Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach: I’m not a forensics enthusiast so I hadn’t read Roach’s Stiff despite it being highly recommended to me by several people. However, my curiosity was piqued when I heard that Roach and her husband volunteered to be the first individuals recorded having sexual intercourse by MRI. One always admires a writer for going the full length to do her research—even if the publicity helps her too—and that impression was certainly not diminished as I read the book. Roach adopts a casual, first-person tone: this nonfiction book, while full of interesting trivia as well as valuable information about the physiology of sex, is really a narrative. It’s a story about her investigation into the challenges surrounding the scientific research into sex, as well as the characters of the researchers themselves; she draws compelling portraits of the people she meets. I admit that I’m not used to reading popular nonfiction, so perhaps Roach’s style has become the norm, but I found it very engaging. Similar in approach, although completely different in style from Victoria Finlay’s Color, which I enjoyed for its narrative form. Roach is of course much more chatty and prone to tangents—she uses footnotes enthusisatically—but she never fails to treat her subject seriously, despite her lighthearted tone. I wish I’d made a list of all the “fun facts” I learned while reading the book (am still strangely fascinated, for example, by the account of a woman who can reach orgasm without any physical stimulation but merely by breathing).

The Annotated Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (annot. Alfred Appel): I make a particular point of describing this book as The Annotated Lolita because reading an annotated text is different from reading the text in isolation. And I did make the choice (or was it a mistake?) to read the annotations as I read the story. I doubt that it would have been possible to do that if Nabokov weren’t so obviously a master of his craft; despite my constant mental interruptions, I never felt that I lost the flow of the story. On the other hand, my reading experience was spoiled because the annotations were meant for a reader who had already finished the book. I didn’t realize, for example, that it would have come as a surprise to most readers who Humbert Humbert actually killed; though in retrospect I can appreciate how Nabokov manipulated reader expectations throughout the story. Yet I didn’t directly experience that manipulation, and I wonder if the impact of the story was somehow lessened because of that. I also realized while reading the novel that many paragraphs in it sounded quite familiar—in high school, I had edited a classmate’s rough draft of a term paper on Lolita, and I’ve of course seen quotes and excerpts almost everywhere—and I had the decidedly odd feeling of déjà vu, as if rereading a book that I had not actually read before.

All that being said, the book was completely different than anything I expected. I suppose I was already prepared for the aesthetic pleasure of Nabokov’s prose style (though it’s clear that The Defense, the only other Nabokov novel I’ve read, was one of his earlier ones and didn’t show the same level of mastery that Lolita does). I was not so prepared though for the fact that it doesn’t read at all like a psychological novel; I’ve always assumed that it would somehow feel claustrophobic to read from Humbert Humbert’s “confessional” perspective, but in fact he keeps us at a distance with his wordplay and seemingly flippant tone. The lack of any titillating scenes also made me wonder why it’s so often condemned as a “dirty” book. True, its subject matter is probably as controversial as it gets, but the sexual content is minimal and almost never described explicitly. (I had an amusing conversation with my mother, where she tentatively asked me what Lolita was about—”Isn’t it about a stepfather…with his daughter?”—and why I was reading it. I had to laugh because she had recommended André Gide’s books to me—Gide, who celebrated homosexual pederasty—and I find the implicit sexual relations in The Counterfeiters much more likely to offend my mother’s morals than anything in Lolita.

In any case, I do suspect that reading the annotations made me a little emotionally detached from the novel; much of the pleasure was academic, in following the numerous allusions to Poe, the puns hidden in character names, the sheer control of language that Nabokov exhibits. I think the only moment that really gave me pause was when Humbert Humbert begs Lolita to return with him. Though I do think it isn’t meant to be an emotional novel; there’s too much self-mockery and hidden contempt for the reader in Humbert’s memoir that jerks you away from any attempts at pitying sympathy for the narrator.

What really impresses me over and over is the artifice—in all its nuances—of Nabokov’s writing. He makes no pretense at realism, even when he draws the most incisive portrait of motels in Midwest America. He presents his art as art, not as an imitation of life. Now there are writers who emphasize their writing to the point where they stop engaging the reader and merely indulge in the equivalent of artistic masturbation (I am harsh only because I recognize this failing in myself), but Nabokov makes his writing the centerpiece that communicates with the reader. It’s as if…he makes no attempt to hide the puppet strings, but instead of it being an ugly intrusion on the reader’s consciousness, those very strings are incorporated into the show. Rather like (to use a similarly theatrical example) having visible stagehands change sets during a play as part of the performance. It seems immensely difficult to me, and I am all the more blown away by how Nabokov does it faultlessly. I am watching a virtuoso perform.

Arabella, by Georgette Heyer: I never did get around to logging that Heyer reading spree in which I indulged last fall. I burned out after a while and decided to hold off on reading the last two Heyer novels I had obtained. I finally got around to reading them, and perhaps my dissatisfaction with Heyer’s male romantic interests (with the exception of Freddy from Cotillion, who may never be equaled) has mellowed because I didn’t dislike Mr. Beaumaris at all. I suppose it helped that although he was perilously close to being yet another rake (I dislike rakes immensely, and so many of Heyer’s versions happen to be misogynists at the same time), he managed to show some self-awareness. A cynic, but one with a sense of humor. Also, while his “prank” was irresponsible and could have seriously ruined Arabella’s life, he did his best to make up for it. I guess what also helped the dynamic was that Arabella remained self-possessed and calmly encouraged his meaningless flirtations for her own ends while mostly assuredly not falling in love with him. Actually, I think I mostly liked Arabella, especially with her social justice crusades.

Sylvester, by Georgette Heyer: Well, I didn’t like Sylvester at all, but he didn’t actively annoy me. It took me a while to start liking Phoebe; I still can’t understand how such an unconventional girl could be such a doormat to her stepmother. I mean, I do understand the fear of invoking displeasure or disapproval, but in my experience, those sorts of girls actively try to remain as conventional as possible. I mean, I’m not saying that those personality characteristics are mutually exclusive, but I do wish Heyer had put a little more effort into completing her characterization of Phoebe. She felt like two characters mashed into one. That being said, how delightful is it that Phoebe published a novel parodying the ton! That was what made me like her in the end.

The volume also included Beckett’s Act Without Words, which indeed has no dialogue. The whole pantomime seems rather like a post-existentialist satire of Camus’ assertion that the only philosophical question of any importance is the question of suicide. The lone actor, in confronting the futility of his actions, tries to commit suicide but even this option is denied him. Camus at least gives us the will to choose suicide if we so wished, but Beckett seems to be saying that we aren’t even permitted that escape. The actor ends up on the floor, paralyzed and unresponsive. What I would dub the modern nightmare.

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk: The book calls itself a history of chess, but it doesn’t simply relate the development of the board game alone but frames it in the context of why people have obsessed over this game for centuries. Chess as metaphor, chess as cultural phenomenon, chess as a mirror of sociopolitical and intellectual history (e.g. the rise of “courtly love” under Eleanor of Aquitaine, the French Enlightenment and subsequent revolutions), chess as rational system. The book describes myths and legends associated with chess (the caliph who did not evacuate his burning palace because he was engrossed in a game of chess), as well as famous games (the “Immortal Game” of the title describes a match between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in the nineteenth century) and grandmasters (the personal history of Bobby Fischer). It also talks about the evolution of game rules and strategy over time–I was fascinated by the four historical “stages” in chess style–and the appearance of chess in literature and computer science. All in all, an excellently written book. Shenk likes to dwell on the implications of chess as a game representing the power of free will (versus games of chance, like backgammon) and by extension, the triumph of civilization and rational thought, which he freely admits carries a personal meaning for him in the wake of 9/11. I’m not sure if the more memoirist parts of the book strengthen or weaken it (after all, he also talks about how the obsession with chess can be all-consuming and how chess geniuses lose their sanity), but I did like reading about his own attempts to improve his chess game.

Vita Brevis: A Letter to Saint Augustine, by Jostein Gaarder (trans. Anne Born): In the introduction, Gaarder purports to have found and translated a letter written to Augustine from the “concubine” whom he mentions in his Confessions. I actually took him at his word at first, but if you read the book, it becomes clear that the letter is a fictional vehicle in which Gaarder can criticize Augustine and his influence on Christian theology. Despite Gaarder’s conceit of including “footnotes” citing the original Latin phrases, it’s clear that Floria, the supposed letter writer, sounds like Gaarder (or at least like Gaarder’s usual English translator) and has surprisingly modern ideas that coincide nicely with Western liberal opinions largely held today. I’m no classics expert, but I doubt that a letter originally written in Latin would ever “translate” into the style that Floria adopts. I suppose I’m annoyed because if Gaarder was going to make the pretense of having found a letter to Augustine as some sort of metafictional device, he could have done a much better job of it. It would have been brilliant if he executed the writing well enough to really make the reader believe his framing story of buying the manuscript at a book fair in Argentina. (Choice of country a nod to Borges?) As it is, all it becomes is a tiresome rant on Augustine’s extreme Platonism. Floria basically says (over and over again, while quoting extensively from Confessions) that believing in a Creator God who loved his creation means not denying the physical world and the facts of our physical existence; in fact, it is as much a sin to hate the world as it is to love it too well. Chesterton made the same point in his biography of Aquinas much more eloquently and with much more subtlety. Also, like most poor arguments, the whole book started making me sympathize with Augustine. I mean, I think Augustine’s conception of religion as divorcing oneself completely from the material world as much as possible is a little ridiculous, but I also think that he was genuinely trying, in his own fashion, to devote himself completely to God. And honestly, do we really need to blame all the excesses and mistakes of the Church on Augustine? As Chesterton points out, there are historical reasons for why Augustine’s brand of Platonic Christianity had such great appeal. Then again, I suppose we don’t like to accept that theology can have relativity without being untrue. (Oh, the poststructuralist paradox.)

The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, by Martin Palmer: The subject matter of the book is quite fascinating since it traces the history of early Christianity in China centuries before any Jesuit missions. It describes a Christian tradition that developed separately in the Middle East, India and central Asia and is hence not continuous with the history of Catholic church (and subsequent Protestant denominations) in the West. It’s unfortunate though that the writing wasn’t very compelling and used phrases like “the Church of the East”, which implied an orientalist attitude that grated on my nerves. I think the book was also extremely disorganized: Palmer kept jumping from his personal account of discovering the ruins of an indigenous Christian monastery in Western China, to recounting the history of how Christianity entered China and merged with Taoist and Buddhist doctrines, to summarizing and translating the “Jesus Sutras” (Chinese texts that refer to Christian scripture and liturgy) without providing an overarching flow to his argument. I wish he had chosen a more academic tone and stripped the personal commentary from his book. I also wish he didn’t analyze the Sutras prior to providing the translated text; it seems to be dodgy academic practice to try to bias the mind of your reader with a particular interpretation of a text (given that he can’t exactly assume that his reader is already familiar with the texts in question). Mostly, what I found most irritating was that he built up my expectations with his claims that the Sutras were an important contribution to spiritual literature. Granted, I have no idea how the original Chinese reads, but the English translation sounded awkward and uninspiring to me. Also, I didn’t find the blending of Christian theology with Buddhist and Taoist (more Buddhist than Taoist, in my opinion, despite the title) philosophy to be all that radical. It’s easy to find common points among all religious doctrines; the question is at which point do you end up generalizing so much that you end up becoming nondenominational. If Palmer had seriously addressed whether or not this “adulteration” of Christian theology can still be called Christian, I would have liked the book a lot more. (Are you still Christian if you diminish the historical existence of Christ and turn him into an abstract Savior? Conversely, are you still Christian if you emphasize the humanity of Christ and overlook his divinity? I don’t know the answer. To be honest, I don’t think I’m capable of grasping the dual nature of Christ; instead I slip into the fallacy of believing in two different Christs, one human and one divine.)

I should add that of course, one could say that Catholicism (and the Protestant sects which it spawned) is the adulterated form–and I think to a certain extent, that is Palmer’s contention. The Christian message has become distorted and politicized in “the West”, and hence we ought to look to “the East” to revive Christian spirituality and return to a more original form. But I find that whole attitude aggravating: Buddhism and Taoism have been equally subject to distortion, and I would presume a “Taoist Christianity” would be no different. No matter where you go, religion has been a tool for power.

Mike at Wrykyn, by P.G. Wodehouse: The prequel to Mike and Psmith, although I don’t know if it can rightly be called a prequel since I believe the two books were originally published together as Mike. The book talks about Mike’s first year at Wrykyn as he makes his mark through his superlative cricket skills, while juggling relations with his brother, an overbearing head of house, his roommate (an upperclassman known for getting into trouble) and the Wrykyn cricket captain. Schoolboy pranks included, although not as many as I expected, since the book is in fact mostly about cricket. I wish I knew more about cricket but the book is still enjoyable without any knowledge of the sport.

Leave It to Psmith, by P.G. Wodehouse: Switched from reading about Jeeves and Wooster to reading about Psmith, who is absurdly and delightfully verbose. He is able to get away with anything by simply never losing his composure; in the stickiest situation, he always makes everyone else feel that he has the upper hand. That’s the charm of a thoroughly arrogant character, of course. I suppose the trick is that he never irritates the reader with his arrogance, although other characters certainly find it infuriating. I liked that Wodehouse also finally created a strong female character, who is assertive and independent, without including any criticisms that come off as subtly sexist. (Female characters that are as spunky as Eve in the Jeeves and Wooster books come off as irresponsibly mischievous or domineering or scheming to entrap Bertie in marriage. Along the same lines, the weepy poetic female character in this story turned out to be a thief, whereas in a Jeeves and Wooster book, she would simply have remained soppy all the way through.) I also hadn’t realized that Freddie Threepwood was such an idiot; I read a later Blandings short story where he becomes much more competent.

Further progress in Gödel, Escher, Bach has proven delightful. There was this dialogue called “Ant Fugue”, which compared anthills to brains in a rather charming way. The dialogue preceding this one was called “Prelude…”. Makes you wonder at the cleverness of the author in finding an analogy to address a subject that also provides a pun like “Prelude…Ant Fugue”. Oh, and in between there was this pun Lierre de Fourmi, a fictional anthill who discovered the converse, so to speak, of Fermat’s Last Theorem. That n^a + n^b = n^c has an infinite number of solutions when n=2, but no solutions when n>2. This is of course a Diophantine equation, and Lierre de Fourmi supposedly discovered his Well-Tested Conjecture when reading Arithmetica by Di of Antus, mirroring the way Fermat thought up his theorem while reading Arithmetica by Diophantus. Even more clever that one can create such a pun on Diophantus’ name to reflect all the other ant puns going around…Lierre de Fourmi by the way means “bridge of ants”, which reflects an actual behavior of ants that illustrates Hofstadter’s whole point about anthills. It was really amusing, to say the least.

[Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter]

By the way, there was another really clever dialogue in the GEB, which I read on Wednesday. It was titled, “A Little Harmonic Labyrinth,” which was a Bach composition that modulated continually until it ended on a key that was not the tonic. However, due to the constant modulation, the listener would have been deceived into believing that it was the tonic. Meanwhile, the dialogue itself was a story within a story within a story within a story, etc. and once the innermost story was finished, they would “pop” back up using a “Popping-Out Tonic” (see the pun, tonic?) and return the story before. But because there were so many embedded stories, only the careful reader would notice that the dialogue ended in a story within the largest story, that is, that it didn’t really return to the original starting point at all, just like Bach’s piece did not return to the original key. The next chapter then talked about recursion and how recursive definitions can create infinite loops and gave examples like Fibonacci numbers and other very cool ideas. I’d go into more detail if Hofstadter didn’t explain it all so well—if you’re curious, go read the GEB for yourself.

[Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter]

A few days ago, I succumbed to temptation and opened up Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. It is one of the most absolutely amazing books I have ever read. Very difficult to follow though without a pretty well-rounded education, which has made me appreciate my high school’s curriculum all the more. You need a basic grounding in fugues and counterpoint, in set theory and logic, and in visual arts (so far) to appreciate the first three chapters.

It’s really impossible for me to describe what the book is about and why it is so amazing without forcing you to read it yourselves, so let me just provide some brief paraphrases of moments in the book.

You are given the string MI and you want to obtain MU with these four rules:
1) if you have any string of the form Mx, where x is any string of characters, you can obtain the string Mxx
2) if you have I anywhere in a string, you can add U, i.e. if you have MI, you can get MIU
3) if you have III anywhere in a string, you can replace it with U, i.e. if you have MIII, you can get MU
4) if you have UU anywhere in a string, you can replace it with U, i.e. if you have MUU, you can get MU
Using any combination of these four rules, obtain MU from MI.

The game above represents a formal system, albeit a very simple one. You can see the parallels to mathematics: the strings are theorems, the laws are permissible methods of reasoning or logic, and the very first given string MI is your axiom. Hofstadter presents ever more complicated examples of these formal systems in order to explore the question of whether mathematics represents reality, what is consciousness, etc. Specifically, he is looking at “Strange Loops,” which is his non-technical term for certain types of recursive paradoxes that “loop” into infinity. He uses Escher’s art as a good example.

As a further demonstration of his ingeniousness, he uses dialogues between Achilles and Mr. Tortoise (the characters in Zeno’s motion paradox, which essentially states that when Achilles races with the tortoise, he can never win the race if he gives the tortoise a head start). (The paradox is wrong by the way, because an infinite geometric series with a ratio whose absolute value is less than 1 converges.) In the third dialogue, called “Contracrostipunctus,” Achilles and Mr. Tortoise’s conversation reflects Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem using an analogy of a phonograph player. They then continue on to Bach, who used all of the notes in his name in the last Contrapunctus in the Art of Fugue (of which, by the way, I have a recording, performed by Glenn Gould). Mr. T comments that this is similar to an acrostic, where the first letters of all the lines spell out some hidden message. At that point, I accidentally stared at the first letters of the four paragraphs I was reading and realized they spelled out “BACH.” I then started from the beginning again and realized that the first letters of all the paragraphs spelled out “HOFSTATDER’S CONTRACROSTIPUNCTUS ACROSTICALLY BACKWARDS SPELL ‘J.S. BACH.’ ” Isn’t that witty? Perhaps a bit too obvious for your tastes. But I thought it was pretty amazing.

And these kinds of message revealing hidden message types of tricks are scattered all throughout the dialogues. Each dialogue basically presents metaphorically the mathematical/musical/artistic ideas to be discussed in the following chapter, except the metaphors themselves are metaphoric and other such “Strange Loops” of self-referentiality, which in turn is another huge self-reference, neh? I know that sounds confusing, but this book is a work of genius, so I suggest you all read it.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

But when I realized this, that I’d be liberated if I knew that I had to die in the next few weeks, I suddenly understood what the heck Camus was talking about with his whole “Absurd Freedom” chapter. Now, I understood most of it before, but only in an intellectual sense. The absurd has a lot to do with facing the inevitability of your own death, an aspect that I usually ignored because it was a little bit confusing. But now it makes sense. By living with the absurd, by living with the knowledge that you will die and your life will not matter, you are liberated from the burden of living your life! You are freed from making plans for the future, freed from the desire to seek happiness, freed from the social expectations that tell you to move forward and onward and ahead with living. Instead, you are forced to remain in the present, anguished and uncertain, but freed nevertheless. Once you realize that you are not truly free, you are liberated from the burdens of exercising that freedom. Once you realize that you must die, you are liberated from the burdens of living life.

It’s awfully depressing and I don’t agree with Camus at all, but I finally realized what he was trying to say. So in a paradox worthy of Camus himself, I’m really happy about this depressing epiphany. Go figure.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

So if any of you were waiting breathlessly to see how Camus would affirm life when one lives in the condition of the absurd, expect to be disappointed. Basically, he says, we would not confront the absurd if we were unaware or unconscious. Awareness is what perpetuates the absurd, this paradox between our need for unity and the chaotic uncertainty of the world. So if we are to cling to what we know, which is that we do not know, then we must keep on living to preserve the absurd, “through a constant awareness.” Suicide is not a legitimate course of action, because it eliminates our awareness and renounces the absurd.

A bit of a cop-out isn’t it?

He’s now talking about how this state of living with the absurd is a state of freedom, because one recognizes that one is not free and then is liberated from the burdens of bearing responsibility for one’s free will. Urgh. More paradoxes. This is actually not that much of a headache, however, because it’s been said before by many others, and all you need is an appropriate analogy to figure it out. Interestingly, Camus refers to those analogies. I’m growing incoherent, yes, but I doubt anyone’s following this anyway. He is trying to explore whether living with the absurd is a feasible act, right now, which I think he should have dealt with before coming to his cop-out solution.

Actually, there’s a lot that Frazer left out. There is no such thing as a complete closed system or a finished research project. (If there were an end to research, why would we ever become academics?) But he did write a massive work of scholarship, which I think is still brilliant for its time. I’m sorry to confess that I never did finish the book, since I got distracted halfway through. One of these days, I need to pick it up again.

[The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by James Frazer]

My belief in “magic” is more of a belief in the “network” idea, that we indeed are connected to everything else and that a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. And science bears me out on this too. Frazer calls it the law of sympathy in magic, that anything which has been in contact with or bears a resemblance to another thing can be used to affect that other thing. He pompously calls it a primitive belief, but asserts that magic, at its root, is really a simpler version of science. Because magic doesn’t look for an outside source, like a god or a spirit, to accomplish amazing and miraculous acts. The magician analyzes his universe and concludes that it works in a logical, predictable fashion, according to a set of laws that govern nature. The same assumption, the same attitude, that drives science.

Anyway, Frazer thinks that the law of sympathy is utter idiocy, and he’s right of course, in a sense. Voodoo dolls won’t hurt the person they’re meant to simulate. Or at least I don’t think they do. But the belief that my actions have far-reaching consequences, that even my thoughts and my will can somehow subtly affect the universe is not so farfetched as people may first think. This is why SF writers are so insanely excited by quantum theory. Consciousness determines the event, turns uncertainty and probability into concrete event. Before the act of observation, it’s all a mishmash of states. Shoddy reasoning, of course, but I think the idea works on a certain level. We as conscious beings have a very different relationship with reality than inanimate, unconscious objects. We affect reality and thus have a means of changing it. Sometimes in surprising ways.

[...]

Frazer by the way is an absolutely insane man. Was an absolutely insane man, I mean. A brilliant scholar, but completely off his rocker. To explore the meaning behind a succession ritual at this temple that he sees in a painting at a museum, he writes a 800+ page book with an entire companion volume of footnotes that encompasses the entire globe in its exploration of culture, mythology and other anthropological studies. I was trying to explain the sheer mindboggling insanity of this project to my mother, and the analogy I came up with was “explaining an aspect of human nature and beginning with the structure of atoms.”

One day, I’d like to have completed a work of massive and perfect scholarship like Frazer’s The Golden Bough. I would like to finish writing the last sentence of the conclusion in this as of yet nonexistent book and know that I have covered everything: every possible book, every possible reference, every possible tangent. That my book could almost be a perfect closed system of knowledge in itself. The man’s not so much a genius than a scholar with OCD. But anyone who loves academia knows what’s so wonderful about The Golden Bough. It is a truly finished research project. I complete my social studies papers with a heartache, knowing that I could have gone to the reference section of the MML and read through a thousand more books but didn’t because of time and laziness. Even the books that I skimmed instead of reading. The chapters that I ignored because they didn’t seem immediately relevant, but did have some connection to my topic. The authors who I heard about but didn’t look for because their books weren’t in the circulating system. The papers and manuscripts and other unpublished documents that could be out there. The sources in different languages which I could not read. Frazer completed his book knowing that he had looked at it all, had read it all, that he overlooked nothing, that he left nothing out.

Or did he? The scholar’s ideal is ever elusive and impossible, as Mother would say. He probably finished the book in time for the publishers’ or the university’s deadline, but with a pang over that one notebook he didn’t look at, that one book which he had meant to use but never did, that one detail that he didn’t include because it would be too long, that one note that just slipped his mind and never came back. That one sentence about that breadfruit cooking custom among the Fiji Islanders (or something like that) that the editor scratched out.

Well, even if Frazer did feel heartbreak as he wrapped his manuscript up and sent it off by post (or handed it to his publisher), he still managed to come a lot bloody closer to the ideal than anyone else whose works I’ve ever read. Of course, not having read too many works of academia, I can’t really claim anything. But I personally believe that few people would have had that much devotion and insanity.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

Camus has now discussed how the phenomenologists end up escaping the absurd in a different yet essentially the same kind of “leap of faith” that the “theistic” existentialists did. Instead of deifying the irrational and turning to religion, they turn to Reason (with the capital R, yes) to provide meaning to the universe. Yet the absurd is a confrontation with the meaninglessness of life so it again denies the absurd like Kierkegaard and Chestov. I don’t really understand phenomenology that well, so I’m just assuming Camus is correct. He says that the phenomenologists, especially Husserl, see consciousness as a direction of attention and believe that all experiences of all objects are equally important. Sounds good so far? They don’t deny the fragmented nature of our perceptions and do not assert the “unifying” principle of reason. We cannot explain the universe; we can only describe. Still pretty good, right? And then somehow, this all becomes understanding the “essence” of an object through being conscious of it. What? Je me suis perdue! Again! Anyway, if anyone can provide me with a concise explanation of phenomenology, I’ll be very, very grateful.

[The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus (trans. Justin O'Brien)]

I am still in the middle of The Myth of Sisyphus, by Camus, or rather I returned to the book after a week of avoiding it. The subject matter is probably way over my head. After reading for three pages without really understanding what was going on, a sentence finally clued me into what the last section was about. You see, Camus is describing in languid analogies the paradoxical state of expecting a rational world and living in an utterly irrational reality, in the context of the uncertainty of all empirical experiences. He then goes on for quite some time about how this describes the state of the absurd, the “desert” as he calls it, and what is one is forced to accept and not accept about it. Except what he is really doing is exploring every nook and crevice of the same paradox, and I didn’t even realize that he was describing a paradox until now! Oy vey! I mean, I was trying to understand why he was saying one thing and then something else which completely contradicted it! He could have simply said, explicitly, “I am discussing a paradox,” instead of letting me suffer. You probably won’t understand why I had no clue for three pages, unless you’ve been reading the same translation I have. And unless you’re as dense as I am. But seriously, I don’t think I’m that dumb. I was paying attention! I think Camus was being too obscure! Okay, I’ll stop ranting.

But now it’s getting pretty interesting. He is saying that all the existentialists before his time chose to escape the absurd through religion, by deifying and surrendering to the utter irrationality of the universe, but in the same moment denying and rejecting the absurd, because the absurdity of the irrational world does not exist if we no longer struggle to see it rationally. And BTW, irrationality is not simply refusing to argue logically or leaping to unfounded conclusions. Irrationality is the inherent inability for us to know anything about ourselves or the world around us. In that sense, it is the complete opposite of the empiricists who claimed that we can only know through experience, because it says that we cannot know, but it is also the consequence, the child as it were, of empiricism. Isn’t that weird? Come to think of it, that was what Camus was discussing in the third section, even though I didn’t get it at the time. Anyway, M—, if you’re reading this, this means that the irrationality we’re discussing here is not your type of irrationality, but a confrontation with the possibility of nihilism which you completely refuse to acknowledge. Or at least I hope you refuse to acknowledge it.

So according to Camus, the previous existentialists were caught up in the paradoxical state of escaping the absurd by embracing it. He says that this is unacceptable, because he can only be certain of one thing and that is the absurd. (If you look at that statement closely, it’s another paradox: certainty of only uncertainty.) He must seek a new way to live with the absurd without ending up denying it and without ceasing to struggle against it. Yeah, I know, you must be thinking, “Eh?” How on earth is that possible? Well, one of the options is suicide, which we know only because Camus opened up by considering the “problem of suicide,” as he calls it. But because in the introduction, he says that he ultimately concludes that suicide is not legitimate after all, we’ll just have to wait and see what the other option is.

Anyway, I didn’t realize that he was talking in paradoxes in order to discuss the paradox of the absurd until now.

One thing came to mind while I was reading on the subway. All those existentialists prior to Camus, Sartre, and the rest of their generation are indeed the “theistic” existentialists, as my mother’s philosophy professor told her in college. And Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and the rest of them, whoever they were, are considered the “atheistic” existentialists, precisely because of what Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus: they are unable to accept religion as a way to live with the absurd because they see it as an escape and a denial of the absurd even though it is also an acceptance. Kierkegaard with his leaps of faith into the irrational, religious stage of existence is what Camus refuses to accept. I was wondering whether historians of philosophy recognized this split between the “theistic” and “atheistic” existentialism simply because Camus pointed it out first or whether because it is obvious.