Ah Absurdity, my good friend.

So in quoting one of my professors did you wake up today go to leave the house and say "Better take my umbrella in case a whale tries to explode on me today!"  Sounds pretty absurd right? Well let us take a moment to define absurd and we will be quoting Thomas Nagel on this one. "In ordinary life a situations is absurb when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality." Or As he later trims down to, "Some respect in which pretension and reality clash or collide."

Bearing that in mind I am going to start a few day process of trying to take the absurd seriously based off four strategy that I am in the process studying using the following in no particular order::

Schopenhauer- The great turning
Camus - The Embrace
William James- Logotherapy
Herman Melville- being Melville...

All of these will accomplish taking absurdity seriously by combining the meaning or life + Courage.

You know just for absurdity's sake let's start with Melville. Many of you will know him as the man who wrote Moby Dick. Recently he has come into my world as the man who Bartleby the Scrivener. The man who preferred not to. I'm not going to re account the story. It's widely available on the net for free if you want to pause here and go read it, it is fairly short and highly absurd. The real question I want to explore is whether Bartleby is courageous or cowardly and I'm not sure its that simple. You see on the one hand he was defying social norms which does take a great deal of courage but on the other apathy towards the situation can also lead to defying norms.  I'll be honest, everything about this is shaky to me. Trying to put a clear cut line on a vast combination of emotions doesn't lead to the best results. If you think you caught me rambling trying to get you to read a good piece of lit then you caught me. I like reading Melville. Bartleby is by far his best and worst work all rolled into one. I find the story to be one of a man grown apathetic and simple would prefer not to do something more than he would prefer to do it. I find the concept of him wanting to sit on his rump at work doing nothing and getting paid to be absurd but that is social norms talking, or is it survival instinct? If everyone gets something for nothing and no one is doing any work then how do we have anything. Well we don't. So is there a situation where someone who has been working a job for the past 30 years should get to just take the last few off and still show up to work and get paid? If so then who do you expect to pick up their slack? Where is a situation where you can look at your boss or professor and say "I prefer not to." and that be ok?

Liking William James better than Melville,
Corset signing off.