Old auties, death (!)

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In Japan there are very few capital executions. When someone is given a death sentence, he (usually it’s a man) is kept in prison for as long as ten years or more. Then some day, without any previous information he is taken in early morning and hung.

People of some age and in good health are in a similar situation. They may survive ten or more years, they just don’t know. Every day may be the end or the beginning of the end. They must get accustomed to a familiarity with death. They have always to think that time is priceless, that if time is priceless, what they do or not do is not irrelevant as many people in their youth may (I think wrongly) believe, but is decisive, weighty, and charged with an extraordinary thickness.
So if you find out very late that you are autistic, you also discover that your life has all been a fraud, an attempt to pretend a normality that you have never been able to reach. In other words that all your life has been inauthentic, that life has eluded you completely. What to do now? Go on pretending? My answer is a round no.

Our culture, modern culture of elusion, of distraction, of ephemeral consumption, disposability of the things around us is a culture that is unable to come to terms with the idea of death. I understand this, but cannot accept it even in youth. To be obsessed with death is wrong, but that death is somewhere in the horizon as soon as you reach maturity, that you can’t erase it from life, that life and death are inextricably intermingled, that death is only the other face of life is something that anybody, no only old people, should take in account.

I don’t expect a follow up to this post, but I wanted to make the point and if I didn’t do it I would be responsible in my infinitesimal part of collusion with a distorted view of life and things.

It is futile to fear or be concerned with the inevitable and unknowable. All we can do is try to enjoy every day and ultimately fulfill our genetic imperatives. That purpose is the only reason we exist after all.

Some amount of pretending is necessary for us to function successfully in society. Whether an older person knew they were autistic or not would not have changed anything except perhaps making them feel a little less like a freak. Our lives can be nothing but fake in a world that does not accept us as we are even if there is an explanation for why we are the way we are.

Thanks to Paolo and Fraya both for your comments -- they deserve thinking about.

Although I had known of the term Asperger's for some time, I wasn't interested in discovering what it meant nor whether it related to me. When I read an article in the NY Times about its symptoms five years ago, it was quite a revelation. I saw how closely my own personal problems corresponded with those listed in the article.

It has come as an immense relief that these quirks -- deviations -- oddities of mine are not moral defects (my ex-wife often tried to persuade me that they were) but rather were attributable to a certain extent, at least, to the structure and functioning of the central nervous system.

Today's my birthday: 82 down and 18+ to go.

Interesting thread. For people with AS, even though we may not understand most of the world around us, what we see is infact real, meaningfull;what we observe in this world is the fake, efforts of others to fit in and be all the same even with out a common purpose. Better then I think, to enjoy who you are and what you are. Unique.

Yes: I spent all my life pretending. The problem is that not that I pretended, but that I believed that I was serious. This was my capital sin. As for cultivating some attitude of revenge against a society that doesn’t have a place for different people I understand it, but would like to distinguish between a society which is rotten (not only for not accepting difference, but for many other reasons) and, people, persons, human beings, kids, animals and trees. My empathy is mostly ineffectual, I don’t believe in philanthropy, but I am moved by the resilience of life, attracted by the innocent striving of living beings.

Human beings are noble creatures in theory and isolation but in practice in groups they are inevitably poisoned by infectious greed and envy and twisted into something ugly and incapable of anything more than seething hatred towards those who are immune in many ways (us).