Beyond Absurdity
Alertness in the ennui
To awaken or not awaken, that is the question. Some of us want to be awake; it’s just we want to awaken without the hardship and discomfort of awakening. We want to awaken in a beautiful place and have company that feels good. Most of us are looking for a relationship with a person who makes us feel good—as if that’s the purpose of friendship and romance with anyone, to have that person make me feel good? When you put it like that, it sounds crazy, right? To have an expectation of someone else to make me feel whole? And when that person inevitably fails to meet my expectations, when that person inevitably disappoints me in some way, well, what then? Do I move away? Do I find some enclave somewhere, a monastery perhaps, or a seaside resort, and clam up in safety and absolutism? “The world has failed me again,” I say to myself as I attend another spiritual gathering where the speaker is filling my head with lots of feel-good notions that restore my self-esteem.
The simple things really drive it home, don’t they? The neighbors down the hall who travel constantly because they don’t want to experience the ennui of retirement. The best friend who hops from relationship to relationship because no one is filling her, or him up, or them up. The anesthesia school student who anesthetizes her daily life with takeout food and cocktails, all of which she works off each morning at the gym. She rushes through everything, always getting somewhere but never being.
We’re all trying in our various ways to make life easier. It’s the work of life we work so hard to avoid. The Baby Boomers understood it like this: work now, play later. Generation X decided to try to skip over the “work” part entirely. It didn’t work out so well, so they raised their kids to not work at all, doing all the work for them so that the future could have what the present lacked—and the result is that you have emerging adults today who don’t even know how to do their own laundry. As for cooking, oh, let’s just order a pizza. Everyone does DoorDash, right?
Was it Albert Camus who said we humans are the only creatures who refuse to be what we are?
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.—Albert Camus, The Rebel
How about this one?
To hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.—Albert Camus1
We think of absurdity as something that is ridiculous, preposterous, ludicrous, even farcical. We don’t want our lives to be absurd. We want our lives to have meaning. How can we have meaning, though, in a sea of ease? Meaning does not come from binge-watching shows and eating pizza.
Does it come from doing something? Traveling to all fifty states before the age of fifty? Seeing the Eiffel Tower before you die? Having “genuine” pasta and wine under the Tuscan sun? Climbing the highest mountain?
What if it comes from nothing in particular at all? What if it comes in this moment? Just sitting here, listening? What if meaning comes through alertness even in the ennui? Alertness, awakening, in the ennui…. I wonder if that is the real absurdity we are so longing to escape—the absurdity of the moment.
“….man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.”—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
What is it about the Now that is so frightening for us? Traumatized by the past and frightened of the future, we find ourselves discontent in the present moment. The past is depressing, the present is boring, and the future is terrifying. Thus we find ourselves in a situation, in a life, that is—well, Camus said it—absurd.
Absurdity, he seems to say in The Myth of Sisyphus, is nothing but what is born of comparison.
“There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them, the absurdity springs from a comparison.”2
Bare facts and certain realities collide, and thus absurdity is born. A marriage by itself is not absurd. The contract of marriage between Henry VIII and a goddess he saw in a portrait who turned out to be ugly Anne of Cleves? That’s absurd, but only because we understand what a marriage can be. In reality as opposed to potential, or in the encounter between them, we find the absurd. Camus uses an example of a fight—between swordsmen and machine-gunmen. That's absurd because of the disproportion between intention and reality. “‘It’s absurd’ means ‘It’s impossible’”3 that the sword is a match for the machine gun.
Absurdity is not human. Humans are not absurd. Nor is the world, continues Camus, absurd in and of itself. But putting humans in the world, together, you end up with absurdity. We can neither live with nor without each other. The porcupine pricks and stings the other porcupine, but at the same time, they need each other to stay warm!4 Like Sisyphus, bound in an absurd cycle of life and death, we long for something meaningful, but, well, we're fighting with sword in a machine-gun world. We feed ourselves daydreams and doses of hope, or, to put it bluntly, we die. "Living," says Camus, requires...nay, it forces the choice "to get away or to stay."5 To keep pushing the rock up the hill or let it roll over you? It is absurd because the result, either way, will be the same. Whether a life is long or short, the end of it is the same. It doesn't make a difference whether you spent one day at the beach or ten days doing chores. Either way, your thoughts messed it all up. Ennui reared its boring head. You longed to do, to see, to feel something more interesting.
Vacations are wonderful for breaking the ennui. In a new place, you find yourself more alert. You have to be extremely present in new surroundings. You pay more attention to the unfamiliar, both from practicality and from excitement about what is exotic and, therefore, fascinating. It even helps you to appreciate the mundane. When you’re home again, you feel relief and comfort. Ennui comes back though. Again and again. The present becomes the past and the future always lies ahead, uncertain, scary, anticipated with dread or with hope.
To get away or to stay! It’s the old maxim, wherever you go, there you are—warts and all. Thoughts, ennui, daydreams, nightmares. Regret and shame (the past) and anxiety (the future). You take it with you, whether you are struggling uphill or cascading downhill, whether you live in a gated community or a penitentiary—irony intended. You can’t find peace. It’s not hiding somewhere, waiting to be found. It’s not going to jump out all of a sudden and say, “Hey, what took you so long?” You’re either at peace, or you’re not. “I can’t be ok until…” Until what? Until, perhaps, I wrap up this article. Fair enough. All I know is that we’re always setting conditions on things, when the conditions are endlessly shifting. Are you waiting for someone’s love to fill you up? What if you’re waiting to be filled up by a person who is…waiting for you to fill them up? It’s too much pressure, methinks. I’m not here to fill anyone up. I’m not here to be filled up. I’m here to awaken. Now. And now again.
I’m not sure where he wrote this. The quote is mentioned on Goodreads, and much to my frustration, there’s no proper citation, like a title, let alone a page number.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, New York: Vintage, 2018, p.30.
ibid., p.29
Schopenhauer’s Porcupines, otherwise known as Hedgehog’s Dilemma:
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays. UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
Wikipedia contributors. "Hedgehog's dilemma." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 30 Jun. 2022. Web. 25 Sep. 2022.
see note 2