There Is No Fate
from the Archives
Every now and then, I share an essay from the archives, an essay no longer available to free subscribers. For those who don’t know, all free essays on Homo Vitruvius — the Thursday creative flights — in addition to the four semi-accessible paid subscriber series, move behind the paywall into the archives after 3 months. That’s a long time for them to be freely available, I think. But I do believe that what I offer, creatively and intellectually, has value. I think it’s worth paying for if someone can afford it. So I offer periodic peaks into the vault and its deeper riches, frankly, in order to tempt you. (I’m a devil.)
This essay, just my fifth on Homo Vitruvius, way back in May, and a meaningful one to me for reasons you’ll see, resonates in many ways with my “Exit Interview” essay that I cross posted at ’s The Recovering Academic on Tuesday. It seemed just the right choice for a From the Archives offering this time.
There Is No Fate
If you believe what you read, all over, then what we call “the Humanities” are done for. The evidence of a decades-long shift in college students’ majors and their earnings-driven career ambitions all attest to it. If you identify as a humanist and you listen to those students’ indifferent or dismissive estimations of humanistic study, your heart will fall farther than the status of a college English department. STEM rules. Tech is the godhead. Even our most humanistically-oriented president of recent decades, Barack Obama, in his leadership role as national economic fuel rod, sold STEM and its well-paying jobs to the young masses like the latest fashionable pharmaceutical. When I was an undergraduate, English departments bestrode the campuses like giants. Philosophy departments offered estimable intellectual heft to a university’s reputation. There actually existed classics departments.
I taught through the change. Over the course of my career, I threw wrenches into the money-works as I could. What, I would often ask a class – after you earn the X-number of yearly dollars that marks the spot for you, after you own your Beemer or that status EV, and your iPhone 25 and achieve that dreamed-of, recumbent reward-vacation – what then? What will your life be about, and what faculties will reside in you – and how placed there – even to consider that question in any meaningful way? If I posed to you, I would say, the words of my old high school pal Alan Hahn, departed from us just a year ago – my last hippie – who liked to pierce the complacencies of the bourgeois by the satirical proclamation that “progress must progress” – would it provoke in you a genuine thought, or would you simply stare as if one or both of us were donkeys?
Even many English department members themselves will now comport themselves very much of-the-moment by professing puckish doubt about the value of what it is they themselves teach. The reading and study of literature make one a better person? Pshaw! I was still in graduate school when I first already heard the jab of some anonymous academic wag that in the final analysis Emma Bovary was just another trope. Novels aren’t real, for goodness’ sake. A novel is a text, not an experience. You can’t grow from it, only analyze it. No doubt that’s true for some readers, even professional ones – one reason many of them now practice the field of literature as if it were a social science rather than a humanistic study.
But for me, I am here now to say, all my life, books have been experiences, no less than human encounters, and greater than most.
What is a book as an experience? Something that alters you, like a memory, a love, a loss, a fulfillment or a failure, a yearning that forever leaves its mark. Vanity Fair was an experience for me, when I wished to be Dobbin. Professor Alan Brick of the Hunter College English department, in his pedagogical inventiveness, asked of the class, who wants to play the role of the novel itself – come to the front of the room, sit in this chair, and answer student questions about the novel, in the voice — as if the consciousness itself — of the novel?
I volunteered. I sat, responded to questions with a sure, thoughtful sense of the answers, and revealed to professor Brick, I know, with some concern, how deeply I had received the novel’s insights into worldly vanity, how vast I perceived the fair of its folly to be.
Jude the Obscure was an experience to me more than once, when I felt myself Jude; One Hundred Years of Solitude, while I shivered with recognition at the history of the Buendia family, in the very act of reading it, being windswept from the earth; The Sound and the Fury, riding, with the doomed Quentin, the Leviathan back of Faulkner's sententious gloom: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire....”
But I have experienced no author and no book as I did Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus.
There is little trace today of how existentialism once bestrode even the popular intellectual scene. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, it was the dark, continental challenge to the hopefulness of the American century. Like any philosophy entering the popular conversation, it was misunderstood, simplified, bastardized, derided. Its two most famous figures, Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus, were little distinguished from each other. Life, those existentialists said, was meaningless, even absurd. It was Nausea, a random murder, not to be observed crying at your mother's funeral.
I first read Sisyphus as a young undergraduate at the City College of New York, in a summer session class called Philosophy and Literature, taught by Willard Hutcheon of the CCNY philosophy department. I sat alone beside a window in the morning quiet of the North Campus cafeteria and read about Absurd Reasoning, Absurd Creation, the Absurd Man, the smoke of my cigarettes curling through a shaft of sunlight slashing diagonally the space above me.
(Spy the unformed, unsuspecting undergraduate, book in hand, sitting in the grass under a tree, on a Riverside Park bench gazing at the river. Note the invisible happening there.)
At a time in my life when it mattered to me, I read these words of Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
It isn't that my life ever hung in the balance in quite that way. But there was no small number of days, sunk into the single corner seat of a crowded Manhattan, Seventh Avenue subway car, the sweaty mass of fully adult riders looming over me like the city’s skyscrapers, and my stop approaching, when I felt no reason, ever, to rise.
I rose.
Amid the dark mental forces oppressing me then, I knew, intellectually, that the question of why I should live was a question to which I needed a response.
Sartre was the philosopher who wrote literature, Camus the literary man who philosophized. This was a choice that I would not finally make for over a decade, but my affinity was quickly established. For Sartre, existence was absurd in itself. “Hell is other people,” says Roquentin, made ill by the physical world, in Nausea.
In contrast, Camus wrote in Sisyphus, “I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”
The absurd for Camus was not an ontological condition, but rather a human paradox “born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten.”
Camus, who refused to abandon the human for the idea of the human, wrote The Rebel, which examined the tendency of mass revolutionary movements toward the utopian and totalitarian. He pursued human solidarity against injustice not from ideological system, he said in “The Artist in his Time,” but “through a sort of almost organic intolerance, which you feel or do not feel.”
But solidarity is nonetheless a bond among individuals, all of whom ultimately need to confront their essential condition alone: “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
Sisyphus, then, is the absurd hero. Camus, sensualist that he always was, helps us envision his laborer as almost one with his rock: “one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.”
And then Sisyphus watches the rock roll back down the hill.
How must we imagine his despair? How must we live it? What have we created in this world that does not hang in such a balance? How do we not, some midnight hour, hear the voice of Ozymandias?
Sisyphus pauses just before, once more, he begins his descent. Says Camus, “It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me.”
“I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible,” Camus writes. “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”
As I made my way through the psychic challenges and emotional crucible of my twenties, I would reach often for my copy of The Myth, much as a person of faith will reach for scripture. But I was a young man of no faith, who sought no faith: for Sisyphus, “The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”
But why do they perish, and not crush? To answer that question meant to know where to stand in my life: Because Sisyphus is fully conscious of his fate, and consciousness is freedom, and “A fate is not a punishment.”
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Camus imagines Sisyphus happy. Happy!
His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing... convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
By the time I made it to my thirties, I had, at last, engaged the world with success, and while life would still deliver, as it does for all, the pains and losses that are among its features, the deep, devouring sorrow that had seemed to seep into me at birth had passed. Along the way, The Myth of Sisyphus – as philosophy and literature were always meant to do – gave me a way to live.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Thank you for sharing this today. I needed to read it. It’s easy to get caught up in the hysteria about the death of the humanities, especially when you work at a predominantly STEM institution (like I do) where being an undergraduate English major is considered irresponsible (at least in my students’ experiences). But, this beautifully written essay affirms what I know from my personal experience, and what I try to express to my students: namely, literature’s power to help us better understand ourselves and our lives, to hopefully navigate the dark times with a bit more grace and clarity. Or something like that. Thanks again.