Trees, probably

Any staid academic will tell you: existentialism is over. Discredited. Démodé. A plebeian fashion mercifully donated to the secondhand stores of culture for splenetic teenagers to cherish, recycle, and eventually, as they grow to maturity, discard. Sure, in textbooks and encyclopedias we preserve the names of its exponents--there was only one, actually--so as not to be thought careless when the angels descend from the clouds to audit our archives on Judgment Day. But no one takes them seriously anymore. Being? Responsibility? Choice? Meh. We prefer language (even though we scorn its science) and its belligerent twin, discourse (whatever that is). But don't waste your life worrying about how to live. Everything's in a book, anyway. I'm sure you can just look it up.

Of all the existentialists who emphatically were nothing of the sort, none has suffered so much over the past thirty years as Camus. In that short span his reputation sunk from cultural icon to drab anecdote. No longer a difficulty to be challenged, his work, for most scholars, seems better tasked as an intellectual diaper for college freshmen. As they acquire the salient skills to keep them from soiling themselves academically, they can, if they need, use it to remedy accidents, although elders discourage even this modest practice. The wise ones train their disciples not to humor their passions. And the disciples, for their part, eager to assume their place as cultural custodians, reciprocate, mimicking, and then mastering, the prestige ideology. So it goes.

It may be a sign, one among many, that I'm not fit to be a scholar. But as I get older, I continue to read Camus, and now that I've shed my adolescent, angsty skin I find more, not fewer, reasons to admire him. Very little that he wrote--his prolific political journalism, his understated neoclassical fiction, his relaxed and happy philosophy--fails to work a deeper, sicker logic with each reading. He was the great philosopher of sensation, and in his work he wove a persistent, delicate tension between carnal joy and conscious self-cannibalism, a dissonance that resolves, as it must, in quiet, culpable loneliness. Unlike Sartre's, his writing is never arrogant. By his practical approach to language and perception he distinguished himself from Merleau-Ponty, who tended, in the style of Husserl, to interrogate his concepts without explicating them. With Marcel he shared a delight in contradiction, but while Marcel contented himself with theological abstractions, Camus exercised his rational influence on every inconsistency, however intractable. Kaspers gradually abandoned philosophical inquiry in favor of psychological schematization, a brilliant pathologist but one too timid to ask why human beings must be so afflicted. Unlike De Beauvoir, he was a man, which means, among other things, he couldn't be salvaged by Women's Studies. In fact, he was a bit of a womanizer.

Unlike, say, most varieties of post-structuralism, existentialism proposed human solutions to human problems. Its methods showed an attention to the facts of everyday experience, and that closeness to real life gave the outlook a distinctly practical value. In fact, for Camus, the problem par excellence, the only real one, really, was suicide: whether one should, in a world ungoverned by any superhuman intelligence, where moral truth must be discovered, where human passion makes its sufferer absurd; whether one should, in light of these constraints, kill oneself. It has the French flair for melodrama, but his point is basically sound. When accident rules creation, there really is only one question to ask.

The very fact that existentialism adopts a personal perspective tells you that, for better or worse, it is the individual's philosophy. Its project is less to secure truth than to answer the question what shall I do? Any response by definition will be a personal one, proposing a personal truth, and the subjective bias extolled in existentialist reasoning--it is one of the style's great virtues--opens philosophical inquiry to areas of experience inaccessible to other methods. The style's defining experience, as revealed by Camus' interest in suicide, is the individual crisis. Let me offer you an example.

Yesterday I played an abominable match against a dispirited opponent. The sun glared. The air was boiled water. But that wasn't the problem. Neither was my unpredictable first serve, or my four double faults, or my reliably unreliable forehand. A strong backhand and crisp volleys kept me in front, and when my heart beat nihilism into my limbs, stumping them, my calm eyes and studied breath cleared the blood and circulated it. No, the problem was that, at some point late in the first set, leading 5-1, getting ready to serve, I forgot why I was playing. My opponent was having a bad time of it. In tennis, some days are like that. The sport requires so many fine, complex, coordinated movements at such quick intervals that the body, too tired or distracted or indifferent to oblige, can slip too easily into errors. When that happens, you can't talk yourself out of it or regain your rhythm by pumping yourself up or by soothing yourself down. All you can do is wait.

For some competitors, like me, playing against a rattled opponent can be hard. To keep the negative energy from infecting one's game, one has to turn competition into a job to be completed. But in order to play well, to care about my shots, I need to feel, as I hit them, their small kinetic art. For me, the sport has always been an expression of aesthetics. My movements have purpose, my shots depth and control, my serve power and direction only when I lose myself in the really remarkable fact that for a few seconds my life--what I am doing immediately, here and now--feels, and probably is, quite beautiful. Something rare between these two bodies and this ball lets me participate in its loveliness. For a moment, without intending to, I make guileless contact with a total stranger. Nothing is guarded or prepared. I'm free to improvise all sorts of wonderful laws. Time can stop. The physical dimensions are mine to mold; space is merely a tool with which to design the universe. Forged in the same Keatsian heat, closeness and sadness fuse, both reluctances.

When I played my opponent yesterday, under the grotesque sun, in the sweltering, rain-ruined atmosphere, ready to close out the set like a professional, my stomach suddenly felt empty. I looked across the net at my foundering opponent, who was miserable, and my body, every limb, grew hollow. I didn't want to play. My muscles contracted, my strokes tightened, my movement slowed. For the first time that afternoon I made errors. In a flurry of uncontrolled action, I lost my serve. We played another irrelevant game, and then I took the set 6-3.

The second set was worse. Again serving at 5-1, this time for the match, I was broken, dropped an easy return game, was broken again, and, finally, returning at 5-4, broke for the final game. On any ordinary day, I would have swept the match at love. I have just the right style of play to frustrate that particular opponent. But as he unraveled, as the match lost more and more of its reason for being played, I found myself unable to summon the professionalism to win for the sake of winning. Eventually I did, of course, but not until I'd soured my mood and plunged myself into a mild crisis of faith. When you're constantly striving to improve, a task can quickly and unconsciously change from deliberate love to tolerated grief. And facing an opponent who refused to play amiably, I discovered a side of tennis I simply didn't like. After meeting at the net to shake hands, we left the court together, not speaking. Afterward, I sat silently in my car, feeling stunned and heartsick. I drank my recovery mix, turned the key, and drove home. Then I called my coach to schedule a meeting.

Toward the end of The Stranger, in a passage that seems more impressive to me each time I read it, the imprisoned Meursault, awaiting his execution the following morning, struggles to absorb the chaplain's increasingly invasive queries. For the better part of two pages, he succeeds. frustrating his visitor with glib responses while maintaining, in the presence of the holy man, an agnostic dignity. Finally, exasperated, the chaplain demands that Meursault admit to having desired some other kind of life:

J'allais lui dire de partir, de me laisser, quand il s'est écrié tout d'un coup avec une sorte d'eclat, en se retournant vers moi: "Non, je ne peux pas vous croire. Je suis sûr qu'il vous est arrivé de souhaiter une autre vie." Je lui ai répondu que naturellement, mais cela n'avait pas plus d'importance que de souhaiter d'être riche, de nager très vite ou d'avoir une bouche mieux faite. C'était du même ordre. Mais lui m'a arrête et il voulait savoir comment je voyais cette autre vie. Alors, je lui ai crié: "Une vie où je pourrais me souvenir de celle-ci."

Meursault concedes that he, like anyone else, has imagined a life in which he were richer, or swam faster, or had a more handsome mouth (a curiously French desire). But these lives, he insists, aren't important; it's all the same. Further aggravated by Meursault's nonchalance, the chaplain presses the point, ordering the condemned man to tell him how he pictures this other life. In what I believe to be the wisest sentence ever written, Meursault answers, "a life where I could remember this one."

When I first read that exchange as an eighteen-year-old, its brutal knowledge changed my life. And every time I reread it, or quote it, or think about it, it changes my life again. Outdated genetic instrument that I am, I will never accept, from Emperor Brain or anybody, that existentialism has expired. When we ask ourselves what we truly want--freedom from pain or age, or death, abundance of peace and pleasure, an uncorrupted truth--aren't we really corroborating Meursault's claim? All those chimeras, the afterlives and eternities, the spiritual reunions and rebirths--aren't they abstracted images of this life and its memories? Don't we really desire another life where we can remember this one? A heaven that happens to be here?

Hitting with my coach tonight, trying, and failing, to rid myself of dejection, I felt, as black and numb as a body can be, that what I desired was something else, an improved existence, a cleaner, rawer, more ascetic pleasure, not this athletic job. With the disappointment of the day's match eating through my veins like lead, corroding my satisfaction, I yearned for some other life untainted by business and bad energy, where yellow balls, like small Pythagorean solids, conducted their paths in remote geometrical mystery. In my head I held a vision of Ptolemaic spheres, gorgeous and austere, rotating within my body like an uncreated clockwork, spinning to produce perfect space. Ball after ball I sent wide, long, into the net. I wanted to hit my way off the Earth. To break my strings on the Moon. To bury this world.

Suddenly, my coach stopped me. He pointed to the tension in my face, the strain in my arm, my unfocused gaze. "Why are you so upset? You enjoy doing this. Tell yourself that. You come out in the sun, at night, it's awful weather, because you like to hit the ball. That's all it is. That's all it has to be." He was right. I focused, relaxed my arm; I smiled. It doesn't have to be business, even when it is. This world, it's a fine place and worth the fighting for. Robert Jordan says that in For Whom the Bell Tolls right before he loses consciousness and dies. (His horse crushed his leg, an ignoble way to snuff it.) But he's right. It's all very simple and embraceable.

When I die--or right before I die, I suppose, when I still have consciousness--what I'll miss most are the trees, probably. Not those Constable shags but the carnivorous walnut trees I grew up in, and the desolate desert palms, and, hell, maybe even those Constable shags after all.

Slothrop: Hey gorilla: you've stumbled your way into many a-wise word in your time and taught me much of the little I know today. But this here love letter to life is one of the most wonderful things I've had the pleasure and grace to read. Your writing is losing its tough intellectual veneer and your heart is finding crystalline ways of beating in a language that invites and welcomes whomever is lucky to chance by.

When you do things, you do them with a depth of purpose I've seen possessed by few others. Wallace comes to mind and I don't mean that patronizingly. Sometimes this depth approximates truth, and sometimes a dizzying and incomprehensible vertigo. You are an artist of the human soul, daring to go where few of us have the brass balls to go. You rarely explain yourself, but when you do, there's a compassion and strength and humility to your thoughts. I guess you can say they are whole-hearted. My guess is that you've been listening to lots of Foreigner and watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Or admit it, it was New World, wasn't it? Right after the tennis match? Confess!

Anyway, that's the main thing. But your thoughts about living and dying fully did bring up a secondary concern about which I very much want to speak, gorilla á human erection: the purpose of academia, in general, and as it concerns our lives, specifically. I used to think the road to becoming an academic was worth traveling because the ends were a best case scenario as far as jobs go. But now I'm not so sure anymore. I think I've got a bit of Groucho's "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member" muddled thinking going on, but a more mature version, if that's possible? Maybe this: turning the study of literature into a job that loses touch with the essence of the thing that's at its core has become deeply problematic for me. But I remember a similar line of reasoning back in college when I turned away from medicine and worry that somehow laziness has displaced virility as a pattern and habit.

Or maybe I should just hush and wait 'till Ruffalo makes it all better on Friday evening?