[...] ethical self-becoming, as the constant relating of gift and task, is a process that is never finished; the ethical view is not something that one arrives at, after which one is done, and no unclarity and aesthetic confusion remain. [...]

He had to build a wall around each second just to make it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second--less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.

The aesthete is afraid of being bored, tries fervently to occupy his oversaturated mind with all kinds of distractions, but inevitably ends up being bored. This is what we might call the double nature of boredom: it encompasses both the individual's basic, languid state of apathy, as well as the frenetic attempts that he might make, out of boredom, to distract himself from that state. Kierkegaard thus concludes: 'Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut'. The ironic inability to commit to something causes an absolute emptiness. Try as the aesthete might, all his attempts at distraction, at 'poetic' variation, lead back to boredom [...]

[...] Boredom is the confrontation with the nothingness of aesthetic existence, and, as such, is connected to what Kierkegaard famously calls anxiety. While fear is always directed at a (supposedly) specific aspect of the world (snakes, heights, the monster under the bed), the object of anxiety is nothingness: it is directed at the undetermined situation of the individual, his freedom to form himself. Anxiety is the realization of the groundlessness of the individual, the realization that he is not automatically himself, but has to become a self, as the product of choices for which he is solely responsible. Boredom has the same nothingness as its source, only the bored individual does not yet seem fully pervaded (or 'anxiety-struck') by the existential task that this nothingness represents.

The absurd is not a quality of man or of the world, but 'is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world', writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. The absurd is the tension, the discrepancy between man asking the world for meaning. for reasons, and the world that does not answer, that stays meaningless, reasonless by itself.

'At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face', says Camus. Man can live his life unthinkingly: 'Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, fourr hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm--this path is easily followed most of the time,' writes Camus. Habit is the unconscious explanation of the world, which means that the demand for an actual explanation does not really arise: 'A world that may be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.' But, as we read, 'one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement'. According to Camus this is 'the first sign of absurdity', 'it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness'. From that moment on, man and world are no longer unthinkingly 'one': 'in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land', writes Camus, '[t]his divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.'

What Camus describes as the experience of the absurd is man realizing the meaning of his own consciousness, that is, of his freedom. His descriptions of man's 'absurd freedom' are very similar to Sartre's analysis of the intentionality of consciousness, which is always a relation, a distance to the world [...] Camus emphasizes on the one hand the physical factuality and on the other hand the free consciousness of man: 'Through the whole of human consciousness runs a fault line; man is double. Due to his body, he also belongs to the world of objects, while as consciousness he is free from this world. It is this division that Camus calls "absurdity", writes Achterhuis.

Holland describes 'Octet' as 'sculpting through fiction a powerful human presence whose insistent engagement with the reader makes her feel, in her own life, less alone'.

Through this experience of communal suffering, AA seems to do something that Wallace also regards as one of the main purposes of 'serious fiction', namely: 'giv[ing] access to other selves'. Wallace states: 'Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is [a sort of "generalization" of suffering]. [...] This is nourishing, redemptive; we have become less alone inside'. At that point, we can say, in the words of Camus, that '[we have] conquered solitude'.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.