Exercise in futility

I'm reminded of the passage from Jane Eyre where Mr. Rochester states: "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, — you'd forget me."

I reference that excerpt to speak about the "queer feeling" that I experience with respect to my dreams and aspirations. And how when I fail to obtain fulfillment it's an untainted -- rather the antithesis to the qualifier ersatz -- verisimilitude to "that cord of communion [being] snapt" and "...bleeding inwardly" and being forgotten.

It's an experience that's emphasized by Pearl Buck where she states, "failure is death."

I'm reminded of the film GATTACA where the protagonist talks about pursuing his highest aspiration and that the endeavor to do so is comparable to entering oceanic waters to swim to the other side while not saving any strength for the inevitable swim back to the originating shore.

I'm reminded of the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged where Francisco questions Rearden: “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”

And how several months back I came across an episode of Batman where a character put forth a similar question and Batman responded with "plant his feet" instead of shrug. (Side note: that conversation is interesting because in Frank Miller's adaptation I'd read that Batman was the Randian hero and Superman was the collectivist, the diametric Randian hero.)

Is it even possible to plant my feet when exhaustion is in the distance and extreme muscle fatigue and collapse are inevitable as the greater my effort the heavier the world bears down upon me? I examine my life through time-biased eyes and can't see any instance of when putting forth that demanding effort to keep my world lifted didn't result in anything more than ephemera, an ineffective band-aid on deep gash.

I feel this ambivalence. I'm pulled between seeing an exercise in futility, which I understand can be the beginning of the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, and the necessity to "rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I understand this all to be an exercise in pedantry; and that my introspection has led to me having "gaze[d] long into an abyss" whereupon the "abyss also gaze[d] into [me]."

It feels like I'm rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

You understood what you were doing...deck chairs, or not. There's not much more to be elaborated on.