Teenage suicide (don't do it)

This year, one of my Christmas presents was a collected essays edition of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus -- which, it still being winter break and me having no real responsibilities, makes for some poignant subway reading on my way to and from the gym. Camus was my first French existentialist love (Sartre was too brittle and thuggish for my refined adolescent taste), but I'd always been more into his novels than the cut-and-dried philosophy, so I'd never read Sisyphus in its entirety. That's probably a good thing, though, because I'm sure it's more palatable the closer you get to the 30-year-old expiration date that Camus places on all human hopes and dreams. Any younger, and you're still convinced that this world might have something better to offer than arbitrary struggle against pain and death, so his whole theory of the absurd might not go down quite so easily.

For the Too French; Didn't Read crowd, the basic premise behind the parable of Sisyphus is that our life on this planet is completely absurd. The only thing of which we can be certain is our resounding ignorance in all matters of philosophy, science, and religion. Furthermore, our individual and collective hopes, dreams, and strivings -- all traces of our existence -- will unquestionably be obliterated in the centuries to come. Only those who foolishly delude themselves with thoughts of a god and an afterlife [foolishly because of the two quick death-strokes with which Camus punctures the idea: 1) if we have free will, then God allows evil in the world, which is antithetical to our idea of an omnipotent and benevolent God, and 2) if we have no free will, then God is himself evil because he makes us suffer, and, again, life is absurd] can possibly continue to hope for something better than a finite lifetime of pain, confusion, gradual decay, and death. Hence, the human race is Sisyphus, that poor sap whose punishment was to roll a giant rock up a hill, only to have it roll right back down again, for all of eternity. We toil and sweat and live for nothing.

So, again, especially great reading before and after an hour on a treadmill.

What fascinated me, of course, was Camus' reliance on Dostoevsky to bolster his point. Now, anyone who knows me and has heard me expound on this subject knows that I've been a lifetime member of Team Tolstoy. And anyone who knows what Team Tolstoy is all about would place better odds on Jews and Arabs skipping hand-in-hand down the streets of Haifa than a devoted member of TT breaking ranks and spending a few leisurely afternoons with a full-blown 400+ page Dostoevsky novel (it's kind of a thing in Slavic circles... similar to Camus v. Sartre, I guess, but even more firmly entrenched). Sure, I like his shorter stuff (stories, Notes from the Underground), and I'm okay with The Brothers Karamazov, but only because the 50-odd pages of The Grand Inquisitor story make the rest of the hack genre-fiction and schlocky theology padding worthwhile. So, it is with all due gravitas that I report to have picked up a dog-eared copy of The Possessed at a used book store the other day, in order to get to the root of Camus' allusions. I took one for the Team.

Camus isn't just interested in telling us that life is absurd; after all, everyone from Diogenes to your 13-year-old emo blogging neighbor down the street (no relation) has been gracing us this rather unshocking revelation. What Camus is really interested in is suicide -- specifically, why more people don't commit it, since we all at one point or another have to deal with the unsettling feeling that all of this pain and frustration is just not fucking worth it. That's where Dostoevsky and The Possessed come in. In this novel, a character named Kirilov is writing a book on this very subject. During a heated conversation with Kirilov, the narrator, who is horrified by the idea of suicide, exclaims, "'Man fears death because he loves life!'" To which Kirilov replies:

"That's a base idea and in it lies the whole hoax!" His eyes flashed. "Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now everything is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That's how it's been arranged. We are given life for fear and pain, and that's where the swindle lies. Today man is not a real man. One day there will be free, proud men to whom it will make no difference whether they live or not. That'll be the new man. He who conquers pain and fear will be a god himself. And the other God will disappear."

Decades of canonical existentialist writing, of which Camus is only a germinal part, has taken this quote as a solid, universal maxim -- life sucks, forever and always. But I'm curious if the change of time and religious fervency hasn't changed the equation. In Sisyphus, Camus also talks about experience as the lone principle that makes sense in an absurd world. Since this, our all-too-human mortal life is the only one we've got, we may as well throw caution and accepted morality to the wind and have as many experiences as we can. Quantity over quality. (He refutes this somewhat, but not, I think, entirely.) And when I put this idea together with Dostoevsky's vision of the world I wonder...

Yesterday, I didn't leave the house at all. Hell, I barely left the living room couch. And yet, at the mere push of a few buttons, I had access to: hundreds of films and TV shows, new and old, streamed directly to my computer; countless articles and texts to read, share, comment on; innumerable hours of music of every conceivable genre; a dizzying array of pornography; a network of digitally-linked humans to chat with; and, in case all that wasn't enough, three video game systems with dozens of hours-long immersive gaming experiences to choose from. And it's not because I'm rich or noble or otherwise special. My dad came to this country with exactly fifty dollars to his name. I earn my monthly pittance, about as much as your average Starbucks barista, to teach kids about Dostoevsky and thesis statements.

My point is, we educated elite in the land of exorbitant wealth and nuclear stockpiles have, for all intents and purposes, stopped believing in God. But we certainly haven't gone all Kirilov on everybody and flocked to cliff-sides like lemmings. Maybe Dostoevsky's world -- a dark, dank Russia still functioning on de facto slave labor, simultaneously enthralled to medieval thinking and every passing current of misunderstood "liberalism" that floated its way from the West -- maybe that world was, for the most part, a cruel hoax. But I think the American experiment with utilitarianism has shown that it doesn't always have to be. Even if it's couched in the form of media oversaturation, bad-faith pleasure-proliferation, or just plain and simple False God of Capital, I for one welcome the death of the old God and the rise of our new Experience overlord. What keeps me on that treadmill and loving every minute of it is the pursuit and enjoyment of experience, and the knowledge that I'll never come close to exhausting its horizons. And what keeps me from getting burned out by the width of that infinite horizon is the knowledge that for others who aren't quite so lucky, it's not quite so infinite. The possibilities that I was (stupidly, arbitrarily, unimaginably felicitously) given, the ones that most of us have in this country and others like it, are just too damn precious to waste. And if that sounds dangerously close to Christian rhetoric, so be it. I'll happily plunder the moral system without any of the dogma.

So, in closing, if I can enjoy Dostoevsky, there might be hope for us yet. Also, blame Camus if I slaughter you in a race. It's all in the existentialism.