of time.

To say I am embracing the aging process is an entirely incorrect way to put it. I do accept it. I am not one for practices of self deception. I’d rather fully engage in its process and learn everything I can from that process.

I don’t look much into the future these days. The present is now. I am aging now.

Leonard Cohen didn’t flinch from it. You Want It Darker does not sugar coat it. It doesn’t provide platitudes. It is as though he is looking directly into its sun, burning figurative retinas be damned, seeing it for what it is rather than drawing a circle on a page, coloring it yellow or orange, and then placing a smiley face upon it.

That isn’t to say it lacks religious overtones. It has obvious intentional religious overtones. Cohen was never one to shy away from topics of faith, but neither does he lie to himself or others. Cohen provides clear and direct references in his lyrics that underscore his familiarity with faith. But they are such that one can access them being entirely non denominational. But you won’t find any solace in certainty in this work. He was also a practicing Buddhist. And a poet. Death is ubiquitous regardless of one’s method of practicing faith.

A poet to the end, he also understood that one must let the artistic nature of ambiguity was a tool of honesty. He maintains clarity without pedantic literalness. This compels the audience to contemplate the meaning of his lyrics. But they are left to find their own meanings, understanding and paths. Is a song such as “Treaty” about God or a woman? It doesn’t matter. It can apply to both. And even if we state such, he still leaves us with truths buried beneath the ambiguity. In the end he says “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.” It is a sincere statement and a poignant statement. We often have desires that will never be fulfilled or questions forever left unanswered despite our inherent longing for them to be otherwise. There is wisdom in making peace with our heartfelt desires left unfulfilled and our unanswered questions.

It takes bravery to open those doors rather than to bury one’s head under the covers or lock one’s self in a small dark closet. That path beyond that door is one way. There is no turning back once you walk through it. Cohen demonstrates there is a bridge that takes us to that door, but he does not guarantee a glorious vista will be there to welcome us should we walk through that door once we arrive. “Leaving the Table” is a beautifully worded song and brings to mind reconciliations. However, he makes it clear that reconciliation often require that we must accept untidiness. Neat and tidy final resolutions are not to be expected. No finally, once and for all, we-are-on-the-same-page and of one mind results are promised. Rather, we must accept that differences may always exist. Maybe the best we can hope for is that we learn our differences are not acutely pronounced. Reconciliation is in large part a practice of acceptance of what is rather than what we wish.

This album would have been inaccessible to my younger self. Being a lover of old English Literature and the Romantic poets in my youth, I believe my younger self would have said he loved it and yet would not have really felt it. You Want It Darker came into my purview as I was nearing an age in which I could receive it for what it is and accept its lack of answers. Or rather accept the answers it provides rather than the answers I once sought.

That timing is coincidental. Nothing more.

Fortunately, I live in a time where older artists are permitted to continue to grow and share their experiences through abstraction. Cohen is not the only artist we can reference and learn from as we age.

Of course there are Johnny Cash’s last albums. While he did not reach the median life expectancy for his demographic, he died at 71, he had lived a life of experiences that likely equated to much older than his physical age suggests. His version of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt” may be an overplayed song at this point, but that is because he delivers it in a manner that is ubiquitous to the human experience. Even people who generally loath country music seem to relate to his version of this song. Just as Hendrix stole “All Along The Watchtower” from Bob Dylan, so to did Johnny Cash steal ”Hurt” from Trent Reznor. His version has an authenticity that only aging into death could provision. You feel the walls closing in around him. Most everyone he has known and loved from his youth has departed, particularly his wife, June Carter. He is an island from escape is not possible. Yet, he bravely commits to sharing his experience through his art, refusing to stop being an artist. The songs from his broader American collections cover a wide gamut, and not all are glum tunes of sorrow, but his gravelly voice and conviction combined with scaled back productions do not hide his age and the effect is broad, wide strokes obtainable only from the vast palette of experiences he encountered during his unique life. He is not trying to be a younger version of himself and the result provides us something new and meaningful.

Though, to be fair, even during his younger years he often sounded like an aged, grizzled, weather beaten survivor. These later albums lack his youthful bravado. I find them honest.

David Bowie’s Dark Star is another brilliant album by an aging artist that is conscientious of his impending death. I won’t be able to do justice to it in a few words, so we will leave it at that. He died when he was 69. Bowie was the rare figure that was older than his years; not so much due to how he lived, but due to the type of artistry and influence he provisioned during his life. He is uniquely timeless. Starman indeed.

In the 21st century we are fortunate that many other aging artists have insisted they carry on and do so without attempting to mimic their past selves. Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Kim Gordon, and countless others. Let us not forget Dolly Parton. She continued to create up until her death at age 80.

You Want it Darker is not Cohen’s last album. There were apparently a number of unfinished tracks that he was unable to see completed during his life, but thanks to his son’s efforts and conversations, managed to be completed posthumously.

“Hummingbird”, the last song on his last album, is a bit daunting. His final lyrics in his final song on his final album: “Listen to the hummingbird, whose wings you cannot, listen to the humming bird, don’t listen to me.” Honestly, when I first heard these lyrics I was put off by them. I felt like I had read a very long book that ended in an unsatisfactory manner. In this case it was as though he was saying something along the lines of “You know all those words I wrote and songs I sang that you loved? Well, never mind. Disregard them. Go listen to nature instead.”

But one of the things I love best about literature, poetry and art is when it tells me truths that I maybe don’t want to hear, but do need to hear, and then relentlessly insist such by parking in my brain and forcing me to wrangle with it. Nothing seems to get me to engage more with an artist‘s work at times than when they provide me with something familiar, yet do an abrupt left turn and then leave me to figure out where they went.

If one is brave enough to look at these dead center, one may ultimately find these truths are not so much scary as they are necessary for continued growth. Subjecting oneself to these hard truths forces one to consider other perspectives. That is how we discover truth. Sometimes we need to revisit these works that we find uncomfortable and look at the hard truths they offer us because we are unable to understand them the first several times we experience them. Considering other perspectives do not require us to adopt them. Refusing to consider them risk us shutting the door on truths that may benefit us. Even when we consider and then ultimately reject them personally, we may find the process of consideration actually enhanced or clarified the truths we already discovered. We may even evolve entirely new truths that are not simply rehashed old truths.

While I was initially put off by Cohen’s final lyrics, I find, a few years later; a few years older; several more experiences experienced; that I begin to see the more wisdom than truth behind his words. The more I age, the more value I find in wisdom. Maybe were we a wiser species, rather than a knowledgeable species we would be a better species. Perhaps knowledge is overrated. I now consider whether wisdom is preferable to knowledge. Maybe knowledge is our downfall. Perhaps we must encounter an abundance of knowledge in order to understand the futility of its limitations. Maybe, only after our quest for knowledge fails us, do the doors open the search for wisdom transcends the limitations of that knowledge begins? What if humans pursued wisdom over knowledge?

Perhaps it is still too soon to understand the truth of any of this. Perhaps there are simply no answers. And perhaps that is ok even as we are left to be satisfied wandering through labyrinths that are dimly lit and heavy with shadows.

You are not alone.

You want it darker.