With due respect to Professor Einstein, sometimes it's the unreality of reality that is the illusion. A comforting illusion.
Take my periodontist. Please! (Sorry, I'll try to be serious.) Let's begin at the beginning.
I've been fascinated by the human skeleton ever since elementary school I used to pour over drawings of skeletons in our school encyclopedias, memorizing all the bones and how they were connected. There was nothing scary about those skeletons, any more than studying the steel girder skeleton of a skyscraper was scary. It was just the way things were put together.
Then there was Halloween, of course. In Seattle today, folks' yards are decorated, for most of October, with (fake) human bones. Just bones. Or skulls. Or full skeletons. Skeletons sitting in chairs talking to each other. Or half submerged skeletons emerging from the soil. All very creative.
I'm sure we had "scary" skeletons when I was a kid, but the decorations tended more toward witches, and black cats, and ghosts, and spiders. And pumpkins galore. And girls dressed up as princesses and fairies and other pretty creatures, a bit scary perhaps to young boys but in a different way. I'm trying to remember how I felt about skeletons as part of Halloween. They were just one form of decoration among others, and I don't recall any particular reaction at all.
At some point in my life, of course, I realized that I myself was a walking skeleton, painted over with layers of flesh. Not a new idea intellectually, but it hit me with a sense of reality. I really WAS a walking skeleton. I could bare my teeth at myself in the mirror, and almost imagine the skull beneath the face.
Almost, but not quite. Certainly there was bone structure there -- I could feel it through my forehead and cheeks and chin. But I couldn't quite picture those bones as coming together as a skull. Not even after watching Hamlet declaiming, "Alas, poor Yorick," as he held poor Yorick's skull in his hand. Just a play, that was.
But the reality beneath the illusion became much more clear yesterday at my periodontist's office. As part of an investigation of my mouth, he had a CT scan done of my skull -- not the entire skull, just the portion beneath the eye sockets. He was interested in the teeth and gums. He posted the scan on a large screen in front of my dental chair for my education and amusement while we talked.
"Alas, poor Me!" There was no doubt that I was looking at my very own skull. I even saw, for the first time, my one remaining unerupted wisdom tooth, right where it was supposed to be. It was my head, all right. Just another skull among the uncounted billions which have passed through an earthly life over the eons.
I was looking at my head as it would be some years from now, lying six feet beneath the surface of the earth with a horrible, demented grin stretching across my entire face. It was far scarier than a Halloween decoration. Far scarier than Hamlet's stage prop. This wasn't merely a skull, first studied with curiosity from an encyclopedia in second grade.
This was me. The real me. The me that a good haircut, a clean shave, a Botox treatment, and a genial smile could not disguise. What I see today in a mirror, however dispiriting the sight, is just an illusion. The reality is what I saw yesterday in my periodontist's office.
The shock of that sight merely enforces a decision already made long ago. Cremation. And, please. Do it quickly before that ghastly smirking skull begins peaking our from beneath my face.
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