Review Of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

Now here is a story about a really pathetic character, Antoine Roquentin, absolutely paralyzed and nauseated by his intellectual power and gravitas. My diagnosis: he played too much, then thought too much, then was too tired to take courageous steps in the best direction he knew. It was the epitome of the tension between thought and action illuminated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous line, “Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.” I think it’s interesting that in Antoine’s attempt to squeeze out of the narrow confines of a simplistic worldview, he finds himself feeling suffocated and even violated by the close proximity of all existence, and even his own existence. The interconnectedness of all things, like “dough that gets longer and longer…everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people go the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions,” became to him an inescapable realization of his coextension with the universe by interpenetration with all adjacent objects, and therefore his own infinity. He wanted nothing more than to be a discrete, understandable, limited object that keeps fresh and accessible the meaning that his life may have had in the past, and that other people were still enjoying all around him. He is lost, has become immured in the entanglements and knots of his serpentine logic that is coiling in and constricting the life out of him. Reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s great exhortation against too much of an emphasis on reason, “The madman is not the person who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

It’s actually sad, and a bit unnerving, to witness Antoine’s decline into delirium, and I won’t say I can’t relate to some of the symptoms. It’s a genius thang. This book begins with Antoine journaling his thoughts to try and lend resiliency and consistency to a growing abstraction in his ideas and sensations. He wants to hold on to his leaking life, crystallize his moments and finalize their meaning. He is very uncomfortable with his growing realization that the world isn’t just itself, but partly his own fluid invention. While listening to music, he compares his slippery attempts of holding onto, and defining, the moment as akin to trying to catch jazz notes in his hand, “I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one, it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it.” This, then, mirrors his resignation not to stymie the flow of his seconds and minutes, or wish everything into a petrified past with no organic, infinitely extending present, "I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable, and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated.” But he, just having turned 30, is morbidly transfixed by the intractable, ‘unsluicable’, nature of the flow of life and time, to the point of being unable to get his bearings and…do something about it! He’s basically experiencing the cliché of a mid-life crisis and responding with rag-doll physics. He loathes his life, and loathes other people’s lives, and starts blaming life itself for his failures. His exciting travels are over; his love-interest is no longer in love with him; his only friend is a clingy, insecure, child-molester; he hates his job (writing history); he hates philosophies that are contrary to his own; he hates stupid, frivolous people; and apparently he can’t play jazz. But mostly, as I see it, he’s just lonely. There is one chance in the story where he saw a spark of hope to rekindle an old romance, and he actually became excited about it, but he loses the girl again, and falls back on his bitter-sweet companion, nausea.

To himself, he seems to want to frame his misery as the ultimate penalty for knowing secrets about life, society, and self that all the other poor schmucks can’t see, “They only see the thin film…I see beneath it! The veneer melts, the shining velvety scales…explode everywhere at my look, they split and gape.” But the real problem here is that Mr. Roquentin sees no purpose for his insight, except to lament that he is alone in his supreme intelligence looking down on the silly dummies all around him. But, those silly dummies are happy, sooo…. ? He is “alone and free”, in “exile” from others who do not think as he does, “…they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.” Not unlike the ugly bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Antoine’s feeling of alienation and rejection might just be a more significant factor in his self-loathing than merely an albatross of his genius. Which came first, societal rejection or self-loathing? Hard to tell.

This story, however disgusting an impression the character makes upon the reader, is not a meaningless story. It is about a void that is left in the place of the failure of logic and modern ideals to string personal meaning together out of impersonal data, which data, this story clearly illustrates, is not so easily culled and defined from the boiling porridge of reality that is essentially irreducible and ‘absurd’ apart from our distorted and deeply human categories. It is meant as a warning against modernist idealism, and as a call to action to think about what our response will be to this postmodern quagmire of antiquated values, traditions, and explanations of the meaning of life. Sartre, I don’t believe, was simply wallowing like his protagonist in the sulfuric atmosphere of self-pity and melancholy despair. I don’t believe this is what Sartre believed and felt in his finest hours, though he may have (and I would assume probably had) experienced these thoughts and feelings to some degree to have been able to so brilliantly capture that life-sick mindset. Sartre was sounding the alarm by painting a clear picture of the orphans of modernism, leaving nothing to the imagination as to the type of sticky mess of confusion and despondency that one’s existence becomes when one tries to live in the past, instead of moving bravely into the future with a better understanding who one is, and what one’s supposed to be doing in the universe. Does Sartre offer any answers here? No. But he poses a pretty damn good question that might inspire people to start the search. He makes attempts in other books to answer the question (try Existentialism Is a Humanism), but that’s not the point here. He’s nauseating us to prevent us from turning into the monster he wrote about.

It also is a warning to all erudites who think knowledge can ever bring happiness. Knowing is not living, and action must be taken so that love and happiness, which according to some psychologists “cannot be pursued, but must ensue”, will be a constant in a person’s life. And it is, again, so important to note that the overwhelming sense of one’s bloated and overly-magnified self in the center of an absurd universe will only grow more absorbing and involuted as a person withdraws from society and begins to brood upon their inadequacies. In other words, I wonder if a little bit of medicine and healthy friendships could have fixed a large part of Antoine’s problems. The other part, to be sure, may have been ideological malaise (which I assume is the primary motive for Sartre to write this story) but it’s hard for me to view that as the whole problem. I believe existential angst cannot be blamed squarely on one’s ideas, but this new brand of melancholia may be rather a hybrid of inefficacies in philosophy, relationships, biology, environment…maybe more. Who knows, it could just be a bad thyroid. Or an ‘underdone turnip’. I don’t know. What do you think I am? An ‘existential-angst-factor-calculator’ or something? Geeeesh.

Parallel first-person narratives of people who over-thought their life to the point of existential paralysis are Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” and Camus “The Stranger.” Similar affliction, similar attitudes.  To all the panty-wastes of these novels I say (with the authors’ concurrence I’m sure), “Well, my boy, it seems you have thought yourself into a really fine pickle. And don’t you love it, you wretch, you.” But really, I’m not sure the problem has been offered an absolutely satisfying solution, even in my time; so I hope to do everything I can not to end up comparably prostrate before my own sense of meaninglessness in the end. Sartre, your warning is duly noted, my friend. Duly noted.

Review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

James Agee was a writer and poet par excellence, but to a devastating degree. This guy bleeds his subjects in a slow, tortuous death; and the reader doesn’t fair much better. His work has been critiqued by some as “repetitious and crazy”, and even his collaborating photographer described him in the book’s foreword as diffident, imaginative, having an inward “paralyzing, self-lacerating anger” and an  “unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled” rebellion against institutionalism and upper class society in general. He hurts, and he inflicts us with his shame, guilt, and confusion regarding which details of his observation are important and which aren’t. He continually feels that he has betrayed his subjects, himself, and the world by attempting to categorize in his mind objective reality and—more importantly to him—other people, as his biased mind sorts it all out according to good-and-bad, revolting-and-appealing. Agee’s self-deprecation surfaces so intensely at times that he goes so far as to write that he feels he has sacrificed these our country-cousins as specimens to endure, however unconsciously, “the murdering of museum staring” at the hands of complacent readers who are moved only to curiosity and not to empathy.

The title is taken from the Jewish Scripture of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 44: 1 – 15, which is a hymn in honor of heroic ancestors. It is Agee’s nod to the hard-to-kill branches of one’s lineage who, although they may have lived in squalor, ignorance, and suffering, have still brought their progeny to the ‘other side’ and have sired a future race because of their hardy endurance of the worst life has to offer. This warrior race of forbears who have survived the heat of many suns may not have understood what they accomplished because their minds were sweated out in labor, but they accomplished it nonetheless, and our existence is due to their indefatigable flesh and spirit.

The book is steep and ‘gloppy’ from the beginning, with interminable stretches of poetic orgasms, some of it great and incomparable to be sure; and with rambling, quasi-philosophical justifications for the author’s melancholic empathy for the poor and ignorant, and oppressive guilt over his wealth and intelligence. It just barely managed to stay interesting and comprehensible enough for me to keep reading, and I love rank poetry. It was a spiraling mess at times, full of run-on sentences and pendant thoughts that end abruptly. Was it profound, or madness? Probably a little of both. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how in the world this was widely read at any time. Who (besides me of course) would spend their time on it? It’s a struggle with the author to understand him or sympathize with him at points. And then, there are times when he tries to give you just the facts: simple descriptions stripped bare of embellishment or interpretation. Odd. Anyone reading are not the ‘just-the-facts-ma’am’ kind of people, so it’s actually a turn-off when it comes mid-way through the book.

And my, how Agee travails to share his agony over the suffering of his brothers and sisters on this planet. He aches to relieve them of their crushing responsibilities, to honor them for their lives, and to awaken them from their sleep-walking existence. He wants us all to live better together, to share our awakenings and triumphs and joys; and he wants the wealthy to perceive the beauty in their impoverished brethren, which can only be in “proportion as [the rich] recognize the ugliness and disgrace implicit in their privilege of [such a] perception.” How loudly and lugubriously he moans over all the sad and doubled-over souls in the world whom he views as “tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.” His highest salute to them was comparing them to a “scab” that grows on the wound of the earth, as if it was oozing these sore lives, “expressing themselves upon the grieved membrane of the earth in the symmetry of a disease.” It is very obvious he feels the pang of torment of what others are feeling as they eke out their pathetic existence with “…the burden of being upon them.”And he’s good to insist we feel it too.

But despite even my own feelings of sorrow for Agee’s subjects, I refuse to surrender to such a view of humanity. How could I pity someone so, without likewise, at some point, demanding pity for myself? I would rather a person admire the strength of my character in suffering, and see something redeemable and really communicable in the sweetness of my resolve, something so brave and beautiful that it would evoke in my onlookers a desire to come join me and be loved by me, rather than merely weep for my wretchedness. I simply don’t believe anyone is so pathetic, or weak, or poor, or futile as Agee would have us accept. Every person has the light of a god radiating from his hurting eyes, walking erect atop the supine earth, defiant against gravity’s urging to mix his atoms with the senseless soil. Man has awoken from his mineral coma, breathes against the pressuring atmosphere, works the begrudging ground to yield life to him, multiplies himself into a host to weather the elements, and dies with a curse on his lips against death, with a promise to return, declaring with every thought a present victory over inertia. And I’m sure God smiles, and does not pity his sons and daughters for their plight, however meager their situation is. The more destitute, the more noble a man’s or woman’s resistance to the cold and hunger. Agee bemoans the assaults of the universe? The way I see it, it is man instead who assaults the universe by virtue of his very birth, and not the weight of a thousand solar systems has succeeded in preventing or smothering him. He’s born a king, seizing the crown of higher order, even if for a few moments, from the usurping blind cosmos that governed while he was asleep. And we pity this wakened being for his wakefulness? We pity that he has arisen only to find that he has the ‘burden’ to set his kingdom in order? I say: the greater the fight, the greater my adoration for a life that towers over its environment in mind, spirit, ingenuity, endurance, and sheer power of will if only to scratch his name on the bathroom stalls of the cosmos. No, I do not pity my suffering brothers and sisters. I pity those folks who do not love, respect, and honor them for the god-like striving against the spin of the earth’s mindless mass, as they stand as lords over the rest of mute creation. I pity those who whimper over what they should worship. There. I feel better. What? You’re still here?

I don’t know if it’s a sad thing or not that this book will probably be lost to antiquity very soon. It seems that it has played its role in history, and I hope it woke people up to the suffering and ignorance of their fellow man, even if Agee’s sobbing was a bit theatrical. I will certainly walk away with a few nice nuggets of excellent writing that I managed to unearth in this long and laborious text. Enjoy a few of them:

“Each [person] is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time: Each is composed of substances identical with the substance of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars…tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.” (56)

“…but [theirs were] the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings.” (100)

“A falsehood is entirely true to the derangements which produced it.” (230)

Review of The Valley Of The Moon by Jack London

 

Jack London never fired blanks. There isn’t a book of his that I’ve read where he isn’t trying to mortally wound a lazy convention, a notion taken for granted, or what often passes for common sense. London’s exhortation is always, in my words, “Think! Act! Live to the fullest!” He believes in the power of the will and body, and despises those who fear their own breath fogging the mirror. One of my favorite lines from his works, “I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.” Pretty much sums him up.

That being said, Valley Of the Moon definitely was London-esque, but it wasn’t my favorite for a few reasons. There weren’t as many good one-liners. He took too long telling the story. The plot became too swollen with needless details about how his characters were outsmarting everybody else. Of course, to be fair, it was written as a kind of manual for people in his time to know how to escape their situation.  But I’m not them. They can write their own reviews and give him 5 stars if they want to. Oh wait, they’re dead.

So, the protagonists in this story were Californian urbanites, mired in hand-to-mouth living, and finally having their financial Achilles-heel snipped by a union strike that embroils them in riots, incarceration, and an widening distance from each other in their marriage. The beginning of the book is heavily steeped in mawkish romance between the characters: “I love you more! No, I love you more!” It starts feeling like the story is about to end 100 pages in. Everything is so perfect. Sickeningly so. Come on, London! Send a plague or something! If I’m going to read 400 more pages of this, I need a plague or some severed limbs…something!

So, half-way through the book it gets really interesting. Everything’s calculated to dump old-timey religion, antiquated values, and dumb sense halfway through the book. It’s a Jack London signature move: skinning the weak and boring, and re-fleshing them with something more, well, readable. The heroine, Saxon, finally hits rock-bottom (thank you Jack), starts wading out into the San Francisco bay to collect mussels to eat so she doesn’t starve. Her man is incarcerated for nearly crushing a man’s skull. Their neighbors are afraid, and people are getting stalked and killed over the scarcity of employment. Then suddenly, struck with a new vision of freedom, Saxon and Billy let go of their choked, wheezing pittance of the city-life, and go on the road with just their backpacks and a little bit of cash. Bravo!

To be sure, initially there appears to be some white-supremacy overtones in the story, but this actually turns into high praise for Hispanics and Asians who are smart, hard workers and have progressed further than whites because of their ingenuity and courage…two qualities London extols above all others. So, was he really a supremacist, or merely calling for whites to catch up to their hardworking brothers-from-other-mothers? I’ll bet that London was probably most in love with his own self and his hard body, and tended to dwell on people and ancestry that resembled his narcissistic self. Even Saxon’s name referred to past Anglo honor and grit up to the early days of pioneering. But I have to hand it to this heroine; she was a boss! A master of herself and others. She drew on her inner reserves, and “she rebelled…fluttered and beat her soul against the hard face of things as did the linnet against the bars of wire…She did not belong in the trap.  She would fight her way out of the trap… It was the stupid that remained and bowed their heads to fate.” She was independent and emanated love and concern for others, but she had a commanding aspect to her that enabled her to take the reins from her husband when he became abusive and began to neglect himself and his family. She singlehandedly created a life-strategy during a period of want, led her family out of Oakland with the marvelous slogan, “Oakland’s just a place to start from”, slept on the ground, went without food, humbled herself to demeaning roles to survive financially, and ultimately guided others around her to live out their strengths and make a better life together with her. Such a powerful example of a proud and noble woman.

Of course, the characters are WAY too lucky, and it doesn’t help matters that even the title of the book signifies a utopian ideal that is impossible to realize. But I’ll be darned if our heroes don’t actually find a spot in California that fits their dream and is actually called The Valley Of the Moon (Sonoma Valley)! Seriously? Whatever happened to the line from the book, “I don’t want to dream…I want things real!” I’ll tell you what happened. London went out playing with the butterflies again instead of writing us a book that helps the rest of us who haven’t yet found the greener grass, and may never. Geez, thanks Mr. “just-giving-you-the-hardcore-truth-so-you-can-learn-to-live-better-and-smarter-and-not-in-a-fairy-tale-land-that-will-ultimately-leave-you-bleeding-in-a-hole-somewhere”!! Yeah, thanks Jack…for a friggin’ lot of JACK SQUAT!!

But I still love him. Overall a good story, good points; just took too long.

How To Lose Post-Evangelical Friends And Un-Influence People

This post, “How to lose post-evangelical friends and un-influence people”, is a satirized response to the equally satirical blog post "Post-Evangelical Blogging For Dummies". I know this is out of the ordinary for this book-review blog, but I took an opportunity to review and otherwise poke fun at a blog someone shared with me recently from a fundamentalist position. It's supposed to be funny. Reading the referenced blog post "Post-Evangelical Blogging..." I hyperlinked above will help make sense of this whole thing.

“How to lose post-evangelical friends and un-influence people”

I have people come up to me all the time at conferences and speaking engagements—well I actually have to interrupt a conversation about the keynote speaker’s topic, but that’s beside the point—asking how such a sardonic and pedantic person like myself continues to blog about the obvious, while vilifying stereotypes that in the end are only straw men distracting me from the fact that I’m still living in my grandma’s theological basement.

I could offer hackneyed answers like “I thank God I’m not like other people”, or “a strict diet of fatted calf”, but then I realize I’m alone in a room again. And though God may hear my rant, he doesn’t laugh loud enough, and he’s honestly kind of cheap with compliments.

So here are my secrets on how to lose post-evangelical friends and un-influence people:

א) Totally disregard personal experience. News flash: your story is boring. The Truth has nothing to do with what you think about The Truth. “The Truth is out there”, said one brilliant person it would not behoove me to name, like the sun above the sky, unflinching and unchanging—immutable if you will—and this Truth is as old and impersonal as the stars. Even God can’t change Truth. Thankfully, people like me know The Truth, and it remains unpolluted by my personal bias, opinion, or my…story (how cute). People like me are, if you will, like safety deposit boxes for God’s message to mankind. Hey, don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

ב) Never leave home. God did not call us to adventure, or change, or risk, or anything of the sort. Stay where you are and no one gets hurt. God always send an ark. Those little questions that you find constantly nagging you, that make you think your moral compass has been magnetized and is off by 90 degrees—ignore it. Keep the faith, the old faith, the unchangeable faith of whichever protestant denomination you happened to be born in. Test the boundaries and you might step on a landmine and become a hipster, or the Dude, or Peter Griffin, or Anderson Cooper. Beware the sheep in wolves clothing. Wait. Strike that. Reverse it.

ג) Pain or crises don’t change a thing. Honest questioning is honest…’confusioning’. We’re human, after all, and God has placed in each of us an unerring conscience that always speaks the truth very clearly. No grey with God (ooh, I like that). And this truth never conflicts with the Bible. You have to steel your mind against any persuasion that comes knocking at the door as if it’s Christ himself. Shut your ears, cover your eyes, fatten your heart. We’re in for a long ride. Keep your arms and legs inside your creed at all times.

ד) Remember that you are right. You’ve always been right. How could you be wrong? The Bible is right. If you believe in the Bible, you’re right. How do you know the Bible is right? You just know it, that’s all. Nothing external to the Bible has the authority to confirm or deny the claims of the Bible. You just know in your heart. But how do you know your heart is right? We just covered this…because the Bible is right, and you believe it in your heart, therefore you’re right. What part of this do you find confusing? Your mind is playing tricks on you again.

This brings us to the phrase that is anathema to all right people: revelence. I mean, relevance (Spat!!). What is all this talk about relevance? What madman came up with it? What is it, some kind of post-evangelical conspiracy? Look, did Noah care if he was relevant when the ark shut out a whole world of screaming adults and children and little doggies so that his family could be safe? Did Moses care if he was relevant when he told the priests to kill his own people for worshipping an idol while he was having coffee with God? Or did John the Baptist care if he was relevant when he went out to the desert to wear camel’s hair and eat locusts and wild honey? Did Jesus care if he was relevant when he busted out a whip in the temple or told the rich, young ruler to take a hike?

The fate of the prophets, of which I am obviously a true form, was not to be ‘relevant’. It was to have a ‘forehead harder than flint” and “bitterness in the heat of my spirit”. The post-evangelicals—well, now I’m splitting hairs—let’s just say the world as a whole is as “briars, and thorns, and scorpions” to me, an earth swarming with rebellious people who are, starting in alphabetical order, “arrogant, boastful, disobedient to parents, haters of God, insolent, inventors of evil, slanderers without understanding, unloving, unmerciful, untrustworthy; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t add “Jesus loves you”, where ‘you’ is ‘them’; but he’s also just a liiiiiiiiiitle mad at you. Maybe a lot of mad.

Stereotypification is the tir pas cher du jour. I’ve decided I don’t have to take opportunists seriously, so the only thing between me and a good nap is bringing all post-evangelicals (I really love that word) under the rubric of ‘opportunist’. How do I do it so easily? Easy. I just do, and—BAM!—it’s done. Gay people, pro-choicers, feminists, feminist sympathizers, humanitarians, raw-writers, sin-shunners, intellectual wannabes…they all get thrown in the blender, and out comes a nice, cool, smoothie of invigorating “WRONG!!”

I hope this helps. Here’s a tract. Stop by my grandma’s church sometime. Nice altar there. You can get saved.

Review of Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte

I picked this book up because I thought it sounded fun. What happens to our trash? How is it ultimately disposed of? What are the plans for digging our way out of our filth in the future? I have a “Wall-E” complex when it comes to envisioning an apocalyptic ending to our time on this planet as a result of our poor waste management. “Don’t sh*t where you eat” is starting to sound like the words of some ancient prophet who has foreseen our wicked ways. “Be sure your sh*t will find you out.” And, no, not all of us will have to face the error of our ways in our lifetime, but someone will one day, and it may be sooner than we think. For centuries cities have been built on the refuse of yesteryear, but in no other time has the trash grown as exponentially per capita as it has grown in recent years. For a bird’s-eye view, check out the artwork of Chris Jordan at chrisjordan.com. Look, we have trash mountains 30 stories high. Old landfills that have been closed for years will be leaking 200 lbs a day of contaminating leachate into the ground and releasing noxious gases into the air for many, many years to come. Uh. That’s not cool.  

So, this book was written in 2005. Already a little out of date, but the history of trash is still there, and I’ve learned some of the basics of potential solutions that hopefully are more advanced by now. The author has some fun describing, even making a joke of, the idiosyncrasies of the personalities and folk-culture of waste management laborers. The book swells, almost disagreeably so, with the author’s persnickety, though often humorous, cataloguing of waste-workers’ mannerisms, dress, facial features, and daily routines. Mixed-in evenly was an equally punctilious explanation of how local, national, and global efforts at waste removal and recycling has been coming along. It was exhausting. Half-page litanies of chemicals and contaminants littered the book through, and the sludging stats kept backing-up until I almost called a proof-plumber to get the story flowing again.

 I truly liked it at first, and was learning a lot, but Royte is, pardon the pun, a party-pooper when it comes to writing.  Okay, that was too far. Royte is truly a creative writer, and I had fun reading for a while, but she tries to plunge too much material at one time through the ole brain-pipes. Sad, but true. The pages grew longer and longer with the telling of the story, and I ended up skimming the last third of the book. 

Review of Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

It’s settled in my mind: Chris Hitchens is no joke. From the moment I read one of Hitchens’ final (as in end-of-life ‘final’) essays on the internet, I was hooked. That particular essay, now only available in book format, was such a gut-punch to the euphemistic adage “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”. Though I found myself somewhat disheartened as he pistol-whipped this maxim which is dear to me, I had no shortage of respect for a man baring his struggles to the world, a small part of which world informs him that they relish his suffering. I am reminded of the way the theologian Harry Emerson Fosdick cautioned people not to dismiss as meaningless those brand of atheists which, in contrast to ‘pert disbelievers’, actually carefully weigh the cost of their belief system and ride it to its end. Said Fosdick, “To be sure, some denials of religion even a Christian must respect.” Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich took this call for respect a step further, “The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning…It is creative courage which appears in the creative expressions of despair.” I find this courage, even an unbowed élan, in Hitchens’ writings, especially in this his final opus.

I think Hitchens may have been one of the few men brave enough or resourceful enough to make us laugh at cancer—his cancer! Not that cancer is funny, at all, nor was Hitchens in his last days trying his hand at a Seinfeldian sense of irony: “so what is the deal with cancer?” But it was the way he poked familiar things—things like “a vulgar little tumor”—and helped us see them in a new light.“This alien can’t want anything; if it kills me it dies, but it seems very single-minded in its purpose.” He gave a few hard blows to blind, romantic optimism, and in chapter 6, probably the most powerful in the book, he charges at that kind of idealism that sanctifies suffering as a sort of purification rite that many believe secures health and happiness. He cannon-blasts this last hope of the ailing, possibly as a stroke of mercy for those taking lightly any potential encounters with pain. I have to admit, I am the type of person who hates being told ‘be careful’ (true story, ask my wife), but this little book drives home the point to be sure to count the cost of any action that would bring one closer to a weakness of mind and body which Hitchens chillingly warns may not be returned from so easily, or with all senses and abilities intact. Go too far and we are “left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.” And suddenly cancer’s not funny anymore. In one chapter he takes a shot at Randy Pausch, who lectured and penned The Last Lecture for his posterity while he was dying of pancreatic cancer, for being sensational and flippantly epigrammatic about something as mute and unfathomable as death—especially one’s own death. While I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with his mocking jabs at another dying man, I do believe there are many who are dying that may echo his general sentiment of “it’s not like that” in response to the glamorization and commercial profit of dying. Hitchens point here is that dying is much harder than some people make it look, and it’s normal to feel whipped.

And, sadly, the book ends so startlingly abrupt, like death itself. Fragments of his writings in the last ‘chapter’ of the book is reminiscent of the waning of the powers of mind, and sense and composure begin to be islanded between the death-rattle of rambling and unfinished thoughts. Much of the final chapter is even repetitive of previous chapters, and makes me wonder why it was even included; but I am ultimately glad it was included after all, because it made it easier to let go in some strange way. Hitchens was gone, and only the blinking, bobbing head was left clicking out its last sounds while one realized he is gone. I imagine that the death of brains has a way of helping us let go of the empty casing of what once was the beloved. Matter of fact, the death of intelligence is a bit repulsive in a way, as if to remind one that the brain is just a slimy, gelatinous blob of an organ built and utilized by something greater, and its demise is much more obscene than the wasting away of external flesh. Altogether my confidence in intelligence took a hit as I read Hitchens die.

Hitchens didn’t have a whole lot to give us on his deathbed. No real insight to life or death, unless it’s how not behave as some do around death. One of Hitchens’ favorite poets, and one that I have an appreciation for, is Philip Larken who said in his poem Aubade, “Being brave lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Maybe that’s his message with this little literary experiment. Being with him, and not necessarily having any death-bed revelations or secrets imparted to us, may have been what we best gained from this experience. Maybe being with his audience was enough to make it worthwhile for the author, and maybe it’s what we were looking for too. I’m starting to think that the fine art developed by materialists is the art of distraction, or what often takes the form of living in the present. Buddhists happen to think it’s a great idea, and call anything other than living in the present (such as worrying about tomorrow) a distraction in and of itself. Jesus held it as a virtue to “remember the lilies”, to live in the present and not waste life worrying about the future.

I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that Hitchens was a pretty good guy. In the afterward written by his wife, I couldn’t help but wish I had known him personally. It helped that this book was published in a short, 100 page hardback with heavy, quality paper…it really felt oddly special and intimate even through the quality of the binding; like a sacred moment with a dying man. I may not be interested in facing death with the same outlook as Hitchens, but witnessing him face death gives me hope—pardon me Hitchens—that deeper reserves are available for each of us when the time comes to embark on a new journey. I like to think that something deeper in him was able to withstand the abyss of the threat of non-being and meaninglessness into which he stared. Perhaps Hitchens was more than he knew. And maybe he is more than we know.

Review of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra

This is one of my top 3 favorite books of all time. It’s a story, it’s a sermon, it’s poetry, it’s philosophy. It seems heavy reading at first, but it grows progressively easier once you get used to his language and ideas. Zarathustra’s style is Biblical, almost like one of the Old Testament prophets lamenting society’s turning away from the truth, and he preaches and raves like a prophet too. His message is a bit different, enjoining his listeners to turn away from a traditional notion of God and values written in stone; but his call to a pure heart and pure mind, and his appeal to return to an innate sense of right and wrong with an emphasis on caring for others and striving to live according to the highest ideal for humanity moves essentially in the same vein.

When I first picked up this book I knew next to nothing about Nietszche or this specific work except I heard it referred to by a person professor in a negative light. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to feel sorry for Nietzsche’s unfortunate beliefs. His works were cited as the voice of opposition. Somebody must’ve heard that Nietzsche was the Spirit of postmodernism, a veritable boogieman for theologians; but it didn’t dawn on me until years after grad school that most people who spoke about him had never actually read his stuff, only excerpts that their peers had already excoriated. Well, the real irony here is that somewhere along the line I was desperate for something that made sense beyond the conformist theology and terrified Christian apologetic that was supposed to keep us so warm and snug; and one night I heard a prof quoting him again and thought, “Maybe this guy we’re supposed to be afraid of might actually have some answers I’m looking for.” Years later I would find confirmation to these feelings in the words of Joseph Campbell, “Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” I had started reading Thus Spake Zarathustra at night after the night sort at UPS, and it was like huge gulps of fresh air smuggled between the iron bars of fundamentalism. And so began my journey with the abomination that is called Nietzsche.

Everybody knows about Nietzsche, very few know him. Ubermensch is fun to say, I guess because it makes you sound intelligent or something; but few are aware, or even care, about what Nietzsche’s Superman really is all about. It’s not easy being Nietzsche: Christians love to hate him, philosophers smirk to think they’ve outgrown him, political zealots throw him out as the hapless father of Nazism, but there’s so much misunderstanding. So many wiki-dabblers, so little reading of his actual work. I won’t deny that, not unlike other authors that I love to read, some misunderstandings may be Nietzsche’s own fault, but like his prophet Zarathustra, he has offended many with the truth he has gleaned, and has learned to hide himself “like one who hath swallowed gold—lest my soul should be ripped up.” Well, many have gutted him, and made a spectacle of selections from his works, but few have found the wealthy current of hard-won truth that flows out of his carcass like honey.

It might help to think of Nietzsche less like a novel parlor discussion than a prison-break, and his works are best understood when read in the dimly lit cell of fetid customs, on a starvation-diet of water-thin traditions, and stretched on a rack of heartless religious doctrines on which one’s joints are already popping loose preventing vital living. Nietzsche would spit in the face of his executioner, and give a final word of hope and courage to those of us who are next. He would dig you out to freedom, and once in the free air, help you escape the searchlights of Mother church and state, furious with its escaped worshipers.  He’d be a great guy to be around when people are wrong. However, because he’s a nihilist (not in the sense of believing in no values, but in the sense of believing we choose our own values) we may have to be satisfied with abandoning him as we begin a new life. He has no promise of a map to buried treasure once outside prison walls, but he has the confidence that we can figure the rest out on our own.

Nietzsche is, in general, a tonic against conformity. Zarathustra teaches that each individual ought to be able to eventually privatize their sense of self worth, “Greatness is achieved away from the marketplace.” But Zarathustra isn’t anti-community, rather he’s anti-celebrity, and he opposes any type of self-loathing that is evinced in the desire to be loved by the masses to make up for one’s lack of self-acceptance. He speaks up for the individual, and he is loud, even brash. Whereas Buddha’s comfort to his disciples disarmed and prevented them from engaging in any evangelistic conflict (“He who proclaims the truth, ye monks, fights with no man”), Zarathustra warns the truth-bearer of the avoirdupois of his calling: “Beware the doom of the incendiary.”  Of course, there are times, when one’s community freezes in the cold on the side of a mountain, that the progressive man often needs to pretend to freeze with them, lest they discover that he has found a warm grotto on the other side that shames their contented shivering. “How could they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes! –if I did not myself commiserate their pity, the pity of those enviers and injurers! – if I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently let myself be swathed in their pity!” One must often conceal his happiness so that others’ may not feel the shame and waste of their voluntary ease and accompanying suffering and boredom, and turn and attack him for waking their conscience and jealosy. Jesus cautioned against the same imprudent revelation of one’s internal treasure that might be trampled by pigs that have no value for riches beyond the troughs. Zarathustra’s desire to proclaim the truth while avoiding premature martyrdom becomes an art he celebrates in himself and others. “My silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence…the clear, the honest, the transparent [people]—these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so profound is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.”

Strength in the guise of weakness is one thing that often must be endured, but weakness masquerading as strength is anathema in the scheme of planning for the ‘superman’, or the next step in anthropo-historical progress. The ‘last man’ is the one who has ceased to strive to become a higher life form, or to give birth to a being that can advance beyond its parents’ limitations, but only evinces a soul-weariness. Life’s meaning for this ‘superfluous one’ is lost in waking, dressing, eating and sleeping. Living is sacrificed to mere existence. The last man is the tired end of a race, the end of a people’s history. And Lord knows we all know people that, if the fate of the human race were left in their hands, we would be done for. We’re not talking about genetic imperfection here, but a refusal to live up to one’s full physical, mental, and spiritual potential; and of course in Nietzsche’s thought, there are many religious people that are infected with the ‘last man’ disease, and bloated religious teachers are referred to as “despisers of the body”, those who see in all the present material world an evil that must be endured for the reward of an easy, sleepy afterlife. In contrast to these despisers of the body is the Ubermensches, the beyond-men and women, the despisers of conventional living.  And these despisers are ‘great adorers’ because they sacrifice what mankind is to achieve what mankind can become.

Nietzsche passion was truly religious in essence. He buffeted religion with religion, though I’m sure he would turn in his grave to hear someone suggest it. What has been dubbed the ‘prophetic imagination’ is most prominent in him, and he preaches as vehemently as any late revivalist against the error of prejudice and bigotry. His precepts are much more negative than positive in that they are a foghorn away from the shoals, not as much a beacon guiding ships to harbor. But being a negative voice in no wise implies that he is a pessimist. Pessimism ends in hopelessness, but Nietzsche’s hope in the meaning and purpose of life is clear. Contrary to what many pseudo-Nietzscheans bruit, Nietzsche, particularly in the persona of Zarathustra, believed life to be beautiful because it is full of potential and meaning—“We love life, not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.” In his paradigm, joy is deeper than woe, so deep in fact that it “thirsts for woe” to enrich joy all the more. He believed in some mystical permanence of human existence, and embraced what feels like an Eastern idea of recurrence and reincarnation. “Joys all want eternity”, and that’s what each individual can expect—an eternity to discover and rediscover the meaning of their existence and the union of beings in love.

So, as I have now developed a profound appreciation for some of his writings, does this mean I have become a blind fanatic of Nietzsche? Course not. He writes in Zarathustra, “Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeks, those who grave new values on new tables.” Zarathustra at one point leaves his followers and says he will come to them again as friends when they have learned to live without him, “Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should someday collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!...Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye have all denied me, will I return unto you.” And so it goes with my dedication to Nietzsche. Christopher Hitchens, in a posthumous publication of his final essays called Mortality, recollects that he once answered an interviewer’s question regarding his feelings on Nietzsche by saying he “agreed with some arguments put forward by the great man but didn’t owe any large insight to him, and found his contempt for democracy to be somewhat off-putting.” Apparently the writings of Nietzsche were much more pivotal in my life than they were in Hitchens’ life, but I would echo with him that there are things I like about Nietzsche, and things I don’t like about him. I choose to focus on what I appreciate from his works, but that does not vindicate him in all ways in my mind. Sad I have to state that, but it’s what people want to hear. I suppose they think there’s something in his ideas that will make you want to go crazy, hug horses, and arguably die of syphilis. We’ll see.