Thanksgiving

“Sir, I have never complained of the world; nor do I think I have reason to complain. It is rather to be wondered at that I have so much.”

- Samuel Johnson

We are thankful.

On the eve of the traditional feast, we recall, too, the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, which carry absurdist undertones:

“Abstinence in eating and drinking has no essential bearing on salvation: The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink… the holy apostles understood that the kingdom of God does not consist in eating and drinking, but in resignation to either lot, for they are neither elated by abundance, nor distressed by want.”

That is an essentially absurd statement, save for the references to salvation and all that. But really, living the absurd life is about acceptance of “either lot” as St. Thomas says. It is to view the world with a certain detachment, or equanimity.

Worry not about eating too much, nor make a virtue of self-denial. We recall that when the famous economist John Maynard Keynes was asked on his deathbed if he had any regrets, he said he wished he had drunk more champagne.

So, enjoy the holidays. Forget your worries. Live life without regrets. Accept what comes with equanimity.

And be thankful.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, absurd man

"Ne'er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men."
- Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was an absurd man, or at least he seemed to embrace many absurd ideas, particularly about the illusory nature of self.

Burton was one of the great Victorian adventurers. He played many roles – explorer, spy, soldier, translator, anthropologist, writer and perhaps half a dozen others. He was master of many languages – Arabic, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi and more. Burton was tall and swarthy and with his language skills and mastery of disguise he could often pass as a native. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, for instance, a great risk for a European. He also was the first white man to enter the forbidden Muslim city of Harare in Somaliland. As an explorer he journeyed to find the source of the Nile on two different occasions and did find the source of the Congo. Burton was also a writer for life and wrote many books. He was the first translator of Arabian Nights.

We are only touching on the highlights here, but is ought to be clear that Burton lived a full life. We recently finished reading Christopher Ondaatje’s Sind Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Ondaatje retraces Burton’s early years in India and Pakistan and relates stories of Burton’s life and times in this region.

We were stuck with the many absurd aspects of Burton’s character. It is hard to describe Burton’s attitude, because he did not write much about himself. That has frustrated many biographers who have tried to figure out who he was.

But his life speaks volumes about how unconcerned Burton was about the notion of self and how, instead, he seemed to relish the experience of living without worrying about what it might mean or what his purpose was or even who he was. Burton was a curious cat who simply followed his whims.

Burton himself loved to play many different roles – hence that long list we mentioned up top. In many of his journeys he takes on different disguises, whether as a Muslim Hajji or a Pashtu horse trader, with gusto. He was good enough – not only with language and the physical aspects of his disguise, but also with the subtle things such as manner, stance, gestures and the like – to fool the natives into thinking he himself was a native.

He also dabbled in many different religions. This, too, frustrates his biographers who debate what religion Burton was. At different times he was a Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Brahman Hindu, Sikh and Sufi. This is another absurd element of his life as he seemed to not take any commitment seriously. He took on these different religions more out of curiosity, it seems, just to see what it was like, to experience the rituals.

This curiosity and lack of inhibitions ran through his whole life. He was particularly curious about things that were “forbidden” and so he spends much time exploring the underside of societies, such as brothels. His detailed report on the boy brothels of Karachi wound up getting him kicked out of the army.

He also experimented with drugs, using cannabis and opium at different times. He liked to drink. He was like Hunter Thompson before there was Hunter Thompson. He was very interested in sex and wrote about different sexual practices. He translated the Kama Sutra. Again, this has created debate among his biographers about whether he was a drug addict, alcoholic or had some kind of sexual addiction.

What we see is something of an absurd man. A man who understands on some level that life has no meaning or purpose, that there is no self to sweat over or worry about. Hence, his ease with taking on so many different roles. We see a man who loved life and plunged right in, following his whims without worry.

Now, we’ll never really know what Burton thought. But we were inspired by the example of Burton’s life. Albert Camus wrote that “we all carry within us our prisons.” Burton was a man who slipped many of those self-imposed prisons. He was free and he was absurd.

The Cook's Lesson

In the spirit of not voting, we submit for the record an outstanding short (and we do mean short) story by Lydia Davis:

The Cook's Lesson
by Lydia Davis

Today I have learned a great lesson; our cook was my teacher. She is twenty-five years old and she's French. I discovered that she does not know that Louis-Philippe is no longer king of France and we now have a republic. And yet it has been five years since he left the throne. She said the fact that he is no longer king simply does not interest her in the least--those were her words.

And I think of myself as an intelligent man! But compared to her I'm an imbecile.

Screwing ourselves

Now you're climbin' to the top of the company ladder
Hope it doesn't take too long
Can't you see there'll come a day when it won't matter
Come a day when you'll be gone

--Boston, Peace of Mind

But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.

--Homer Simpson

Cheers is one of our all-time favorite shows. We recall one episode with particular fondness, in which some Cheers regulars pull a practical joke on a rival bar, then become so worried about retribution that they decide to punish themselves, hoping to mollify the other bar's owner. After coming to this momentous decision, they begin to chant "Screw ourselves! Screw ourselves!"

We believe this is a useful corollary for the absurd, for what can we make of the human propensity to worry, regret, and obsess over the fleeting vagaries that make up our life, other than that we are, in effect, screwing ourselves? Why, instead of greeting each moment as joyous, a gift to be treasured, do we regret the decisions we made earlier this week (or last decade), or fret over what will happen tomorrow...or when we "retire"?!? Why do our minds so relentlessly focus on anything other than the present? Why do we nod in agreement when Agent Smith, in The Matrix, claims that "human beings define their reality through suffering and misery"?

We must ask ourselves...why?

Well, to be honest, we don't have the answer. We imagine it has something (perhaps a great deal) to do with our biological predisposition to survive, as a peaceful individual staring up at the stars is far less likely to survive (to say nothing of reproduce) than one driven to compete with others for wealth, status, and the affections of the opposite sex.

But more important than this reality is what one can do with such knowledge. Upset about something at work? Don't be! Had an argument with your spouse? Who cares! (Or as Inigo put it...so what?!?) We all inhabit our own little worlds ("a prison inside our heads," as David Foster Wallace once put it), and have the ability to live (and feel) as we choose, no matter the circumstances. This is often a difficult hurdle for people to overcome, as we are indeed pre-programmed to feel as if the insignificant events in our meaningless lives are not only important, but of extraordinary consequence...to us!

Next time you encounter some setback or disappointing news, consider how your reaction would be different had it instead happened to your next door neighbor. Or someone across town. Or on the other side of the planet. Would a starving child in rural China really care about a difficult commute?

Or, consider how such news would be received by yourself...10 years ago. Would your teenage self really be upset at losing out on a promotion? Why should your reaction to events be tied not only into this ephemeral notion of the self, but of its current incarnation? (For those who are interested, this idea is called "temporal neutrality," and Derek Parfit has a fascinating discussion of it in his book Reasons and Persons.)

We are so wrapped up in the false importance of personal experience that we not only cannot see the forest for the trees, but are obsessed with lines in the bark. We worry about this, that, or the other thing, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt of the importance of our worries, even as six billion others have their own critical concerns. Your own personal narrative, carefully constructed, cultivated, and nurtured over all these long years, is nothing but a seductive myth.

Happily, the likelihood of determinism notwithstanding, we at least have the illusion of control over our own emotions. Thus, every one of us can choose right now to lead a life free of worry and regret, in which we truly celebrate the miracle of each additional moment.

Or...we can keep right on screwing ourselves.

So what?

So what?

It’s fast becoming one of our favorite phrases. Absurdity seems to demand a light touch. Recognizing the meaningless of it all and the soap bubble nature of our existence means you see a lot of people making a big to do over nothing….

Next time you see someone getting all bent of shape about something, throw in a so what and see what happens. It’s like a sort of mental grenade that, upon impact, makes the other person stop in their mental track.

We did this to the wife recently, when she seemed to go apeshit because our son forgot some homework. “So what?” we said. If you say enough “so what’s” the other person can’t help but get a little existential. At least for a moment.

A pause followed… “He’ll get a zero if he doesn’t turn it in.”

“But again, so what?” we said. “He missed a homework assignment. It’s not worth getting all upset about.”

People seem to get most un-absurd about their kids. Especially the moms. We always thought the old advice from D.H. Lawrence has great merit:

“Take all due care of him, materially; give him all the care and tenderness and wrath which the spontaneous soul emits: but always, always, at the very quick, leave him alone. He is never to be merged into you nor you into him.”

With their mom away one weekend, we put DHL’s advice into play. We let them sleep in. We let them find their own ways to occupy themselves. We gently reminded them of their responsibilities for the day and let them sort out when they would do them. It worked rather well. The stress level was zero for both kids and dad.

Well, whatever… we don’t mean to give serious advice of any kind on child-raising. We simply point out that most people take themselves and their kids deathly serious. And they shouldn’t. Life is absurd. That includes kids and family.

We also find the “so what” exercise good for ourselves. Faced with an unexpected setback at work recently, we found ourselves saying “so what.” Just saying it and working out what might happen seemed to immediately cast the setback in its proper light – which is, that it is nothing worth getting upset over.

Steeped in the absurd, we find it hard to take much of anything too seriously. It’s as if it’s all unreal somehow.

Anyway, we’ve found the “so what” question a useful one for maintaining that sense of equanimity. Use it and see what happens. We think you’ll find that if you ask it enough, life’s absurd colors come out a little brighter.

Vacation and the absurd man

If you are living an absurd life, then you have nothing to escape from. Hence, the idea of vacation takes on an ironic aspect. We’ve alluded to this in the past, putting the word vacation in quotes or noting, parenthetically, the misnomer of an absurd man on vacation.

In this post, we aim to explore this link between work and play a touch more. In a sense, the absurd man is always on vacation.

If life is meaningless and our struggles – like that of Sisyphus – futile, then what difference does vacation make in this? If the absurd man accepts that life is absurd, then it makes no difference if he is “working” or not. The distinction is arbitrary.

Or, as a far-left-leaning friend of ours would say, “Vacation is a capitalist construct.” On some level, she is right. The idea of taking a vacation only came about when there was a need for it. Man first had to have that thing called a “job.”

The idea, as we know it, is a post-industrial invention.

E.P. Thompson writes about this in The Making of the English Working Class. He looks at different pre-industrial workers, such as silver miners in Mexico. The idea is that while people certainly worked, the modern concept of a job would’ve been a foreign one to them.

Instead, their work was much more irregular and task-oriented. You worked until you completed a task. Then your job was done and you were free to indulge in siestas and drink beer until you found another.

There was no sense in being stuck in a harness pulling for the same master for a paycheck. There was no sense, either, that one would be working all the time or on any regular schedule. As Thompson says, Mexican miners would be “willing to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities.”

There were many other ways in which one could spend one’s days – with family, fishing, gardening, playing sports or meeting your buddies at the local watering hole. The point is that the idea that one ought to be working most days of the week was not yet socially normal.

Thompson writes that for most of human history “the work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives.” Today, this lifestyle persists among our more creative classes – artists, writers, actors and the like. They tend to work for a time, around a task, and then idle until the next gig.

Now, we don’t know if Thompson is entirely accurate here. We suspect there is some romanticizing of the pre-industrial age. (We think of all the bad teeth, itchy clothing and body odor of those times…) Nonetheless, we think the observation is not so far off the mark. People simply viewed work differently than we do today.

All of this suggests, too, that the idea of vacation came about when we got jobs – jobs so unpleasant that we had to create a means to escape them. Now, people find it normal to go groveling to an employer to ask for time off. Two weeks of annual vacation is normal for many starting out.

It’s an odd thing, when you stop and think about it – especially in light of some of the work patterns of the past, such as those that Thompson writes about.

And for the absurd man, the modern day ideas on work and play take on an especially ironic meaning. We are all dead either way, whether we take a vacation or not.

In light of that, we say play all the time. The concept of work and play are in our heads. Better, we think, to learn to accept the absurdity of life and reject the arbitrary nature of society’s common divisions. It’s all the same. It’s an experience called life. Escapism is an idea antithetical to absurdity.

Some of this may seem unrealistic, difficult and perhaps even naive. But we think one can live an absurd life. Life is absurd. Nothing matters. Not even work. And that is a liberating thought indeed. As Anthony Bourdain put it, “When you don’t give a shit… you win.”

Absurd humility

“And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about?... When nature is “so careless of a single life,” why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?”
- Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”

We have been traveling again. And travel often inspires absurd thoughts to one extent or another. This last trip got us thinking about how unimportant we are and how life would go one whether we were here or not.

This thought, while hardly original, is always striking when we go away for awhile. We are much less diligent checking e-mails and the like when traveling. Alone perhaps in the universe, we have not yet succumbed to those little devices that everyone carries around, pushing buttons constantly – even while in the car or using the toilet. No, not yet anyway.

And so, many e-mails are left unanswered, sometimes for days. And guess what happens? Nothing. Nothing at all. All these things that seem so important while you are in the office – being available and answering e-mail – look especially ridiculous when you are away. We have all had this feeling that we are “missing out” when we are away. But upon our return, we find things managed to get done without us. Somehow people soldiered on without our all-important presence.

It’s not the hustle and bustle, or the work itself that we object to. It is the feeling of self-importance that comes with that. It is the stresses and anxieties that we put on ourselves that is, shall we say, anti-absurd.

As Stevenson asks above, what is all the pother about?

Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers,” published in 1876, is one of our favorite essays. We had a collection of his essays in our carry-on while we traveled. The old Scot is an inspiration. On this idea of self-importance, Stevenson was wise to the deception. The world rolls on…

“Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy’s preserves,” he writes, “the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss.”

Indeed. And so too, do not fret over unanswered e-mails. Do not worry over work left undone. Don’t let society lay guilt upon your conscience for getting up late. Don’t let the fact that you let that big client get away ruin your afternoon. Don’t let your neighbor’s financial success plant envy in your heart.

Instead, be carefree. Be detached. Recognize the futility of it all.

Another one of our favorite philosophers is Lin Yutang, who wrote The Importance of Living. (Well worth it – you will always keep this book around. You will find you dip into it now and then. You will find inspiration and soothing words from a man who knew how to live.)

Lin Yutang, wrote “the most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself.”

That’s what the absurd helps us understand. It’s all self-imposed. “One must start out with the belief that there are no catastrophes in this world,” Yutang says. Nothing matters. Nothing at all.

But before you can get there, you may have to start small. That means laughing off a spilled cup of coffee… not fretting over missed appointments… meeting disappointment with a shrug… not worrying over things left undone. “On the whole,” Yutang reminds us, “if one answers letters promptly, the result is about as good or as bad as if he had never answered them at all.”

It really doesn’t matter. That’s the freedom that comes with the absurd. The weight of the world’s troubles – all its noise and clanging and banging and bright lights and violence – slips off your back.

Absurd faith?

We have gotten a couple of interesting comments recently, essentially questioning whether we are really simply extolling the virtues of the absurd, or instead proselytizing something akin to religious faith. In other words (as we see it), the objections are that while we say people should be free to live as they choose, our insistence on the absurd as the "best" mode of living belies this claim.

This is a worthwhile point to explore, as it gets to the heart of the argument for living the absurd life. As we have noted, our intention in writing this blog is not to get at some universal truth, but rather to figure out the best way to live in what we view as a meaningless, uncaring universe. However, in the course of developing such a worldview, we have discovered that the absurd answers many, many questions, while competing theories run into one dead-end after another.

The issue of "personal meaning," for example, has come up again and again, with several readers insisting that such meaning can peaceably coexist with universal irrelevance. As we have argued, however, this is nothing more than a comfortable delusion--the notion that meaning can exist for an individual is simply inconsistent with universal meaninglessness (to say nothing of the existence, or lack thereof, of the self).

Or consider this example, pulled from yesterday's Wall Street Journal, when a letter writer took exception to Stephen Hawking's claim, in his new book, that the universe does not require a creator (i.e., God): "Where did the apparently infinite energy and order we know as the universe and life come from? Over the eons when something couldn't be explained, God was invoked. I am willing to go with that."

This, as with all religious belief, is simply a cop-out, and difficult to take seriously. Does the writer realize he is endorsing the view that thunder and lightning are the work of Zeus, and ocean waves the province of Poseidon? Even worse, he identifies himself as a longtime electronics engineer--in other words, a man of science.

The importance of family and circumstance are other areas most people have extreme difficulty squaring with the theoretical appeal of the absurd; while they like the concept of meaninglessness, they simply cannot accept that, well, their family and friends are meaningless too!

To get back to the original question, it is certainly not our intent to sound like "someone saying how great it is to accept Jesus," as one commenter put it...but the reality is that the absurd is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Either one believes the world is meaningless, and humanity a fluke (but nonetheless fascinating) accident, or one doesn't. The problem with the latter is that most people are not willing to accept what is required to rebut the absurd--namely, something beyond the physical. As we have written in the past, we have more respect for religious fundamentalists than we do for Sunday churchgoers; at least the fundamentalists have a consistent belief system.

In sum, we are certainly open to other worldviews that not only allow the freedom and contentment of the absurd, but are also remarkably consistent in their philosophy. We, however, have yet to come across one...

Finally, don't take our word for it, consider the following quote from David Foster Wallace. The quote is from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, written by David Lipsky about a roadtrip he took with Wallace during the post-launch publicity tour for Infinite Jest. There are many compelling lines in the book, but the following may be our favorite:

“There’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that’s been what’s going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff coming from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.”

The absurd man not only recognizes the hole exists, not only sees it for the bottomless pit that it is...but smiles at the futility of trying to fill it. That, to us, is the wonder of the absurd.

Playing a role, part deux

OK, in reality this is probably more like part 12 or 13, but we just liked the way that sounded. What got us thinking about playing a role was a television show we watched last night called "Lone Star," in which a con man (Bob) is living two lives (girlfriend in one, wife in the other) and gets upset when his scheme begins to collapse and he needs to leave the girlfriend. "I've always taught you," his con-man father admonishes him, "you can play any character you want...but don't play yourself. That's what lets you walk away when the time is right."

There is much to like in this quote, but what struck us was the glaring contradiction inherent in the concept that there is a real "himself." Indeed, at a later point in the show Bob tells his father that he wants to take a high-level job he has been offered at an oil firm, not as a way in to loot the company (their original plan), but to really do the job. "I've been pretending to do it for so long," he says, "that I think I can really do it."

So...which is the "real" Bob? If he renounces his con-man life and becomes a successful corporate exec, does his self undergo some sort of transformation? For that matter, who among us--even with the requisite training--has not, at some point, felt a complete and total fraud?

We had a conversation once with a former colleague who insisted there is indeed a self. We pushed on this, curious to see how she would defend something so clearly indefensible. (She is religious, and simply not willing to accept the premise that the self might be an illusion, as it would be far too damaging to her current worldview.) She backed herself further and further into a corner, until finally coming to the position that, at some indeterminate point in childhood, every individual "becomes" who they are; subsequent alterations are considered changes to their true nature.

This, of course, is ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than any other defense of the self, which, as the saying goes, becomes more elusive the more one searches for it. And yet, the illusion of the self is so powerful, so all-encompassing, that the vast majority of people simple accept it; or, as with our friend, twist themselves into increasingly contorted positions to defend it.

So what, exactly, is our point? The point is that Bob has it half right, but that other half is critical. While he is (or, apparently, has been) able to treat his life as akin to a role (or roles) in a play, he nevertheless believes there is something "real" outside this. Further, the longer he stays in the roles, the more "real" he believes the roles themselves to be.

Well, how exactly is this different from the way most people approach life? We speak of things such as relationships, work, and family in exactly the same terms ("this is what's real," "this is what really matters"), based almost entirely on the length of time we have been doing them. Consider how absurd (pun fully intended) this is. What if, for example, we lived for a million years - would we still consider a 50-year relationship to be "real"? Or would it be a mere dalliance--a blip in time, as it were--compared to our 500,000-year marriage?

Everything is relative, and by allowing ourselves to be sucked into the game of what is "real"--i.e, meaningful--and what is not, we lose our ability to see reality as it truly is. We are all playing roles, but while the absurd man recognizes this reality and embraces it--as Camus put it, he knows the rock will roll back down the hill--others fight tooth and nail against this simple truth, hoping desperately to be rescued from what they see as the hellish existence of life without purpose.

We, of course, think it's pretty cool.

The Great Oblomov

"All his anxiety resolved itself into a sigh and dissolved into apathy and drowsiness."
- From Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

Each morning we sit down with a pot of a tea and leisurely go through the morning newspapers. (We get three delivered to our door every day). We enjoy this easing into the day. Life doesn’t start before 9 AM around here.

In any event, we were cheered by the appearance of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov in today’s Wall Street Journal. Oblomov is one of the great lazy men in literature, a satirical creation of the novelist Ivan Goncharov in 1859.

Here is the bit the Journal reproduces, in the Notables & Quotables section:

“He was a man of about thirty-two or -three, of medium height and pleasant appearance, with dark grey eyes, but with a total absence of any definite idea, any concentration, in his features… Oblomov never wore a tie or a waistcoat at home because he liked to feel unhampered and free. He wore long, soft, wide slippers; when he put his feet on the floor as he got out of bed, he invariably stepped into them without looking. Lying down was not for Oblomov a necessity, as it is for a sick man or for a man who is sleepy; or a matter of chance, as it is for a man who is tired; or a pleasure, as it is for a lazy man; it was his normal condition.”

We pulled out our old copy of Goncharov’s story and perusing it inspired this post…

Oblomov is a character that most of society would have a hard time warming up to. He is supremely lazy, rarely leaving his flat or even his bedroom. And yet, somehow, we are inspired by his staunch refusal to bend to what others think he should do.

He is a semi-absurd fellow in this respect, a man not roused by things that society finds so important. Instead he spends a great deal of time lying in bed and shirking work. He finds work especially tedious, asking famously, “but when am I to live?”

Oblomov stumbles around, never putting the pieces together of just how absurd life is and thus missing his absurd awakening, so to speak. “During his early years,” Goncharov writes of his fictional anti-hero, “He was stirred to excitement like other people, hoped and rejoiced at trifles, and suffered from trifles, too. But that was a long time ago…”

His sublime indifference is practically comical. We loved the description about how “he found it irksome to remain dressed all day” to which we sympathize. (We have the luxury of working at home and hardly every wear shoes and often wear nothing more than shorts and a t-shirt.)

Oblomov grows weary, too, of “evening parties” and instead invites his good bachelor friends where he can “take off his tie, unbutton his waistcoat, and even lie down and have an hour’s sleep.”

Oblomov is a day-dreamer, loafer, rebel and master of lassitude. For us, too, he’s a satirical example of one who finds his own way to cope with the futility of it all. The story is funny and sad, but ultimately, very human - with the absurd elements sprinkled in as well.

Forget voting!

It’s primary Election Day where we live. Members of political parties will truck to the polls to pick senators, representatives and other positions.

We will not be voting. We haven’t voted for many years and have no plans to return. Today, we look at the idea of voting through an absurd lens.

Now we know that the idea of the absurd goes against nearly everything we’ve been taught since we were knee-high to a grasshopper. It goes against nearly everything society would want us to believe. We are told to work hard, be good in school, obey the laws, get a job and pay our taxes. Society wants good citizens.

In other words, it wants dogs that enjoy their leashes.

But having an absurd worldview casts all of that in a laughably ridiculous light. Or as Camus put it, “after the absurd, everything is upset.” The absurd view, as we’ve pointed out, embraces the meaningless nature of our existence. It sees the futility of man’s struggle, which ends in death. Therefore, all of these ideals people hold as meaningful and important are seen as nothing more than fleeting shadows and vapors.

In this blog, we’ve tried to explore the ramifications of the absurd – how to live an absurd life in an absurd world. We’ve tried to recover this alternative tradition in literature and philosophy – one that sees the absurdity of the world and embraces it.

In politics, we see another area where the absurd clashes with mainstream thinking. We are told to vote and participate in our democracy. It is a point of pride for those who do. People wear little stickers saying “I voted.” If you don’t vote, people give you disproving glances and “tsk, tsk.”

We find it all amusing. Voting is as meaningless as anything else we do. It simply doesn’t matter one way or the other. An absurd man may vote, we suppose, just because he can. But we find good reasons not to vote.

Supposedly, our government is built on the consent of the governed. Think how silly this is. Did we ever consent? And if we did, can we not withdraw that consent? Why is it that we are ever slaves to the promises made by dead men? Did we participate in drawing up the US Constitution? Did we sign it? How are we bound by these laws?

Our non-voting is our way of saying we withdraw. There was a brilliant 19th century fellow, a lawyer and entrepreneur, named Lysander Spooner. He made the argument, convincingly, that people who voted for the government delegated their rights to it, and those who did not vote for it were free from its jurisdiction. Legally and morally, Spooner has the high ground in our view.

We suppose the absurd man can enjoy the whole spectacle of politics as entertainment, but it is a mistake to impute any importance whatsoever to government and its doings. It is among the most anti-absurd of our institutions – full of self-importance and bluster, and on top of it all, it is lethal too!

Our view is to skip the whole thing. And there are benefits to not voting. As you no longer have a horse in that race, you will look at it more objectively, in a more detached way. It is freeing in its own way, we find.

It’s like C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe a man is happier and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’ … and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.”

The ideal absurd man depends on nothing external for his sense of equanimity. He is truly free because he realizes that nothing matters.

The gravity of the world is all in our heads. It is in how we look at the world. That’s the beauty of the absurd. It shows us that the chains we wear are of all of our own making. We can slip out of them whenever we choose.

Was Socrates happy?

We are traveling today. We are on a slow-moving train slinking its way across a rusted out part of America. We brought a book along – Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, an account of his living on the Greek isle of Corfu on the eve of WWII. It is the kind of book we thought we’d like. Durrell was a chum of one of our favorites, Henry Miller, and seems a similar life-affirming, carefree character.

For whatever reason, the book is not holding our interest. But the trip is three hours long and we find ourselves turning to it again… then we come across an interesting passage:

“If you had an opportunity to put a question to Socrates what would it be?” writes Zarian. “I would ask him if he was a happy man. I am sure that greater wisdom imposes a greater strain upon a man.”

… This view is bitterly contested by Peltours and Nancy. Wisdom, they say, teaches the ratiocinative faculty how to rest, to attain a deeper surrender of the whole self to the flux of time and space…”

We think the line of thought is interesting in light of the absurd. It would be vain to suggest we possess a greater wisdom. But we would argue that the viewpoint of the absurd has had the effect on us that Peltours and Nancy argue for in the passage above.

Later in the book, we come across another passage that grabs us…

“Philosophy,” he said once, “is a doubt that grows… Suddenly you awake one day and realize with complete certainty that ninety-five percent of the activities of the human race – to which you supposed you belonged – have no relevance whatsoever for you.”

That is almost an absurd awakening… and it seems to us when one begins to think like this, one is well on one’s way to shedding the barnacles of discontent that cling so easily to human egos…

Island of the Absurd, Part II

We continue where we left off in Part I…

Cleveland-born Robert Dean Frisbie (1896-1948) headed out for Tahiti aboard a steamer in 1920. He would spend the rest of his life in the South Pacific. For several years in the 1920s, he lived on the little atoll Puka-Puka in the Cook Islands.

There he ran a small trading store for the Line Islands Trading Company. Frisbie was the only white man on the island. He sought to escape the “noisy clamor” of modern life and wanted to write the next Moby Dick. While he never wrote his Moby Dick, he did write about his experiences on Puka-Puka. These pieces were collected in a book title Puka-Puka: a Lone Trader on a South Sea Atoll, published in 1929.

We read this book recently – it is nice light summer reading and very entertaining. We were struck by the many absurd episodes and ideas he encountered in Polynesian culture.

Frisbie himself is something of an absurd man, though he seems more driven by escapism. “At Puka-Puka – there surely I could be as indolent as I pleased, as lonely as I pleased, never disturbed by the hateful thought that it is my duty to become a useful cog in the clockwork of ‘progress.’”

And this: “Here no officious relatives or friends would cry: ‘Young man, you are wasting your life! Here you are, nearing thirty, with nothing accomplished, with no plans for the future, with no bank account! It is your duty to keep the wheels of industry moving! Abstain from alcohol and tobacco! Join the Church!”

But he also doesn’t attach any importance to anything he’s doing. Of his written accounts, he writes, “I know how trifling they are.” He is Godless, though very tolerant of such beliefs in others. He lives very much in the present. And he never imparts greater meaning on anything that happens on Puka-Puka. He seems to take things as they come, enjoying the experience of living on that island.

At Puka-Puka Frisbie finds contentment, even though he is without most of the comforts he has grown accustomed to. He adapts to its slower paced life, a life with hours spent doing little of what we would consider work. He sleeps in the hot afternoons and goes swimming a lot. The food practically falls off the trees. The islanders bring him fish. There is sometimes a pig to slaughter.

The Puka-Pukans people challenge his western notions of what life is about. They are the ones who bring out the absurd in the book. We won’t go through all the episodes, but we were particularly intrigued by their carefree attitude toward death.

They don’t seem afraid to die and seem to relish their brushes with danger and death.

At one point, Frisbie is out fishing with some of the men in a canoe and they have to brave fierce breakers on their way in and out. The giant combers are deadly if they catch you, because they will drive you down into the sharp coral and you’ll be shredded to bits.

The canoe has a very close call on its way in. After a narrow escape, Frisbie writes, quoting one of his fellow fishermen: “If we had been a foot closer in we would have all been killed,” Benny shouted with a laugh.

(This reminds us that Puka-Pukans favorite word is “if.” Frisbie writes: “Every day one continually hears phrases such as “If I had gone fishing I would have something to eat”; “If I had put a new roof on my house – if I had done this, that and the other.” Something about that strikes us as absurd. The absurd man knows things could always easily be otherwise, a sense captured by the word “if”…)

These kinds of episodes, where a Puka-Pukan laughs off danger, are common. These are a people who joyously compose death songs for each other while they are living. These are songs they intend to sing over the fallen. Frisbie at first finds it a bit gloomy, but comes to understand that the Puka-Pukans view death as naturally a life and they feel no compunction to hide the fact that they will all die one day. (In a similar way, they are very open about their own bodies and free with sexual favors).

This point of view gives the Puka-Pukan some mighty psychological armor. “When one believes death is inevitable,” Frisbie writes, “one is indifferent to everything.”

Near the end of the book, Frisbie has his own near death experience when he is caught by crashing waves and barely escapes. He has to put quite a fight to stay alive in the violent waves.

One Puka-Pukan says of Frisbie. “He is superman! A Puka-Pukan would have been killed by the first wave!”

Frisbie writes: “He was right: a Puka-Pukan would have philosophically allowed the first wave to kill him, not being sufficiently egotistical to make a final grandiose gesture in the face of death.”

The Island of the Absurd, Part I

We are, you might say, island enthusiasts. We recently read a good book by Robert Dean Frisbie, a man who spent many years on a coral atoll in the South Pacific, which relates many absurd insights and observations.

The absurd’s core ideas of a meaningless existence, acceptance of eventual death and all its corollaries seem to come out more readily when one is on a remote island. There is something about the islands that teach us much about the absurd nature of our existence.

This is what we aim to explore here, perhaps inspired by our own vacation, in which we spent many days lulled by the sound of waves and seagulls, fanned by salty sea breezes, under a bright and warm sun…

The island literature is expansive… We have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s account of his experiences amid the palm shades and trade-winds of the South Pacific, on the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands. (Just to say the island names seems magical.) We’ve read the tales of Defoe and Melville and Gauguin and others who spent time on those little worlds surrounded by sea. We’ve devoured such stories since we were boys.

As adults, the lure of following in their footsteps, of going bamboo, remains. We have had the pleasure of spending many days on tropical islands. Growing up, we’d spend weeks hopping Caribbean islands when we visited our grandparents. And in our position today, we have ventured to islands from the South Pacific to the Indian Ocean all the way to the Tasman Sea.

We think that being a good bit removed from the patterns of our daily lives, modern society’s futile efforts come out in more stark relief. This is not say, as we’ve pointed out before, that one can’t be absurd anywhere. But we’ve come to appreciate that certain environments make it easier to be absurd (and the see the absurd) than others. As more than one reader has pointed out, perhaps if we were less comfortable, we’d find it harder to say nothing matters. Perhaps they are right, though we like to think we can maintain our sense of equanimity in the face of life’s vicissitudes.

In fact, it may be that life’s trials bring out the absurd in someone who otherwise was comfortable. That was the case with Alexander Selkirk.

Defoe found inspiration for his Robinson Crusoe in the real story of Alexander Selkirk; a Scottish seaman marooned for four years between 1704 and 1709, on Mas a Tierra, an island 400 miles off the coast of Chile.

At first, Selkirk was miserable. His depression lingered for 18 months. He’d have crying fits. He thought about killing himself.

But eventually Selkirk began to make the best of it. He learned to hunt game – the island had goats – and fish. He cooked up stews of goat flavored with native berries. He boiled lobster. He made clothes from goatskins. He found ways to entertain himself, hunting for fun and releasing his catch. Selkirk read aloud from his Bible to maintain his ability to speak and he found ways to write.

After awhile, Selkirk becomes relatively content. He writes how “he never had a moment heavy” and that his life was “one continual feast.” He also did a lot of thinking…

Selkirk had an epiphany – a realization shared by the absurd and certain other philosophies and cultures. He came to believe that “all our discontents” sprang “from the want of thankfulness for what we have.” He thought living on the island, removed “from all the wickedness in the world” helped him realize the folly of his past life, filled with work and striving and worry for some elusive success as defined by social conventions. The island, though it would appear very confining, was more liberating. Though it might seem lonely, he found his existence there contemplative.

The island taught Selkirk how little the old world mattered, how ridiculous it all seemed as viewed from a distance. He accepted his marooned circumstances, despite their apparent difficulties. (And we are, in a sense, all marooned here on this spinning planet).

In part II, we'll look at the experience of Robert Dean Frisbie, a lone trader on a South Sea Atoll, through an absurd lens. On the atoll, Frisbie finds a people with many absurd traits, including some refreshing views on death...

Self-delusions

Well I've searched and I've searched
To find the perfect life-
A brand new car and a brand new suit
I even got me a little wife-
But wherever I have gone
I was sure to find myself there-
You can run all your life
But not go anywhere

-- Social Distortion, Ball and Chain

We have been on vacation the past couple of weeks (although as we pointed out last year at this time, the concept of "vacation" is a bit of a misnomer to the absurd man), part of which included a visit with an uncle who is a devotee of "mindfulness," the Buddhist tradition that encourages adherents to live in each moment, neither regretting the past nor worrying about the future. Clearly this is a philosophy that has much in common with the absurd (with the rather notable difference that Buddhism assumes an interconnectedness of all things--a kind of universal consciousness, if you will), and we have discussed it in the past in this blog.

We were surprised, therefore, when our uncle, in the midst of a discussion of such matters, mentioned that his life at the moment was well-nigh perfect, and he wished he could freeze things as they were. (For context, he is in his mid-60s, lives quite comfortably in Northern California, and has three children in their 30s who have recently married, two of whom have small children.) We were taken aback, to say the least--isn't the whole point of living in each moment to avoid the impact of such externalities? We were further surprised when he attributed our own sense of contentment to our relatively secure job and family.

This, to us, is one of the more frustrating aspects of the absurd--individuals who come right to the brink of understanding...but can't follow through. It is mystifying to us how such people can understand so much, yet not see the contradiction they ultimately embrace. It truly is an all or nothing proposition - either everything matters...or nothing does. If one's family matters (the reason why we harp on family, by the way, is because it seems the one area where seemingly rational people come to a brick wall), then so does everyone else's family, and everything they do, and everything that caused them to exist in the first place, ad infinitum.

This is why we have devoted so much time and space on this blog to the chimera of "personal meaning," which many see as an out to what they view as the bleakness of the absurd. In short, the universe may be meaningless, but that doesn't mean I can't create my own little island of meaningfulness while I'm here. This sounds incredibly seductive and logical, particularly for those who view the absurd as bleak. (As an aside, perhaps we should not have been too surprised by our uncle's comments, since a few months ago he responded to a note we sent about the absurd by saying: "Existential angst!!--Yikes, can't get through a day feeling too much of that.")

But as we have noted, we view the absurd as anything but bleak. Rather, it is the most liberating feeling imaginable. Imagine...this "I" we have been carrying around since early childhood, which wants, and needs, and never seems sated...is nothing more than a fantastic illusion! We can be as content sitting on a park bench staring into space (as our old nemesis Jack Sparrow once mocked us) as living the high life of a billionaire.

But there is another reason for highlighting our uncle's comments here, and that is their "wolf in sheep's clothing" nature. For despite their seeming banality, such attitudes open the door to all sorts of unpleasant realities. To begin with, while our uncle professes to be happy because he lives in the moment, he is in fact happy only because his current circumstances conform to what he views as "good." Thus, he is vulnerable to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to which we are all subject.

Further, this attitude that his family is important by necessity means others must be viewed as less so. Consider what he would choose if given the option to end the life of one grandchild...or 1000 African children. Is such a scenario ridiculous? Of course. And we don't pretend that we wouldn't have similar misgivings were one of our family members involved. The difference is...we know the misgivings are all part of the illusion, while he thinks they are real. He honestly believes his family is "more" valuable than others, even while he preaches the virtues of mindfulness. Think about that...