Who is this guy(Mersault)? Blog Post

All right. I've read the first few chapters of The Stranger, and I understand that I the reader am expected to think that Meursault is a little lacking in human feeling because he is not that upset about his mother's death. Not for the first time in this class I have the feeling that I must be somewhat exisitential myself. When I read the opening of this book, I saw no reason to judge Mersault badly. How am I to know how close he was to his mother? So what if he didn't want to see his mother's dead body as his last memory of her. Meursault seems to me to be the type of person who can't pretend to have the feelings that society expects him to have juust to put on a show. He is respectful and spends the night at his mother's vigil. I think it is better to have your last memory of people be when they were alive. He takes an interest in the caretaker and his story about how quickly dead people have to be buried in Algeria compared to France because of the Algerian heat. He admits to himself after the long vigil that he would really like to take a walk because it was a nice day and he was in the country, "if it hadn't been for Maman." Also, after the long trip back from his mother's funeral, it was not surpirising to me that he was happy to see the lights of Algiers and know that he could go home and "sllep for twelve hours. I think most of us would feel the same way. Meursault knows that he acts differently than others. When the old people come in to see him at the vigil, he has a sense that they are judging him. This feeling doesn't make him act any differently.

Meursault always gives his honest opinion about something when asked despite what the reeaction of the questioner might be. For example, when his neighbor Raymond is talking about the sharp dressing womanizer named Salamano saying, "If that isn't pitiful," Mersault responds, "He asked me didn't I think it was disgusting and I said no." Or when Marie a former co-worker he had the hots for asked if he loved her and he responded, "it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so." He must have known that there was no way he could generate a positive reaction from her after that statement, but he still said it which tells me he is incapable of not telling the truth about how he feels. Sometimes it's better to be honest than to feed people what they want to hear, because then you won't have to deal with the effects of your lying later. If you are consistently youself, people will understand you the way you are.

Meursault seems very grounded in this world and is obvioussly not thinking alot about the future or especially an afterlife. He states the way he truly feels to others and to himself. "It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed."

Huckabees Blog Post Assignment

Do we live in a world that is meaningful and makes sense?

One day your life is going along the way it always does so you have no reason to question it, and the next day something happens to turn it upside down, and suddenly it feels like you have lost your place in the universe. This is the start of your existential crisis, and the first stage is disbelief followed closely by fear. For example Albert Markovski, a good guy environmental activist whose company “Open Spaces” tries to preserve natural habitats suddenly finds himself out of a job when his enemy Brad, boss of the Huckabees megastore (“the everything store”) takes over. There is even a literature angle to the takeover. Brad’s stories, not to mention his good looks, impress the older females at Open Spaces who have grown tired of Albert’s boring “save the environment” poems. Albert then goes to existential detectives Bernard and Vivian Jaffe and asks them to uncover the meaning of his life, which has just fallen apart. Unfortunately, their advice, “Everything is the same, even if it’s different,” does not give him any enlightenment, and so he goes to Caterine, a “dark existentialist.” She tells him to stop thinking and get into a state of “pure being” by smacking a ball in his face, and he ends up setting Brad’s house on fire.
This is not exactly the act of freedom that Sartre or Camus had in mind, something that would reflect well on humanity. When Sisyphus, a clever king, fooled the gods one too many times when he captured Hades so no one could die, his own death ended in an eternal punishment of having to push a boulder up a hill that would just fall down again just as it reached the top. In this absurd situation, Sisyphus found satisfaction in the struggle to keep trying with the boulder, and this was Camus’ point. Sisyphus had to look within himself to find some meaning in his life since there was no outside power that was going to help him. Albert was no Sisyphus.
Albert was also not like a Dorothy, who was one day in her comfy farmhouse and the next traveling by tornado to the Land of Oz, where a wicked witch was out to kill her.
When she discovered there was no outside power to help her because the Wizard of Oz was a fraud, she found the strength inside herself to help her friends and herself.
In spite of the fact that Albert’s act of burning down Brad’s house was not a redeeming one, Albert discovers a sort of existential sympathy for Brad, who loses his beautiful house to the fire and his wife to the fireman. There is a happy ending with Albert back in his own job. Getting even by arson does not give meaning to life, but then “I Love Huckabees” is a comedy, and we do not have to try to make sense of it the way we do with our own lives. In my life if my world suddenly goes upside down, which it did two years ago when a new coach started benching his strongest players. I had to decide between saying, “Everything sucks” and riding it out continuing to do my best.
What was happening had nothing to do with me and so my world made no sense. The only way to give the experience meaning was to find it in me, and I think that is what the existentialists, Sartre and Camus, as opposed to Bernard and Vivian, are trying to tell us. The meaning in the universe has to come from inside ourselves.

Sample from Manifesto

It's 3:30 in the morning during a blackout in New York City, and I'm stuck in a 4 x 4 x 8 foot elevator shaft on what I believe is the 13th floor of a 27 floor building. It’s at least 100 degrees in here, and I have just taken a break from yelling for about three consecutive hours. After the first 15 minutes I stopped pretending that I was not that scared and started in on some high pitched screams. Unfortunately, I am not alone. All too close to me is an elderly religious lady (just my luck) with a hearing aid. My screaming is frying her eardrum. I should just be quietly praying for my soul, she says. “If it’s God’s time to take your soul, it’s best to just hand it over.” “Hey, I’m only 15. I’m still creating my essence,” I reply. She tells me, “God gave you your essence and he can take it away or let it live for ever after death. Your choice.” “Some choice,“ I say. Determination sets in for me as I decide to pound and bang the walls of the elevator harder and harder and keep yelling my high-pitched shriek. I think I hear distant voices as I hurl myself at the walls. The air is getting oxygen poor, and the old lady is telling me to save my energy, which God gave me, for God. Does he need it back? I keep hurling and shrieking. Suddenly there is some kind of heavy tool banging away at what used to be the front door. I collapse on the floor.

Comment on Sandy's blogpost

I think your response brings a lot of insight into the third part of Banach's lecture. I particularly liked your emphasis on the fact that there can be "negativ influences in the world" that make finding the value in yourself hard. That seems to be Camu's point in using the myth of Sisyphus to explain his idea of existentialism. Being condemmed for eternity to push a boulder up a hill that will always roll down again is about as negative an outside condition in the world as it can get. Camus is saying that the fact that Sisyphus keeps trying and does not get crushed by the boulder means he is finding the strength inside himself to make " a defiant gesture" to his fate.

When you wrote about your expirience having "outside influences" get you down so much that it was hard to find your "value within", you were being defiant against whatever was getting you down and using inner strength to overcome it and get on with your own life.

Thanks for your post, I admire your courage

HW # 4 Blogpost # 3

Response to "The Existentialist View of Human Happiness" by David Banach


I can understand why Camus would like the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a way of explaining human happiness in an absurd world. An absurd world I guess is a world without a higher power (a god) who put people on earth for his own reasons and gives meaning to their life. I looked up the myth and the reason that Sisyphus was condemned forever to roll a boulder up a hill until it almost reached the top when it would roll back down again was because he had made a fool of Zeus and Hades during his lifetime. His punishmen was really bad because even death could not save him from it since he was already dead.

Saying that man's fate during his lifetime is like Sisyphus's fate after he died seems on the surface like saying that the life of human beings is absurd if no matter what we do in this world we are all just going to die. Camus seems to be making the point that it is the struggle to achieve our own goals that makes our lives worthwhile and that the struggle has to be constant to give life a purpose. Reading about Camus made me think of how i feel when athletes who have just done something great thank god for their achievements. I always think "You should thank yourself. You're the one who worked hard so that you could have this time of glory." I realize that a religious person could tell me that these athletes could be thanking god for inspiring them to work hard, but the point is that they are finding great value in the hard work they do challenging themselves to get better and better at their sport.

Another interesting thing about successful athletes (can be true about any successful people) is that to be happy it seems as though they have to keep challenging themselves. Tiger Woods has enough money to retire. He does not have to keep playing and risk losing and having people say that he is not that good anymore. He keeps challenging himself because that is what gives meaning to his life not his money and his collection of trophies. In addition, he gets a lot of satisfaction from inspiring kids to play his sport or to just work hard at whatever they choose to do. In a Camus philopsophy way he keeps pushing up boulders, and there will always be another one coming down for him to try to push up again. The satisfaction or happiness in life comes from all the hard work that makes us get better at something. Awards are nice but the thrill of getting them does not last that long.

My feeling is that there is a lot to be said for existentialism. It puts responsibility on us to make what we can of our own lives and do it in a way that does not hurt others and is good for humanity. Then when death comes, it is not depressing because everyone can say that we had a good life. Maybe death is depressing for people who had once thought they were going to spend eternity on a soft cloud with beautiful angels and now believe they are just going to rot in the ground. I think it doesn't really matter whether we believe in god or not when it comes to the best way to live our lives to achieve satisfaction from what we do.

HW # 4 Comment on Remy's Post

Remy still has not written his 2nd blogpost. I guess I will respond to a blog post from somebody else.