Aleksey Igudesman: Fasten Seatbelts, with Rusanda Panfili
Sarah Bakewell’s first book was How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2010), which is delightful and insightful. But not frightful.
If you weren’t a young adult in the late 1950s and early ’60s, you may find it hard to understand the hold that the French existentialists –Sartre and Camus in particular– had over our thoughts. Existentialism offered a more tenable option to the traditional pieties that had been pretty much obliterated by the horrors of two godawful wars and the events happening around them.
It was a tough creed because it put all the responsibility for action on the individual. There was no concerned or caring deity in sight, no one to lean on or blame for failure but yourself.
I leaned more toward the literary than to the philosophical essay side of existentialism and absurdism. For me, it wasn’t Sartre’s Being and Nothingness so much as Sartre’s novel, Nausea, and his plays, No Exit, Dirty Hands, and The Flies, Camus’s essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and The Rebel, The Stranger and The Plague.
Add a helping of Nietzsche and that was me.
Camus’s The Plague hit me especially. The protagonist willingly sacrifices his life to help fight a plague that is decimating people he neither knows nor cares for. In an act of sheer will, he creates and sustains his own moral universe. Camus was perfect for me because he wrote less like a philosopher and more like a litterateur.
Pinter’s plays, too, seemed to inhabit the same world but with no prospect of redemption. And Holocaust survivors tried to recover meaning and worth from what they had suffered: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (original title: From Death-Camp to Existentialism) (1959), for example. How do you explain losses like those? In the Bible, only in the Book of Job is the question even raised.
Sartre’s Nausea. De Beauvoir in chunks but not whole books. Pascal. A good-sized chunk of Nietzsche but nothing from Kierkegaard. I read Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in college: now I read his Life of San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, and Ortega y Gasset. Buber: I and Thou. No Berdyaev yet, but soon, in grad school in New York, I would tackle him too. No Marcel or Jaspers. Definitely no Heidegger. No Tillich or Merleau-Ponty. I did read Colin Wilson’s controversial study, The Outsider: It wasn’t very good if I remember right. Kafka redux. Celine. Kesey. Godot. Endgame. Krapp’s Last Tape.
Playing Nagg, in Beckett’s Endgame
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