The Meaning of Life

I've been thinking all weekend about how to respond to Uncle Ken's last post, and it just occurred to me that there's an old Bob Dylan song that pretty well sums up what I wanted to say:

Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan's Dream (Audio) - YouTube

Dylan must have been a teenager when he wrote that song, and so were we, but he was able to project into the future and tap into the feelings that we all would get someday when we looked at our lives in the rear view mirror.

There is nothing quite like the Catfish life that Uncle Ken lived during his Champaign days in my experience, yet our conversations about it over the years have made me so familiar with it that, when I started reading the fictionalized account, I felt that I could walk right into the Great Wall Bar and feel right at home.  I don't know much about art, but I always was drawn to artists, like Dylan before he went electric, that could say something that I would have said myself if I had thought of it first.  I don't think of art as an illusion, but rather an elucidation.  The artist points something out to us and, once it has been called to our attention, we realize that it has always been there and wonder why we never noticed it before.  

Life is not meaningless, life justifies itself.  The meaning of life is life.