I recently went on a reading spree of books by apparently-famous psychiatrist Irvin Yalom. I’d never heard of him or his books before, but my therapist recommended a couple of his books in addition to my more prosaic explorations of psychiatric literature, so I read five of them in as many days. Yalom’s fiction was more interesting than his non-fiction, but his authorial voice was also much more suspect in his fictionalised accounts of two significant existentialist philosophers.
People commonly accuse Dostoyevsky of being a Christian existentialist. I’m not sure if I buy that or not, but I certainly understand the persuasion of existentialism. Yalom is an existential psychotherapist, which certainly makes things interesting, and I wonder how much will it must take to successfully make meaning out of nothing. I don’t know if I have such a strong will; I think I’d be afraid if I did.
I try so desperately to believe in a generous and loving God. A God who forgives what I cannot. But it’s fucking hard to be so filled with rage and not have a way to unleash it. I can donate and post and do whatever else, but it feels flimsy. I want to scream and rip an old-fashioned phonebook to shreds. I wish I’d known about people pelting a cardboard cutout of a federal thug with sleety snowballs in Malcolm X park yesterday, because I imagine that would’ve felt great.
The trouble with being a Christian is people want to know why. Mellifluous rhetoric can only do so much in moments like these. Sometimes I don’t think I understand why, either. I hear the siren call of a bleak existentialism, but I can’t bring myself to turn towards it—maybe this is what my Russian literature professor felt like when he tried to become a Catholic. I don’t know how else to make meaning; as much as I loved Nietzsche in my theory class, I know I’d disappoint his aspirations for me to be a grand woman of intuition.
Stories of good versus evil have always been important and taught generations of readers that perseverance is crucial, whether they have Galadriel’s light of Eärendil or not. But this week, I feel like I’ve never looked so long and hard at that abyss of nothingness. There’s no reassurance that things will be alright. Okay, I know there is—God and stuff—but seeing that light feels bleak and distant right now. Asking God for something other than my rage makes me choke.
I wonder if Nietzsche would’ve wept now, too.
Nothing scares me quite like being filled with rage and feeling like it doesn’t matter, but meaninglessness also has a special sort of seduction that I find particularly hard to resist. Especially when there seems to be a complete absence of a moral trajectory around me. Staring into the abyss and facing that question often makes me think of this quote from MacIntyre’s After Virtue. “The defensibility of the Nietzchean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle?”
I feel this