Philosophy Season

Hello?  Mr. Sartre?  I, too, sit and watch the humans every day, and I, too, am nauseated.  I have looked in the mirror and seen someone else looking back at me.   I hear your call to take responsibility for my choices, and to make choices as though I am choosing for all of mankind.  Unfortunately, I am a victim of the absurdist vacuum which daily threatened to suck in your friend, Mr. Camus.  I would like to make meaningful decisions and take control of my circumstances, but every day I am more paralyzed by the futility of my actions.  Do this, or do that.  Who cares?  What does it matter?  Why spend an entire lifetime contemplating whether things have meaning, when there are no answers? 

I’d write a book about it, but I can’t care long enough.  Contemplating the nuances of life is exhausting. 

Just ask Mr. Tolstoy.  Even being born into Russian nobility and writing brilliantly crafted tomes about the human condition didn’t save him from a lifetime of wanting what he could not have.  The serfs wanted Tolstoy’s wisdom and money, and he wanted their faith. 

Melancholia is the disease of the thinker.  Those of us who poke and ponder and wish and dream aren’t satisfied with the general mundaneness of everyday life.  If we stare into the abyss long enough, we occasionally lose our balance and fall in, only to have to crawl back into the light … somehow.

I need to talk to you, Mr. Nietzsche.  We have so much in common, and I am ready for the lantern your madman smashed to pieces.  The rest of the world might revel in ignorance, but I long for deep, unadulterated truth.  Even when I thought I was deviating from the herd with my individuality, I was just wandering aimlessly into a different stream of cattle. 

Mr. Frankl, how did you find meaning in such a bleak and dreadful landscape?   How did optimism find its way into a man whose family was systematically murdered simply for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time?  Will you put me on your couch and coach me through this muddled mess?  Sorry, Misters Freud and Jung, you were too adrift in the cranial ocean for me.  I would like to live here, in this place, and not hate it (or myself) for all the ways I feel cheated and manipulated and ignored.  I want optimism. 

In all the bleak landscape of the existentialists and absurdists, I see hope.  I hear students speak of my friend Mr. Kafka as though he was a tragic loser, but even in a man-turned –beetle, killed by an apple thrown by his father, I see hope.  I see writers who wanted nothing more than a break in the cloud through which some sunlight leaks through.  They watched and waited.  They wrote and waited.  They tried to love and waited.  

And while I love that I can find kindred souls in the books on my shelf, I would prefer happiness. 

Mr. Leary, if only you were right about LSD curing the closed human mind and opening the doors to nirvana.  The problem, sir, is that the things behind those doors are all-too-often scary as hell.  Opening the doors of perception means opening them to any and all things – not just the beautiful ones.   

So, friends, how do I proceed?  How shall I act, and what shall I say, and which thought should I entertain?  I would wish that you all were here to help me, but you couldn’t even help yourselves through this thing called life.  Perhaps there is another side, and I’ll meet you later.  Until then, this daffodil on my table is lovely, and this beer is chilled, and the sun is shining outside my door.  I’ll find a way.