EXTPHL 206

A story I found on my old computer the other day

“There comes a point, I’m afraid, where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”

— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

Having misjudged the flight of the ball, I dove headlong into a teammate’s shoulder. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was twenty and believed that my ideas were, as a default, good, moral, and of interest to the world.

There was a thunderclap. And it was suddenly very dark. I slowly returned to myself from wherever I’d been and was surprised to find that I was upside down, with grass between my teeth, sludge where my prefrontal cortex had been, and an aching feeling that maybe my ideas weren’t quite as good as I’d been led (by myself) to believe.

Concussion recovery can seem more like an art than a science, which was lucky. I was a student of the Arts at the time. I was only too glad to action vague medical advice like, ‘Listen to your body,’ and ‘Don’t think too hard,’ and my shamefully few on-campus contact hours promised a gently graded return to full-consciousness. By the start of the next semester the headaches were mild, and if I had any memory problems I certainly can’t remember them. Sensitivity to light was not uncommon among my classmates. The only issue, really, was Existential Philosophy 206.

Every Arts student I knew, be they gung-ho, ultra-rational Arts-Law types, or your more hippyish beanie-in-summer Arts-Arts majors, had had a go at a philosophy elective. Reviews were mixed. One guy told me I’d have more fun eating the textbook. But I was twenty, desperately awkward at house parties, and somehow imagined knowing the meaning of life might give me some much-needed je ne sai quoi.

I’d enlisted before the concussion. When I picked up the textbook from uni — heavy as the yellow pages and about half as fun — I saw how steep the climb would be to a passing grade. But my soul was in a tizz and the course felt urgent. Necessary. I wanted to unlock the secrets of the universe for reasons of romance, power, and social credit.

I made it as far as week three.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

In my admittedly clinically foggy memory, the EXTPHL206 lectures were in an old brick building with a flickering overhead light. My classmates were quiet. A little too serious. The lecturer was an eminent Frenchment whose big fast words rolled together into one long, tense, breathless, coursing river. The lectures usually followed the same course: a portrait of the philosopher of the week, then some commentary on their beards and their uniformly sad personal lives, then two hours painstakingly unpacking why they personally believed existence to be meaningless, torturous, or a cruel illusion.

The sinking feeling set in right away. And it sank and sank all the way to Camus, who we covered in week three.

Albert Camus was very into cigarettes, brooding stares, and ‘The Absurd’. That is, that strange, out-of-body feeling when a person’s need for meaning runs into the meaninglessness of the universe. He thought:

• On the cosmic scales of time and space, any individual life, and individual action, has such a mathematically microscopic impact on the universe that there is no point to anything. Eeek.

• Goodness and rightness are subjective human constructs, as make believe and ultimately spiritually valueless as money, the Loch Ness Monster, or the colour Blegrellow. If it’s not naturally occurring, there’s no point believing in it. Double eek.

• Death is inevitable (triple eek), so ipso facto living is futile.

Now this is a fun guy to talk to at a house party.

Camus thought that there is no universal purpose for being alive, which made it all the more strange that human beings are born with a deep hunger for purpose and meaning and reason. This strangeness is The Absurd, an ever-looming existential crisis that screams at you in the middle of the most mundane of morning routines. Ever felt like all you do is empty the dishwasher? Ever had to convince a computer that you are not a computer? Ever been sweeping the leaves when you realised there’s going to be more leaves to sweep tomorrow?

The Absurd is a collision. Violent! Stormy! This must all be for a reason crashes headlong into but there is no reason for this. A temple smacks a teammate’s shoulder.

And the ultimate tragic-comic hero of Camus’ thesis was Sisyphus, of boulder fame. As a punishment for trying to cheat Death, Sisyphus had been tricked by Zeus into the absurdly futile task of rolling a very slippery boulder up a hill forever. Knowing he would fail and yet unable to stop trying.

‘We are all Sisyphus!’ declared the eminent French lecturer to triumphantly end his week three lesson. ‘And we all have our boulders. Pushing our futile burdens up a very big hill, over and over every day, trapped in our routines, never really knowing why. Okay. See you next time.’

I wanted to run screaming all the way home. I actually think it’s pretty brave that I walked to the train, eyes bugging, back to the wall like I was being followed, and then quietly unenrolled from the course on my phone. There is something very liberating about surrender.

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

An existential philosophy class had given me an existential crisis. I tried not to think about how weird that was and, being concussed, it wasn’t so hard to slip into a delightfully foggy denial of the meaninglessness of the universe.

Quite by accident, in September of that year, I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy outside on the grass on a warm spring day.

If living is meaningless/suffering/hard, then French Existential Philosophy is like rigorous physiotherapy, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is like a scalp massage from a coy dolphin. The book is the existentialist antichrist. In it, ordinary man Arthur Dent is violently ripped from his usual routines and reluctantly embarks on a journey across a bizarre universe, encountering talking elevators, pan-dimensional mice, and an acclaimed planet designer named Slartibartfast. To keep him sane, he’s given the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — a near-infinite encyclopaedia of the absurdity of the universe, with the words, ‘DON’T PANIC’ inscribed in large friendly letters on the front.

Douglas Adams plays cat and mouse with The Absurd, and uses the apparent meaninglessness of the cosmos as a rolling punchline. That Spring felt as good a time as any to return to Camus.

I found the old textbook in my cupboard. And just one single page after the one I’d decidedly quit on were Camus’ resolutions to The Absurd as a numerical list. Why the eminent French professor had at no point mentioned that there were resolutions to the existential dread remains a great cosmic mystery to me.

Camus says that, though icky, awareness of The Absurd is the most important thing we can do as human beings. It gives us life. Knowing that we are desperate for meaning in a meaningless universe allows us to:

1. Rebel. Fight back. Refuse to despair or be deceived. Sisyphus can look the absurdity of his situation in the eye, and choose what matters to him.

2. Reject hope. Nothing is coming to save Sisyphus, so he must live in the present and find his own freedom in every moment. Decide his own values and forge his own purpose.

3. Have passion. Sisyphus cannot live good, so he must live much. Live large! Fiercely! Boldly. Smelling the underworld’s roses, as it were.

‘I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain,’ Camus says. ‘One always finds one’s burdens again. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

And if I ever find myself at a house party again, I guess I could do a french accent and explain all this in a frantic whisper. But wouldn’t it be easier to hand out copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? To just steal more of the immortal words of Douglas Adams?

Like…

“‘The answer to the great question … of Life, the Universe and Everything … is… forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

‘Forty two!’ yelled Loonquawl. ‘Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?’

‘I checked it very thoroughly,’ said the computer, ‘and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’”

— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’