***

When Daria got home it turned out she had been worried without cause. Her mother had received a call from her boss and was already at work, and her father had fallen asleep in the couch. Quinn was the only one who, in theory, could have noticed her absence but that was about as likely as her suddenly growing wings (they would after all totally clash with her wardrobe). She never noticed Daria anyway, and should Daria in fact have disappeared she would most likely have thrown a party.

Daria changed to her normal clothes, and slumped over on the bed. She lay there staring into the ceiling thinking about the discussion she had just had - to think that there was so much she had missed... She had been so certain that she had thought of every conceivable detail, but there had in fact been huge gaping holes in her philosophy. Not that she really minded - her philosophy had given her little more than a deathwish and the cheap satisfaction of feeling smarter than others. Needless to say, the latter had been almost completely devoured by the former. All of last week she had been telling herself that hope was futile, and now for the first time there actually seemed to be a gleam of it. She was lying on her back, but for the first time in almost a week it didn't feel like she had an elephant sitting on her.

She thought about all the thinking she had done. It was amazing how far she had come... but to what end? If the meaning of life really was about relations then what did she really know that any kindergarten pupil didn't? This was something that most people did completely automatically (except maybe the God-part of it). She thought she knew what Lex would have said. Most likely it would have been something on the lines of: "Of course - despite his fall, man was still created into the image of God." Then he would probably go into a long explanation on why it would have to be simple and end it all with saying that the kingdom of Heaven belonged to the children. Then a thought struck her - these were only theories after all. Even though they seemed to form a logical unity, she still had nothing with which to prove them correct. How incredibly annoying! The only piece of information in this universe she really wanted - and it was out of reach... or was that out of sight? She still felt a little suspicious toward Lex' claim that one could ask God for knowledge... She finally pushed the thought aside and thought about the other things that had been said. She would return to this topic later.

The hopeless situation of mankind had seemed to play a very central role in his philosophy, yet he somehow was still talking about love all the time. How did that make sense? Was that in fact the reason why life could be such a pest sometimes? She didn't like people very much... never really had. Perhaps this philosophy wasn't so uplifting after all? She suddenly remembered something Dostoyevsky had said through the character of Ivan Karamazov. She couldn't recall it word by word, but it was something about that beggars would do wisely in just putting in ads in the newspaper instead of begging in the streets. The idea was that it was so much easier to love a person from a distance... It was a pretty smart and cynical way of describing a situation she recognised all too well. Not more than a year ago she had actually considered skipping college and moving to Canada and get a job as a forest ranger, or something. She had heard that they could be completely isolated for almost six months straight. No, she knew what Dostoyevsky meant. People were a lot easier to stand when you didn't have to be around them.

This was the problem: To love thy neighbour although thy neighbour sucked. That was probably the key to why life was never so good as one would hope for. On the one hand you were dependent of people, on the other hand people were all more or less corrupted. Wasn't it in fact strange that the world wasn't an even worse place than it was? Daria sighed and put on some soft music. She felt she could use it. "Strange" She thought. "It would appear that there were two different forces pulling the will of each human being in different directions." There was the simple egotistical force that strove toward a state of "getting as much out of the situation as possible". This force was responsible for everything between shoplifting and warfare throughout human history. It "wanted it all, and it wanted it now". Oddly enough this force was also often responsible for people being able to get along. The simple reason was that the force was trying to acquire maximal happiness - and that did not usually include a whole lot of conflict. Daria began to see a pattern form. All too many human relations were like warfare - the other people were merely obstacles on or tools for one's own way to happiness. The people standing before oneself in the line in the supermarket were merely obstacles, and the only reason that one wouldn't shamelessly pass the entire line was that the protests raised by the other's would make the whole thing "cost more than it was worth". Now she started to understand what Lex meant with the difference between being moral and acting moral. A person acting moral was just acting the way he did because of the terror balance in a cold war on the personal level. He was acting the way he did, not because he cared about the others but because he believed that his actions would grant himself the greatest benefit.

Then there was that other voice - a tiny whisper, seldom heard. A voice that urged to care about the others instead of yourself. But how could a person who lived according to this voice survive in a world like this? All the people who were prepared to grab whatever they could get their hands on would immediately notice this person as weak prey and start abusing the kindness. That person would be like a nation that started a single-handed disarmament in the middle of a raging war - it would be insanity. That was when she came to think of something the priest - the other priest - had said during the funeral. It was something about a corn of wheat having to fall into the ground and die, lest it abide alone. At the time she had thought that that was pretty hollow consolation indeed. To be given the choice of being alone or dying was very much a situation of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" even though she realised that the dying was just a metaphor. It did make sense, though - the egotistical lifestyle was perfectly designed for loneliness, which Daria knew from experience wasn't always all that fun and glamorous. The second one could very well be compared to dying - at least in a world like this. "So that's it?" She pondered. "Life sucked because there were no good alternatives?" She sighed deeply, removed her glasses (it wasn't like she needed them for thinking) and turned over in her bed. The music that was playing slowly affected Daria's mood and she felt she was getting sleepy. She wondered if she should just turn in early, checked her watch and decided it was still too early.

When she woke up it was already morning. It took her a while to orientate herself, but then she realised that she had fallen asleep after all and slept in her clothes, boots and all, all night and that she had a foul taste in her mouth, indicating bad breath. Then she checked the time, and suddenly sprung to life. It was Monday morning, and she would be late if she didn't leave the house within two minutes. A very quick brushing of the teeth was the only luxury she could allow herself. While performing this she noticed that her hair was mussed up pretty bad. Damn! Jane would get a real laugh out of this. Daria often joked about Jane's slow starts in the morning, and she wasn't likely to let an easy chance at revenge like this pass her by.

***

***

-"Okay." Jane said and sat down on a small rock that happened to have a relatively flat surface. "We've walked for an hour already, and I hope you don't mind." Just like with the last explanation she had had a lot of trouble following Daria, and for the first time in her life she actually was grateful that she wasn't too smart. She still had only a very vague picture of what Daria had been through but she was quite certain that she didn't want to go through something similar herself. The only thing that was really obvious to Jane was that there had previously been an atmosphere of complete and utter hopelessness over Daria, and that atmosphere was - if not completely gone, at least dissipating. This was a bigger relief to Jane than she would ever dare admit to Daria. After the second conversation they had had, Jane had in fact been so scared that Daria might kill herself that she had actually seriously considered contacting someone. The reason she finally had decided not to was simply because she had realised that she would have lost Daria either way. Daria would never have forgiven her for breaking a confidence like the one she had been entrusted with. Of course Daria had never said that it was a confidence, but among friends technicalities like that didn't count.

Whew! That story was a pain to write. I wrote everything from scratch in twelve days (not counting proof-reading, minor corrections etc.(*)) and I feel my brain is slowly overheating. I have never, and I mean never written so much in so little time before. I usually write whenever I feel like it, but when I started writing this story I realised I have to be more disciplined than normally if I were to ever finish it, so I set a five-pages-per-day-minimum limit for myself. I soon realised that five pages per day was more than it sounded, but I made it almost every day anyway. The disadvantages of writing in a language that's not your native one become even more obvious when writing prose than when writing script. At best you get 80% of the quality at 300% of the time. You constantly find yourself searching your mind (and your dictionary) for the "right" word or idiomatic expression to use in a certain situation.

(*): A gracious bow, and a tip o' the hat to Steven Galloway for beta-reading this fic.

The reason I wrote this was simply that I wanted to write something thought-provoking, and preferably about an important issue - not just some philosophical subtleties. "What is the meaning of life?" is IMHO the only really important question in this universe (along with the questions that spawn out of this one). I took four years thinking about it, and although I wouldn't want to go through that again for anything in the world, I wouldn't say the time was a complete waste either. Now on to some questions I suspect some of you might have about this story.

Well, I have several reasons and I'll just share the two most important with you: First of all I think the show deserves it. It has set out to be (and it has succeeded to become) one of the "deeper" TV-shows of today. This fanfic is my tribute to that aspect of the show (hence the name of the story), where I try to take up questions that can't be discussed in 21 minutes worth of air time on a TV-show.

Second: This subject is kind of sensitive, and I think that the world of Daria fans is one of the few crowds I can actually reach. People here seem intelligent enough to at least not misunderstand me completely, and civilised enough not to flame my ass to a crisp even if they would happen not to agree with me. (Let's just say I have some previous negative experiences with both of these phenomena...)

Yes, I'm aware of that, but for the sake of the story (and to spare you from even more and longer tedious ramblings about how it feels to have a deathwish) I compressed the timeframe a lot. I'm aware of how silly it looks that Daria is confused about these questions one day, and less than a week later she seems to have tons of thoughts on everything. A more realistic time would have been anything from a year to as much as five years, possibly even more... but if you want a more realistic version of it, just read the scene where Daria is lying on her bed thinking about how the image of the Grim Reaper no longer scares her, but in fact seems inviting, over and over again and picture it going on for a year... :-P Like I said: I don't think anyone would have wanted to read such a story.

That depends on your point of view. Remember that the time frame of this is still highly accelerated. Existential angst easily causes a person to "act out of character" in real life as well, effectively choking almost any "normal" emotions.

Yes. It was the only way I could think of that would allow me to bring up the issues I wanted to bring up in any form of logical order.

To be perfectly honest: I did that to get the dialogue to go where I wanted it. But it's not quite as unrealistic as it may seem... I have personally experienced similar situations when trying to grasp something difficult. One can almost feel the neural synapses trying to establish a connection, but not quite making it. You think you've got it, you can actually see some kind of pattern - and then it's all suddenly gone and you have to try again. Yet, I apologize to all Jane-fans if I made her seem dumber than she is.

That depends on your definition of a philosopher. (An unworldly geek who mumbles lots of logical stuff without practical application?) :-) But it's true that I haven't read a lot of philosophy, and I certainly haven't studied it. I tried to read it at one time but I was quite disappointed of the way many philosophers hide their ideas behind solid walls of jargon and rethorics. After spending lots of time to analyse just a few sentences one may often notice that the thought behind it is surprisingly banal. That's also a point with this fic. I've tried to bring forth the ideas in a way that should be as easy as possible to follow and without using too many "big" words. In other words - when it comes to philosophy I'm a total amateur - I, like Daria in this fic, started to think about these things, not because I wanted to but because I had understood the question and couldn't un-understand it. As for the theology part - no I haven't read any of that either, just the Bible. I still hope that won't be critical since I expect the audience to consist of mostly amateurs as well, and the "specialists" often have an incredible ability to talk over people's heads. (I hope I've managed to avoid that - at least I've tried to.)

Well, if you feel you must, but I'm not nearly as bright as I would want to be, and I don't have half the answers I'd like to have. The fic you've just read contains about four to five years worth of thinking so... The truth is I'm pretty slow to catch on, and if you ask a difficult question from me you might have to wait four or five years for an answer, possibly even longer. :-P

Of course not. Nothing is new under the sun, and I do not believe that I have said anything that hasn't been said before. I have borrowed thoughts from a lot of different sources, and even the stuff I have thought of myself has also been thought of before. (That's part of the reason I have all those quotes there.) But in the end you're just going to have to use you're own head, and I merely hope that this story can work as some sort of catalyst for your brain activity.

There is one source, though that I have ripped off so mercilessly that it would almost be plagiarism not to mention him: Sven Reichmann. You probably haven't heard of him since he's not widely known outside of Scandinavia, but for instance the thought experiment of "Who would lose their jobs, should man be righteous?" was almost directly borrowed out of one of his books, and plenty of stuff from chapter 5 was based on his ideas.

Oh, yeah. I also ripped off some of my previous work, but it's not like anyone would notice. That'll probably never be published in English anyway - or published at all for that matter. :-)

Absolutely not. I truly believe that no sane person would ever commit suicide based on a song they've heard. People who are depressed, OTOH often listen to Heavy Metal because the lyrics are often dark and the music suits the mood. People who believe otherwise have IMHO got the cause mixed up with the effect. The reason I used this song was that I further wanted people to understand how I thought Jodie felt: Like a puppet.

The only reason I'm answering this question is that there might be a chance that someone's paranoia could be awakened if they just skimmed through the text and noticed that particular passage. No. Racism is not okay, neither is intolerance. I only used these examples to illustrate one of the built-in problems of any moral code. If you didn't get this then read the passage again. (If racism was okay, it would in fact have been totally useless for the example.)

AAAAAGH!!! NO!!! Have mercy! I have seen where "debates" of this kind usually go. They tend to go from debate to trench warfare in approximately a nanosecond or so, both when it comes to civilised behaviour and locked positions on both sides. Furthermore I'm positively convinced that debates are a complete waste of time, because people never enter a debate to listen to what others have to say. They enter in order to make their own voice heard. The "winner" of the debate is also usually the one who can shout the loudest. (I was thinking of taking this up in the story, but I wanted to spare you from Hegel and his "dialectic logic".) Please don't start any debates because of this story.

Well, partly. But I am not any single one of the particular characters. There is some of me in Jodie, some in Daria, some in "Lex" but I am none of them even on a metaphorical level. (This was part of the reason I made Lex an old man - I didn't want anyone to think he was a Mary Jane/Sue character.)

I could of course tell you I would not be pleased to hear that someone had come to see things the way I see them because of this story, but I don't think I'd look good with a three-foot-long nose. But isn't the purpose of every more or less philosophical text to present a subject so convincingly that the people who read it become convinced? If no, then what is the point with them? If yes, then what have I done wrong? It is still my belief though, that when it comes to matters like this God himself is the only one who can truly convince, so this story was written for the purpose of getting you to stop and think about the meaning of life. It was also written for the purpose of clearing up what I see as some very common misunderstandings regarding Christian faith, and to explain why the subject of moral is so much harder than it first seems. That's my story and I'll stick with it. :-) Besides I warned about this in the caveat at the beginning - I didn't force the horse to the water, and I'm definitely not going to make it drink.

Also, if you think that I've done something new and/or unfair in "smuggling" in some philosophy into a story - think again. Philosophy has influenced culture for as long as it has existed. The only thing I've done differently is to be obvious/honest about it. Philosophy and the spirit of the times is influencing (either directly or indirectly) practically every cultural event, every book and every TV-show out there, believe it or not. Let's take a quick example: Have you ever watched sci-fi on TV? I knew you had. Have you ever noticed that most sci-fi shows that somehow want to incorporate an element of religion often choose not to talk about "God", but instead to talk about "The Universe" as if the universe was a someone, not a something. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should watch some Babylon 5.) This way they may add an element of "mysticism" or whatever you want to call it without taking a stand in favour of any religion - very politically correct. It's a solution in perfect harmony with the spirit of our times (and culture). It's also a piece of philosophy hidden in the culture surrounding us. It's a manifestation of the modern western paradigm that states that there exists no absolute truth on the metaphysical level. This, in turn, is based on the philosophic legacy of a German philosopher named Hegel - and that, I'm willing to bet, most of you didn't know. Just because someone has never read any philosophy doesn't mean that that person isn't influenced by it - philosophy is all around us in the form of self-certainties and the less we know about the philosophy behind these the less likely we are to be able to see through them. Just like in Huxley's Brave New World, enough repetitions make a truth. :-( In this fic I've been much more open about the philosophical elements than most people are, and if you think that's unfair I just don't know what to say...

This is also what I meant when I said that "The first victim of tolerance is truth." Tolerance (in practice) states that there is no such thing as absolute truth on the metaphysical level. (If such a thing existed, then it would naturally be morally unacceptable to negotiate about that truth in the name of tolerance.) The only problem is that the phrase "There is no such thing as absolute truth on the metaphysical level." is a metaphysical statement in itself, and in order for it to be valid, the phrase itself must be an absolute truth. Ooops. (Of course we don't act like there are no metaphysical truths - we only do that when it's convenient for us, but that's a whole different story...)

If you're a Christian who don't agree with me on my theology - then fine. You don't have to. Just know that what I presented in this text was just the bits and pieces that I felt most vital, and because of the nature of the story I didn't bother to go any deeper with the theology than I thought absolutely necessary. I could have made this story twice as long. I could also have been charged with homicide for slaying people with boredom. [...the insane theological fanfic author! Coming up next on Sick Sad World!] Oh... and as for my theories on heaven and hell - they were theories and nothing more.

Yes. Just let me say that I hope you liked the story, and if you didn't, well don't worry. I'm not likely to write another one like this. Now I'm done. Right after these brief messages:

(And to think that this was written 2500 years before the printing press and 3000 years before the Internet. Whew!)