Perhaps the Most Thought-Provoking Words of All Time

No, these don't come from the Bible or the Bhagavad-Gita, nor from any figure commonly recognized as a teacher or thinker. Rather, the source is The Flying Deuces, a 1939 Laurel and Hardy pic in which the two play a pair of fish-packers from Des Moines on vacation in Paris.

It's been a long, long time since I actually saw it, so I may have a couple of details wrong, but essentially the scene is this. Heartbroken at the discovery that the woman he loves is already married, Ollie determines to throw himself into a canal of the Seine that happens to contain a shark escaped from the city zoo. Ever the faithful friend, Laurel has decided that he too will end it all, and they are just preparing to jump when a legionnaire stops and tells them that instead of committing suicide, they should join the French Foreign Legion. To which Laurel (as I recall) answers thus:

The French Foreign Legion?

I can't join the French Foreign Legion.

I've got to be in Des Moines on Monday!

Get it? I once tried to share this with someone in her early twenties and got a blank stare, whereas I've noticed that the older the person who hears this, the more likely he or she is to understand. Anyway, here's what I get out of that line: we may think we have priorities in life, urgent things that simply have to be done, but in truth our lives could end at any moment, and then those alleged priorities will be revealed as meaningless. Put in terms of the movie, it may seem important to get back to our fish-packing job in Des Moines, but if life itself is so conditional that one could choose to end it in the shark-infested waters of the Seine, then nothing is really mandatory--certainly nothing as unimportant as a fish-packing job in Des Moines.

Sometimes when I've gotten really wigged out about a deadline or a debt or some other such millstone, I've thought of those lines and drawn great comfort from them. Most of what we are forced to spend our time and energy on, simply as a matter of survival, doesn't ultimately matter. Whatever happens when we die, it's not likely we'll be thinking about those things. The ones we have loved, yes; the most treasured of our dreams and ambitions, yes; the sweetness of life itself, yes; but not the job packing fish back in Des Moines.

A few interesting links: an essay on the movie, which ends with Ollie's death and reincarnation (I'm not kidding); the official Web site of the French Foreign Legion; and finally, a historical marker honoring Hardy's brief residence in my own adopted hometown of Madison, Georgia.