Estranged from the World
Week 17: Experimenting with Absurdism
My father died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
When I first read L’Etranger I hadn’t met my father, and I couldn’t imagine feeling indifferent to my parent’s death. But when I read it again today, I see why Yepicurus said we would do well to think of it as The Estranged instead of The Stranger.
The difference is a former feeling of closeness versus never having closeness at all. After meeting my father, witnessing his estrangement from the world, and seeing him pass on, I understand why people try to stay strangers. It hurts to acknowledge something that was a part of you but is no more. It leaves a mark that can’t be erased. It seems easier to never allow yourself to be close to anything, but like it or not, you’re always in and of the world you live in. You can’t ever be a stranger in it, only estranged from it, so you should embrace this first and foremost.
L’Etranger was first suggested to me by a friend I met at a party full of people I didn’t know. The party was terribly dull, but she was loud and obnoxious and completely out of place - like me, so we saw ourselves in each other. We enjoyed each other’s irreverence on a few occasions thereafter meeting up once or twice on my work trips to Sacramento. I once confessed that she reminded me of a dear friend who abandoned our friendship because her girlfriend hated me. She assured me it would be impossible for her to hate me, and so we went on cutting up to “Jolene” at dive bar karaoke. Then one day, I playfully used the phrase “Yass Hunty”, as one did in a 2018 text message, and she said as a lesbian, gay culture was extremely harmful, and she wouldn’t stand for me using it “against” her. She blocked me when I laughed and asked if she was serious. I tried to apologize, but she said it felt insincere. She didn’t give me a chance to right my unintended wrong and we both hurt each other in the end. Now, she’s just a face from the past - someone I drank “white gummy bears” with and the first person to introduce me to The Estranged.
I’ve been estranged from so many faces over the years that it’s hard to know exactly why in each case, but I’m sure it’s something abrasive in my nature that eats away at sensitive souls. My dad had the same kind of poison seeping from his pores: a caustic honesty. It’s not a mean-spirited honesty any more than glacial acetic acid is mean-spirited. Glacial acetic acid is pure acid that crystallizes just below room temp, and it will burn you. I think my dad was just in the wrong environment early on, one that precipitated his harsh nature. He used to say that I was “diluted” from him, as he was from his mother - that people couldn’t handle the “full-strength” of us. When he said stuff like this, I warmed to him because if the emotions I felt were this intense, I couldn’t imagine the “full-strength” dose. He burned me many times, but I think the worst I ever did was leave a tingly mouth-feel, like lemon in a cut or salt-and-vinegar chips.
My father’s absence and the downstream effects of his DNA probably taught me to enjoy strangers early on. When I was young every tall dark man I met could have been him, as I never so much as saw a picture of him until I was 30. I suspected what would happen when I met him, but with a stranger, there’s always a remote possibility. Even after I realized he wasn’t Tony Danza or some ideal father figure who would take care of me as he should have, I held out hope that someone new could emerge. A quote from Emerson’s Friendship is still one of my favorites (I did a full reading here):
“Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.”
While I can attest that the throbbing of the heart waxes and wanes when a stranger becomes known, the communications of the soul don’t have to fade. My dad was accustomed to feeling like a stranger, so when I got too close, he pushed me away, maybe in an attempt to hold on to what Emerson is talking about, but neither of them seemed to understand that there is no such thing as a stranger. Only the estrangement inherent in the absurd. Every element of the world is at the same time a deep part of us, and completely unknown to us. That’s estrangement; it’s deeper than anything you can ever have with a stranger. Conversely, no matter how well you know someone, there’s always an element of uncertainty and impermanence in their eyes.
My dad would have hated me talking about this if he knew what any of it meant, but it must be said: he lived an awful life - much like Meursault, from L’Etranger. If he hadn’t lived so far apart from me and the rest of the world, I’d have had nothing to speak of on the matter, but both he and Meursault lived with an ambivalence for life that one only acquires through a misunderstanding of the absurd. Meursault doesn’t care what happens to him. He doesn’t seek to make things better for himself or anyone else. He just moves through life with dumb hedonism. In the end, he claims to embrace the meaningless of it all, but I don’t buy it. The ending seems like a cop-out. After he’s convicted of murder (which he did commit in a weird and unnecessary act of self-defense) and sentenced to death. He said
“And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.”
Bullshit. I know you’re not supposed to say stuff like this at times like this, but frankly, I don’t care what the world supposes I should do: My dad died an unnecessarily miserable death, and so did Meursault. To say anything otherwise is a placation, and I will not placate something so important. Call it caustic honesty.
The only difference between Meursault and my dad is that Meursault didn’t appeal to God, but you can appeal to the absurd just as you can appeal God to justify a terrible existence. My dad didn’t consider himself “religious” but he “had a relationship with God”, and so all things he did were to be washed away by his faith. That may be for all I know, but in this life, his actions left indelible marks on the people who tried to love him. I don’t know to what extent we can appeal to our natures, our sordid histories rife with genocide and struggle, or even our current circumstances, but I know what it feels like to sink into a pit of despair and categorize everyone as a stranger. My father didn’t commit suicide, but he willed himself a slow rotting death. He could have turned things around, but from the moment I met him, I recognized the longing to die in his voice. He believed he’d finally find relief in God, but he could have found relief here with us had he not given up. Meursault gave up somewhere before the first line of L’Etranger - in his voice is a sense of indifference, an acceptance of whatever life threw at him, without struggle or effort against it. Both stories were thick with defeat from beginning to end, and I can’t imagine any God being impressed with someone who accepts defeat or just floats along indifferently to whatever path is laid before them. Whatever your beliefs about the afterlife, it comes AFTER this life. You must first accept this life and everything in it that you touch.
I don’t know the best way to live, but I do know I have to keep living, and living makes marks on the world. When we’re done making marks, life leaves us as it found us: estranged. Maybe my dad tried to protect the ones he loved by making himself a stranger, but he couldn’t possibly. I already knew him because he’s a part of me, and that will never change. Just like the girl from Sacramento. The best we can do is try to account for the marks we make and embrace that the more marks we make, the more potential for estrangement we share. For me, making marks on a page is the best I can do right now.
Thank you all so much for your patronage. I’ve dedicated my efforts to trying to read, write, and think about the “right things” to do for weeks, but I don’t know what to do with my father’s death. Nor do I know what to do with the other pressing circumstances in my life despite having read John Stuart Mills’ Utilitarianism, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Sartre’s Existentialism as Humanism, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and we’ve just started Thomas More’s Utopia. I’ll keep trying but I say this to tell you, I don’t think there is a universal “right” thing to do. Not now, not ever - except to keep trying.
Below I’ll post my notes on the books we’ve been reading, a link to an event next Friday, and a reminder about some things we talked about last month when we were setting goals. If there’s something specific you feel would be of use to you, please let me know. The Rabbitholes and Reflections workshop is May 31st. The worksheet is free, but if you want a little more personal discussion and reflection, upgrading will get you access to the Discord where I stream the slides and respond to comments in real-time.