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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.
Achterhuis's book: Camus, p.183
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'.
footnote 82. Holland being the author of Succeeding Postmodernism
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.
in an interview
“No, Kristi, it’s not, and you are right to look surprised because it’s fucking insane that every price on this website is set manually by a buyer. So I’m hired to fix it, give buyers their time back to do something more productive. But guess what: every time I turn around I discover some new team of buyers asking, ‘Who is this guy and why the fuck is he here?’ I explain my charter and they freak because they didn’t get to have input into the requirements, because I didn’t know their team fucking existed and vice versa. So they escalate to their director, he throws a fit, and I’m back gathering requirements again while the engineers threaten to abandon the project if I keep making them wait. This is normal to some extent, Kristi. To some extent this is just what a product manager does. But it goes beyond normal at Amazon, because people are like mushrooms here.”
There are so many men here, men from Sloan and the University of Michigan and McKinsey and Deloitte. They’re transitioning to barefoot running. They bought Vibrams last month, and a sous vide machine. They like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and in college they once saw Modest Mouse five times in a year. They have three kids and a wife with an expired law license because it just made more sense for her to be the stay-at-home parent. They work standing up. They’ve slowly come around on Belgian ales, and Tim Ferriss’s book really made them think. They wish they had more time to read. They like their steak rare and their hot sauce vicious. When they interrupt you at your desk, they’re sorry for the drive-by. When something goes wrong, they’re working on a path to green. They don’t just agree; they violently agree. They’re blocking and tackling and focused on the inputs and not getting distracted by orthogonal matters. Going paleo has been huge for them, and tequila is allowed. Can they just play devil’s advocate for a second? Can they just pressure test your idea? Can they just push back on that a little? These last three are them saying you are wrong. Sometimes they say it in an Amazon way and sometimes in a man way, though already the difference is getting pretty hard to discern.
lol
“I know,” Marnie says. “But he’s done it to everyone. Last year at CES, he took us out to Delmonico’s, and I asked the waiter for a vegetable plate because I just wasn’t in the mood for a steak. After dinner Chuck accused me of ‘sending a signal’ that he wasn’t inclusive of vegetarians. But then it was done, and he’s never mentioned it again.”
“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”
It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.3 When the day comes, the twenty-odd managers in Chuck’s org gather in a conference room that reeks of onions from some pizza a previous group left behind. It’s windowless except for a panel by the door that HR has covered with blank paper. Handwritten signs reading DO NOT ENTER!!!!!! ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW IN PROGRESS are posted on both doors. By 6:00 p.m., we’re an hour over the scheduled end time and are only halfway through the alphabet. The doughnuts Chuck’s assistant brought have been sitting untouched in the middle of the table—doughnuts don’t really sync with onion fumes—but now people are starting to pick at them, sensing dinner could be a long way off. I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.
lol
“Does Jeff Bezos want you to write a blog?” my mother calls from the living room.
“I deeply doubt it, Mom,” I call back.
“Well, he’ll be begging when he finds out what a beautiful writer you are.”
“Would you do me a huge favor?” I whisper to John. “Would you murder me?” I pour two mugs of decaf and bring them out to my parents. “I don’t really need or want Jeff Bezos to beg me to write a blog,” I say.
“He might even be one of the smartest people in America,” says my dad.
lmao