We interrupt the crappy stories I've been writing for a real blog. In the words of my friend Jenn: 'shit just got real'.
2 days ago I was overcome by this.... mood?/spirit?/feeling? I don't know what it is. It's like fear, but it isn't the same as fear. Maybe it's just depression again. Anyway, there's like 3 different things causing it and they'll just be boring details to anyone but me.
But I just thought it'd be hillarious/interesting to analyze my reaction to it, it'll be an interesting test of human nature/my nature.
When I began to get this - let's just say 'fear' (even though it's a little inaccurate) - my first reaction was to pray. Then nothing happened, so I tried porn, etc. nothing happened, so then I tried eating, nothing happened. Then I tried some legitimate stuff like exercise and homework, etc and that helped a little. But then all of it got alot worse and so I just started watching every episode of Top Gear and every movie my friend gave me on a burnt dvd. I tried going to Mass and praying more but everyone just wanted me to be optimistic. (I hate contrary advice. My old psychotherapist said that if I'm having a bad day I should just tell people 'I'm having a bad day'. But people don't get Stoicism like that anymore.) Then when I was at my wit's end I tried to just drive away, but I ended up at home. Then I tried to call my brother Jer, my last hope in the world. But he's out in the bush, so I can't call him. So then I just sat on the couch, unable to move or study anymore, blankly staring at the tv screen.
So this morning I resolved to face all of my problems head on. That lasted for about 34 seconds. So I just watched Fast and the Furious (all the Top Gear has put me in car mode), and I'm wearing my Rosary today, I don't care what people say. And I am kind of shaky. I just want to become a monk or a priest in like Arizona or Tokyo or something, and have to be around people I don't know and don't understand. Then no one will bother me. I want like an item list of things I have to do, and I want it to never be longer than 10 things. Like: clean room, walk to chapel, say mass, hear confessions, eat breakfast, go for a long walk, learn a bit of (insert language), eat dinner, teach someone something maybe?, go to bed. A very simple life, a contemplative life.
I want to get rid of everything. I don't want to be where people know me. No one will be able to say: 'that's just crazy ol' Andrew'. I want the food to taste bad and the bed to be uncomfortable. I want to have many moments a day when I meet Hispanic or Asian people or pseudo-criminal people whom I don't understand and can't relate to, and then try to grow as a person until I can reach deep enough into human experience to relate to them. I'm fucking crazy. I don't know. bleh.
...
the worst part is I know - come friday - I'll have all the assignments done (probably just barely pass some of them) and they'll be a new manifestation of these same problems. It's all a cycle, it's all a rut, I'm like a train set on tracks and I know where they're headed and all I can think of is how kick-ass it would be to have freedom like a car...
once again I find myself just trying to survive, just trying to get through today, and hoping. Hope is all I seem to ever have. If I run out of that, I'm scared to think of what will happen.
Showing posts with label Mortality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mortality. Show all posts
Monday, March 1, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Strangers in my Life
I just finised reading, for my existential philosophy class, a book called "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Camus was a famous existentialist atheist and this is one of his 'great' works. The one thing I like about the Atheist existentialists (probably the only thing I like about them) is their logical consistency / systematic thinking. For them, there really can be no knowledge beyond your own personal experience. Thus for them, God is dead and irrelevant because to some extent reason is dead. Theorizing about the origins of existence are meaningless, indeed for them, life itself is entirely devoid of meaning.
It's disturbing to me because the story is all about a man who believes in nothing. He doesn't really believe in love, he doesn't care about God or anything metaphysical at all really. He doesn't feel anything when his mother dies, when a woman proposes to him, when he kills a man, or finally when he is condemned to death. Complete and utter apathy. In the novel the chaplains and lawyers can't understand how he has no desire for anything else, just life without any meaning or hope.
Now there are many non-Christian and even some atheistic worldviews that DO posit meaning to one's life or at least existence, and with those people a dialogue is possible. If a man loves his wife or even money one can have a discussion about values and meaning, etc. But if a man is utterly apathetic and detached from everything, there is nothing one can do.
I've met some people at Brock this year that have scared me in this way. They have terrible things happen to them, or be heartbroken, but none of this leads them to any questioning. They don't even hate God or life - which I think is preferable to indifference. They just are, they aren't looking for any answers.
It all reminds me of a character I greatly admire, a man who is the complete antithesis to Camus' 'stranger'. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens who asked the great questions about life, justice, goodness, beauty, etc. He ended up dying, but one of my favourite quotes from him is: "the unexamined life is not worth living". I tend to agree with him, and so I am still having difficulty dealing with people not content to even participate in life. People who just subsist. It reminds me that -as people from St. Augustine to Eli Wiesel have said before - that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. Apathy is like Darkness. It's the absence of anything.
cookie-cutter neo-darwinians/Dawkinites, University Buddhists, Drunken Hedonists, and God-Hating Atheists are all normal figures in university life. But Camus has shown me my greatest fear in his novel. If you want to know what life looks like in post-modern atheism, feel free to read the book. I guarentee you'll be looking for meaning anywhere after it.
It's disturbing to me because the story is all about a man who believes in nothing. He doesn't really believe in love, he doesn't care about God or anything metaphysical at all really. He doesn't feel anything when his mother dies, when a woman proposes to him, when he kills a man, or finally when he is condemned to death. Complete and utter apathy. In the novel the chaplains and lawyers can't understand how he has no desire for anything else, just life without any meaning or hope.
Now there are many non-Christian and even some atheistic worldviews that DO posit meaning to one's life or at least existence, and with those people a dialogue is possible. If a man loves his wife or even money one can have a discussion about values and meaning, etc. But if a man is utterly apathetic and detached from everything, there is nothing one can do.
I've met some people at Brock this year that have scared me in this way. They have terrible things happen to them, or be heartbroken, but none of this leads them to any questioning. They don't even hate God or life - which I think is preferable to indifference. They just are, they aren't looking for any answers.
It all reminds me of a character I greatly admire, a man who is the complete antithesis to Camus' 'stranger'. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens who asked the great questions about life, justice, goodness, beauty, etc. He ended up dying, but one of my favourite quotes from him is: "the unexamined life is not worth living". I tend to agree with him, and so I am still having difficulty dealing with people not content to even participate in life. People who just subsist. It reminds me that -as people from St. Augustine to Eli Wiesel have said before - that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. Apathy is like Darkness. It's the absence of anything.
cookie-cutter neo-darwinians/Dawkinites, University Buddhists, Drunken Hedonists, and God-Hating Atheists are all normal figures in university life. But Camus has shown me my greatest fear in his novel. If you want to know what life looks like in post-modern atheism, feel free to read the book. I guarentee you'll be looking for meaning anywhere after it.
Monday, July 27, 2009
All Too inHuman & The Story of a Girl
If you don't feel like reading all this post just skip to the "BUT"
We have our extended family visiting our house this week (all the Mennonite Brethren folks). I used to be able to talk with my uncles and aunts about theology and my future as a preacher. But now that I'm of the 'peculiar Roman Catholick religion' (as Rabbie Burns would've said - ), no one asks me about anything or talks hopefully about my future.
In that same Roman faith there is a philosophy that is popular among the Pontiffs. It's the idea of "the full human person" or "the intrinsic dignity of the human person". It's the idea(l) that everyone who is born has intrinsic worth and value just because they are in existence. It's what Seneca and St. Thomas Aquinas said when they gave us the choice between "Being a beast, or being a human". The modern neo-Darwinian socialist materialist positivist atheism of today seems to treat us like we're beasts rated on our ability to contribute to the world (by us I mean morbidly obese grocery store workers and other valueless people).
*******
*******
BUT
*******
*******
Tonight after a long shift at work I was about to walk out as usual without much hope to my house to sit alone in the slanted room (I'm making the story a little melodramatic). But then a girl I work with asked me to help with a recipe and supplies for a meal she was making for her boyfriend, and so we went around getting the groceries and talking and then we drove home (she followed me 'cause we live on the same street, and i drove crazily). I then realized, as I listened to Radiohead and waved goodbye, that I felt like a human being.
Obviously I'm not telling the story to predict a 'deeper' relationship (she's like 5 years younger than me and in a relationship, and I'm just a creepy deli guy). But the reason I wrote it was because it was an example of someone just treating me like a human being, like my opinion was at all important, and that I could contribute something.
Anyway, that's my pathetically boring post you've wasted your time reading. But sometimes I wonder what life would be like to always feel like a human. Gah, all this introspection - blame St. Augustine and his Confessions, he started this Western philosophical phenomenon. Blogs are totally a result of him.
We have our extended family visiting our house this week (all the Mennonite Brethren folks). I used to be able to talk with my uncles and aunts about theology and my future as a preacher. But now that I'm of the 'peculiar Roman Catholick religion' (as Rabbie Burns would've said - ), no one asks me about anything or talks hopefully about my future.
In that same Roman faith there is a philosophy that is popular among the Pontiffs. It's the idea of "the full human person" or "the intrinsic dignity of the human person". It's the idea(l) that everyone who is born has intrinsic worth and value just because they are in existence. It's what Seneca and St. Thomas Aquinas said when they gave us the choice between "Being a beast, or being a human". The modern neo-Darwinian socialist materialist positivist atheism of today seems to treat us like we're beasts rated on our ability to contribute to the world (by us I mean morbidly obese grocery store workers and other valueless people).
*******
*******
BUT
*******
*******
Tonight after a long shift at work I was about to walk out as usual without much hope to my house to sit alone in the slanted room (I'm making the story a little melodramatic). But then a girl I work with asked me to help with a recipe and supplies for a meal she was making for her boyfriend, and so we went around getting the groceries and talking and then we drove home (she followed me 'cause we live on the same street, and i drove crazily). I then realized, as I listened to Radiohead and waved goodbye, that I felt like a human being.
Obviously I'm not telling the story to predict a 'deeper' relationship (she's like 5 years younger than me and in a relationship, and I'm just a creepy deli guy). But the reason I wrote it was because it was an example of someone just treating me like a human being, like my opinion was at all important, and that I could contribute something.
Anyway, that's my pathetically boring post you've wasted your time reading. But sometimes I wonder what life would be like to always feel like a human. Gah, all this introspection - blame St. Augustine and his Confessions, he started this Western philosophical phenomenon. Blogs are totally a result of him.
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