The meaninglessness of our lives and the non-existence of God: never proven, particularly the first one, but we can make a pretty good case for the plausibility of both, based on circumstantial evidence.
If I am important, and I presumably am if I am an offcut of some heavenly manifestation, then the events which change the course of this existence for better or worse must be massive enough to cause a part-god to shudder, either with pleasure or with horror.
For your author, though, the inevitable death of a cat or an old woman; the mistaken belief that I could pick up a handful of impenetrable Hungarian words; these events are enough to make the self plummet through the veneer of the self and reveal the void which lies below. Each time I confirm my own mediocrity, it is a little suicide. It is the tragedy of an insect accidentally killing itself with its own venom. It is the hilarity of a police officer's incapacitation as he turns his pepper spray on himself.
There are three or four moments which have come to define me, which, in the absence of everything else can stand quite nicely for what I am:
at the age of four, I was told under no circumstances must I put my hand into the exposed mechanism of the vacuum cleaner which my father was fixing. Do you understand? You don't go near it! The next thing I recall was my own scream as I was dragged away and/or struck, with my fingers edging ever-closer to the parts which would have severed them.
when I was expected to declare my undying love for my partner, in the form of a declaration that I would 'fight for her', and I not only refused, but said the opposite, precipitating the end of our relationship.
when I took the leaflet from the man in a Budapest street, and tried to read it. This entirely innocuous act changed Bluefish, and changed me.
In each case, it could have been otherwise. In each case, it was the difference between thought and action - even my four-year-old self knew that the rumbling, ancient vacuum cleaner was a clear and present danger.
Knowing, and not acting on that knowledge, is what condemns us. It accelerates the banal and the nondescript, and its new, temporary weight changes lives irreversibly. I am a vacuum cleaner part, a leaflet, an act of desertion, and these are not the concerns of a god-fragment: thus I contend it all counts for nothing.
