The Abstract Man

I know an abstract man. He often talks of love, the soul, beauty, and the completion of the spirit. In his darkest moments he speaks of the void. I asked him once, as he was suffering what appeared to be a breakdown in my kitchen, What is the void, exactly? Why do you blame the void when it seems clear that’s you’re upset over a very specific set of circumstances? Namely, the woman you loved but left for rather arbitrary reasons (you were not sure if you loved her) started sleeping with someone else and is really happy? He looked at me, shook his head, profoundly disappointed. – We are born and we die but in between we struggle to make sense of a few scraps of life, he said, in a booming voice. – Surely one must live specifically before one is able to paint the world with generalities, I responded. I should have phrased it differently. He all but screamed, and said that I had clearly never known the void, and that I had no soul. He left my house abruptly, smashing awkwardly against the doorframe on his way out. He was right, perhaps. But my real error was to think that one needs to have lived first to become abstract. That’s not true. We are born into abstraction, die in abstraction, and in the middle only a few see strange fragments, like the mole between two fingers, a new color of grass, or a Nokia cell phone.