There are good tensiles and bad ones. u-tensils can be survival tools, even. But there is also, "good stress," and good pain--in fact most of pain and even malaise are prods to go here or there, fight, take flight, or blog. One can write novels like Walker Percy, whose primary subject was Deep existential Malaise, after Kierkegaard. "Nausea," was I think Sartre's word for it. (not sure what Camus called it--Dennis?)
The fly in the ointment of course is riches (those are not rubies or obsidian on your ice cream...) which cause us to not only become fatly embarrassed--by the end if not during the trials--but also invite ennui and a loss of appetite for the ordinary joys of life. I have these joys in abundance. But as D.L. Moody said, ""Madame, I leak." --referring to the Holy Spirit and Moody's insistence on regular infillings, not merely the manna-indwelling of yesterday. "People are about as happy as choose to be." Is't not so?
I am most fortunate to have many helpers, observers, and even Servants who are not afraid of the nakedness of the Imperator.
"Fork it over," I tell them.
"Must ye be spoon fed all the day?," they reply.
A Gordian Knife is what I really need. May I also borry a cup o' sugar, honey?
ReplyDeleteIn Albert Camus’s seminal work The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus makes direct reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea and the experience of the absurd when he states: “This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.” In retrospect, Sartre and Camus wanted to put the person as subject into the center of their philosophical discussion, which is to say they both sought to understand and interpret human behavior and experience. In this assertive context, both men make reference to the insistent experience of nausea as an absurd awareness of existence: We exist in the world, we are present to others, and nausea is an access to our existence.