Distributio (dis-tri-bu’-ti-o): (1) Assigning roles among or specifying the duties of a list of people, sometimes accompanied by a conclusion. (2) Sometimes this term is simply a synonym for diaeresis or merismus, which are more general figures involving division.
Most people believe living and dying are different. Actually, they are the same: living is dying, dying is living. Sure, there’s infancy, toddlerhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age, nursing home, death. Maybe there’s an afterlife where you spend eternity in a diner or a really well-run library, or clog dancing in the sky on a perpetual Irish holiday. Don’t scoff. Anything you can imagine about the afterlife is just as possible as anything else—it’s a matter of faith, not facts or even plausibility.
What are the foundations of faith? You can give me a list 500 miles long and reflect on what you have faith in, in a staccato burst of reasons read off the list, that are themselves are taken on faith—in matters of faith, there’s no escaping faith: it may be a pylon pointing nowhere, erected by hope and fear.
Faith turns on narratives projecting pathways to a range of destinations—from Truth Town to Cloud Cuckoo Land. All destinations have arbiters: from scientists, to jurors, to hard-boiled lunatics resting in their cells. But then, the arbiters may have arbiters who affect the community with faith that putting immigrants in detention centers will cleanse the community of evil, or a pain relief medication is harmless when administered to pregnant women. Historically, the list of truth-catastrophes is pretty long. So yes, one of the hallmarks of truth, as far as it is taken on faith all the time, is that it can be wrong. The comforting image of the cure it may project can be shattered, and vice-a-versa.
So anyway, as I eat my breakfast, I reflect on the brevity of life. At any moment, any day, I may succumb. We can’t predict it. We can’t control it. Now could be the time!
POSTSCRIPT
His cereal bowl clattered to the floor. He was dead. The Grim Reaper looked in his kitchen window and shook his bony head and said, “He talked himself to death. What a joke.”
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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