A Tragic Misstep

Rustin Spencer "Rust" Cohle is a gifted but deeply troubled detective in the first season of the anthology crime drama television series "True Detective" on HBO. He is a fictional character, a pessimist, and a cynic who believes that human beings are nothing more than "sentient meat". Newly transferred to the LSP's criminal investigation division (CID), he devotes every available minute to investigating even the slightest details of the crime, meticulously keeping extended notes on every imaginable aspect. Cohle is renowned for his memorable quotes, one of which is the following:

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody."

This sentiment echoes the story of the fall, as recounted in the second narrative of the Book of Genesis. Adam is instructed that he may eat freely from all the trees in the Garden, with the exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's the only one he's forbidden to touch. Initially innocent and unembarrassed about their nakedness, Adam and Eve are deceived by the Serpent into eating fruit from the forbidden tree.

It's an ancient myth, deeply religious and possibly considered silly by some. But it essentially encapsulates Cohle's quote in different words; religions and their holy texts often aim to convey complex concepts through simple and memorable narratives.

The story continues: God curses all three—the man to a lifetime of hard labor followed by death, the woman to the pain of childbirth and subordination to her husband, and the serpent to crawl on its belly and face the enmity of both man and woman. God then clothes the nakedness of Adam and Eve, who have become god-like in knowing good and evil, before banishing them from the garden to prevent them from eating from the tree of life and living forever. (Genesis 3:22-24).

It may seem like an unhappy ending. But upon closer examination, the tale reveals a brighter and more hopeful interpretation:

Is it truly God's curse that causes hard labor and death, as the story suggests? Or is it the knowledge itself that condemns humanity to perceive life as a struggle and ultimately lead to death? Do birds, for example, perceive life as laborious? Do they contemplate death? Or they simply live and die, seemingly content? Isn't it the perception of pain that causes suffering during childbirth or any other painful experience, rather than the pain itself?

D. H. Lawrence wrote: "I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."

All things considered, it appears that it's through our perception of death that we truly experience it—or is it?