The Existentialist's Survival Guide by Gordon Marino

Author:Gordon Marino
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Doc, I don’t understand. Why would the Creator provide us with reason and then put himself beyond reason? It doesn’t make any sense.”

* * *

His name was Karan, a strict Hindu of nineteen. He was slight, dark, and had a red bindi for a third eye. His father was from India and managed a gas station in Chicago. A coruscating beacon of hope for his family, Karan’s burning ambition was to become a religious teacher, a swami. Virtually every afternoon, Karan would come to my office and in a barely detectable Indian accent, badger me with questions about the relation between our philosophy texts and God or, in his case, as a Hindu, the gods. Karan was blessed with a restless and relentless longing for the divine. Tests gave him a serious case of nerves, so much so that even before an inconsequential quiz, he would pester me to go over questions he already had an iron-clad grip on. One time, I ribbed him, “Karan, you have to learn how to deal with anxiety. If you are going to be a swami, people are going to need you to help them when they are upset and afraid.” Dropping his eyes, he answered with palpable earnestness, “You’re right, Doc. I have to learn to deal with my anxiety.”

The past tense that I have been using makes the tragic truth plain: Karan is of the past tense. A month before the end of the semester, he went to the clinic for a cold. He was given some antibiotics. When his condition failed to improve, the medical priests ran some tests. A month later, Hindu priests were bowing over his body with oils and flower petals, preparing Karan for cremation. Trusting in the gods, he did not cling to life even when he faced the nonnegotiable fact that the future he had so passionately and meticulously mapped out was not to be. An angry part of me felt that if there happens to be a God, Karan was the last flower he should have plucked. Another part of me, however, felt that taking him made perfect sense since he was already more spirit than flesh and bone. After Karan’s funeral, out in the parking lot of faith, I felt I could just as easily believe in Vishnu, Jesus, or the great god Nada.

If Camus happened to be there on the sad but sun-sparkling June afternoon of the funeral, I’m sure he would have counseled, “Go ahead, roll around in the dirt with your grief and rage, but unless you are enjoying yourself doing it, give up puzzling about the meaning of Karan’s death and everything else.” In his unique combination of objectivity and lyricism, Camus contends that we are creatures with an innate, esurient desire for meaning pitched into a universe devoid of meaning. For Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was no idiot when he shook his fist and howled that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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