Absurdity And Suicide

Some few years before my brother passed away from a sudden illness, he began an immersion in the work of Albert Camus. He asked me, during a phone conversation, if I knew anything about Camus, or if I thought of him as absurd, as an absurdist. I told him I knew very little. He wasn’t my cup of tea. I vaguely remembered reading Camus in junior college as an assignment but little else. The image that came to mind was of a solitary man brooding on his mother. I thought the writing was dreary and mundane and didn’t pursue it. When I thought of the absurd in art and literature figures like Harpo Marx came to mind, and Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, Groucho Marx and Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco and The Goon Show. Silliness, outrageousness, maniacal hijinks. I didn’t see Camus as an absurdist, I saw him as a worldly cynic with a Gauloises in his mouth and a fatalistic glint in his eyes. The Humphrey Bogart of the French existentialists.

My brother was right. I googled absurdism and Albert Camus and received a truckload of information on the subject, beginning with the AI Overview: Albert Camus was a French philosopher and Nobel Prize laureate who is known for his contributions to the philosophy of absurdism. His philosophy of absurdism is based on the idea that the universe is irrational and meaningless, and that humans should embrace this absurdity and find meaning in life.

It goes to the heart of what my brother was struggling with at the time, which I can’t possibly know in its entirety, its multiplexities and thorny conundrums, but based on some of the events we both mutually coped with, I know a lot of his malaise was linked to the collapse and disintegration of just about everything, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the Bill of Rights, the constitution, the rampant criminality and corruption in government, the endless wars, the many frustrations and heartbreaks caused by an insanely inefficient and predatory healthcare system, the day-to-day grind of asphyxiating routine, the stresses of traffic and humiliations of work, the incivility of people and their buried rage. Things you can’t talk about in polite society anymore. Hence, I really looked forward to the conversations with my brother, which usually took place on his birthday. I was also quite embarrassed about my ignorance on the subject of absurdism, especially since I was the lit guy and my brother had a contempt for eggheads.

It was Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus that most captivated my brother. It articulated his attitude toward life, an attitude he’d begun questioning, siphoning, and battling, wrestling à la Jacob and the angel – or was that God? – in an effort to find a fulfilling answer, or a liberating nullity. He was embroiled in a confrontation with life, a soulful interrogation, a candid exploration outside the purviews of superficial therapies designed to put you back to work, bring you back into the fold to become a functioning member of a baldly toxic society. I wish I could’ve been of bigger help to him. My take on the absurd seemed clownish and self-indulgent matched against heavyweights like Kierkegaard and Camus. I used humor to accept and sometimes celebrate the irrationalities of contemporary life, the bizarre cruelties and arbitrary misfortunes. I didn’t get low and dirty and mess with the greasy mechanics of the human condition. That conversation with my brother left me with a sense of inadequacy, an intellectual popinjay.

I had to remind myself, that if it weren’t for the fool, I’d never be able to make it through King Lear. The final absurdity of the play is survivable because of the fool’s lunatic language. I began to see a link between the dada absurdity of Dali and the dark, nihilistic absurdity of Camus. For Camus it was all about endlessly and repeatedly pushing a boulder to the top of a hill only to see it come rolling down again, the whole cycle repeating itself ad nauseum. Just like real life: get up, get dressed, go to work. Get up, get dressed, go to work. Ad nauseum.

Meaning doesn’t come in a cereal box. You have to build it yourself. Dream it. Conceive it. Construct it. Give it a trial run. Superimpose its diaphanous beauty over the ugliness of our industrial world. Look for significance between the cracks, between the rules, over there in the margins, the ditch at the side of the road, where the rabbit disappeared down a deep hole.

The first thing I discovered about Camus is that the writing was a lot more beautiful than I’d remembered, probing, unflinching, intellectually honest. And also quite elegant.

The Myth of Sisyphus begins with a core statement: “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy… I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”

The phrase “the meaning of life” generally triggers a great deal of laughter in today’s world. It’s considered to be hilariously sophomoric, a futile endeavor, not worth the time, what really matters to most people is making money. Money has meaning. Everything hinges on that. Bank accounts. Credit cards. Real estate. Investments. Asset management. Compound interest. Life is peripheral. Life without money means you set up a tent on the sidewalk. You’re kicked to the curb. Literally. Everyone loves that word: literally. Words without metaphor or allegory. Words in their most basic sense. No fooling around. No verbal flourishes. Leave that to the poets and weirdos. What people mostly value now is either brute survival, or what kind of yacht to buy.

Camus doesn’t promote suicide. He argues against it on the principle that suicide is a rejection of freedom. Does the absurd dictate death? No. Of course not. “For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.” Hamlet – that tortured soul who delivers one of the most beautiful speeches of all time on the subject of suicide, “to be or not to be” – emphasizes this point in the simplest of terms: “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I would argue with Hamlet on this point, and ask him if this formula applied to the murder of his father. I don’t know what his answer would be, but I’m sure it’d be terrific.

Life can, occasionally, feel pretty good, even to the most impoverished. There’s that, though it is somewhat beside the point. Because mostly life is painful. The acquisition of food and shelter require daily vigilance and struggle. People get sick. Loved ones die. For a few, there are buffers. It helps considerably to be rich. Food and shelter are never a problem. Healthcare isn’t a problem. The rich are mostly assholes, for reasons that escape me, but the deadening routine of a job isn’t a contributing factor. There was a time in my life when money became easily available, and the usual anxieties were greatly diminished. I was euphoric and kind and nice to people. Even in heavy traffic. So I don’t get it. Why are rich people such assholes? You’d think they’d be as compassionate and jolly as the fat-bellied Buddhas they like to put in their gardens.

That’s a question for another occasion. Being poor doesn’t exclude the possibility of feeling meaningful and fulfilled. Thoreau found serenity and richness in a small cabin in the woods. Buddhists are constantly reminding us of the miseries of attachment. Everyone, rich or poor, will have an encounter with the absurdity of our existence. The poor can be assholes, too. “Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them…this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.” Giving things a name is a means to achieving some measure of agency in this world. The language we choose to describe and expand our experience is a powerful stimulant and unifying force. “Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.”

“Things are established by a unity, and ideas and feelings are made into concrete reality through the power of a unifying self,” writes Nishida Kitarō in An Inquiry Into The Good. “The unifying power called the self is an expression of the unifying power of reality; it is an eternal unchanging power. Our self is therefore felt to be always creative, free, and infinitely active.”