In her book The Faraway Nearby, American author Rebecca Solnit reflects on “emptiness, meaninglessness and transience”. According to Rebecca Solnit, emptiness, meaninglessness and transience are philosophically and linguistically related to breathing, and, as a Zen master teaches his student, far from boring.
“The word vanitas is only a step from the English word vanity, which has a host of pejorative meanings. It‘s a word that conveys futility, fruitlessness, and foolish pride. Sometimes the famous passage in Ecclesiastes has an even harsher interpretation: the New International Version of the Bible translates it, presumably from the Latin, as meaninglessness, and turns the famous passage in Ecclesiastes into a scolding, „Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless“, a far cry from the majestic cadences of the King James Bible‘s „Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.“
There‘s a sort of decay or mutation of language at work. Vanitas is Latin. It means emptiness and is related to the word vacant. The Latin Vulgate Bible, the standard version for most of Europe for a thousand years, derives from the Greek Septuagint, where the word that occurs thirty-eight times in Ecclesiastes is mataiotes, which means emptiness, meaninglessness, but also transience. Does transience render all things meaningless? The Hebrew word in the original of Ecclesiastes, unavailable until modern times, when scraps of surviving manuscript were found in dry caves is hevel. It means breath or vapor, and the sense of transience is vivid but the condemnation of the transient is nowhere to be found.
Ezekiel Hopkins’s „a great bubble blown up by the breath of God“ and all those paintings of children blowing bubbles return to the original meaning, for each breath is fleeting but breathing is life itself. There‘s a story about a Zen studen who complains that paying attention to his breath and counting his breaths, the fundamental exercise of Zen meditation, is boring. His teacher plunges his head into a stream and holds it down a long moment, then pulls him up and says, „Still boring?“ Less boring when its transience is more evident.”
Source: Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, Granta Books, 2013