Honey From a Lion’s Skull
An Enumeration of Belief Through Literary Analysis
November 6^th, 2022
Joseph R. Hunt

“Samson went down to Timnah together with his father and mother. As they approached the vineyards of Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring toward him. The Spirit of the LORD came upon him in power so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat…

Some time later, when he went back… he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass. In it was a swarm of bees and some honey, which he scooped out with his hands and ate as he went along. When he rejoined his parents, he gave them some, and they too ate it. But he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the lion’s carcass.

‘Let me tell you a riddle,’ Samson said to them [to his companions]…

‘Out of the eater, something to eat;
out of the strong, something sweet.’

… before sunset on the seventh day the men of the town said to him,

‘What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?’”

Judges 14:5 – 14:18

This Thanksgiving past, I took a trip to see family in Fremont, California. I hopped a plane to Reno, Nevada, after a longstanding fight against my anxiety around flying; inexplicably, my fear of heights – at least in relation to airplanes – had resolved itself about five months prior. My Uncle Neil picked me up from the airport, brought me to the home of my Aunt Chris. I slept in a bed in the guest bedroom where my Dad had once been. My Aunt Chris used a comforter from my home. An old flannel jacket of my Dad’s hung off a chair in the kitchen, as if he was there himself in just the next room, ready to step out of the front door on a drive in just a moment’s time. When I came back seven months later for her memorial service, I couldn’t help but think of that old jacket, hung on that chair, and perhaps that memory kept her spirit in that home for just a little while longer.

We spent a few days there, before making the road trip through Lassen national forest south to the bay area. I got back in touch with family I had not seen in person for years. In some instances, the last time I had been face-to-face with them was on a trip west my Dad and I took seven years prior during winter break my freshman year in college. I slipped into conversation with my Uncle Jay about literature, philosophy, and theology while riding into Sunnyvale in his blue, convertible Nissan 350Z, feeling like a movie star; I ate dinner at the same dining table where I remembered fondly my Dad cracking jokes to put his sisters in stitches and did my best facsimile of his humour; I reflected on how different I was now than when I was then.

On the flight home, I experienced what could be described as a moment of clarity; the note I wrote on my phone, while the thought was still present with me:

Increasing sense of self-awareness. Necessity of taking control of my life. Not needing someone else’s family during the holiday, or hiding away in my living room. Creative, motivation blocks don’t seem so daunting, real, or valid. Why were they so damn difficult before? Sense of perspective on my past relationship, and my own failings: inattentiveness, self-focused/centered, unaware; inability to relate and focus on the other; communicate, dive into my feelings, feel safe and secure. All of which are fixable/tractable problems, which means there’s plenty of room for growth moving forward. Feelings of isolation, otherness from the world primarily in my own head; imagined sense of social anxiety? Where else have I been holding myself back? How do I go forward? What are my action steps, and how do I prevent myself from slipping up again? Generate momentum for self growth and maintain it? Maintain enthusiasm?

Pursue hobbies; get back in touch with creative side; stop avoiding people, and get to truly know your friends/family; channel playfulness/adventurousness. Draw, write, read, travel more. Enjoy your life – it’s not all so damn doom and gloom, Joe.

Why is it all of a sudden so simple? Why does this feeling slip away? And why for so long? What in my past/head/heart keeps causing me to slip up?

Take action, of any sort. Will be happier as a result.

There are several things that strike me, reflecting on the last eight years, or so, of my life:

1) A long-fought, losing battle of attrition against boredom, attention, and effort. Especially this last year, I’ve come to identify a periodic cycle of inertness within myself surrounding my hobbies, my interests, my work, and my academics. I often describe myself in a multitude of ways: as an essayist, a teacher, an avid reader; an autodidact, a mathematics afficionado, an armchair philosopher. A hiker, weightlifter, wrestler, wannabe bartender, and - in my daydreams - a professor of literature; a lover of yoga, art, and stoner metal. Even so, despite all my interests, I often find that I spend very little time advancing any one of them. The actual time-on-task for my drawings this last year? Less than two weeks. Time spent writing, journaling, and reflecting? Less frequent than once a week monthly. Instead, I’ve often found myself mindlessly cruising the internet, watching YouTube videos, or bullshitting my way through a few dozen Reddit posts. How can I describe myself in these ways, while putting so little of my time, my energy, and my effort into them?

2) A pervasive sense of non-belonging, lack of control, or direction. I’ve often found, without much of a sense of home or place, that the events of my life have happened to me. I’ve often attributed the good fortunes of things I’ve spent years working on, like my undergrad degree from Mines and all my time there, on luck and circumstance. I’ve a nasty habit of self-effacement, that I’ve yet to fully identify and acknowledge the source of; the extent of which leads to significant challenges reflecting upon and taking intentional action in my life. I’ve griped and complained about the circumstances surrounding my work, and done little next to nothing to actually move in the direction that would make me happier. For someone familiar with the basics of stoic philosophy, I’ve given up the internal locus for the external.

3) At times, paralyzing anxiety. The fear of being or doing something wrong; the terror of being alone, or not knowing the next step; trepidation around first dates, new friends, unfamiliar places, and plans for road trips abandoned as quickly as they were dreamt up. Fear so laughably strong surrounding air travel, that I hadn’t seen the people who have loved me since my childhood in seven years. Long, sleepless nights staring up at the ceiling, gazing out windows, and pacing the house at three in the morning. Frequent indecision, caught in the either-or trap.

These feelings and thoughts are not unfamiliar for me. I’ve felt them, omnipresent, in everything I’ve done for much of my adult life. In waves, and in periods weaker or stronger, they’ve accompanied my days for as long as I can remember; what I’ve come to know and acknowledge, slowly, and with varied progress and enthusiasm, is the necessity of breaking out of these old habits and to acknowledge and address the facts, the falsehoods, and the idiosyncrasies of my personality that have held parts of me back. The work that I’ve recognized I need to begin: to identify the beliefs I’ve gleaned through wit and experience here in my twenty-six years on Earth; to discern the true, the useful, and the false; finally, to make a decision and to act.

Growing up, I experienced a difficult childhood. My mother and father divorced when I was four. One of my earliest childhood memories, now rendered hazy by the erosion of time and relevance, is of them fighting bitterly in my first childhood home, an apartment in Aurora, Colorado. I remember the cold, hostile silence between them while all of us sat in the living room, watching the television together. My mother won custody of my sister and I, and what began was a long regime of anger and conflict over visitation: we saw our Dad on alternating weekends, returning to the apartment for only a couple of days at a time. My mother, a travel agent, moved in with a friend of hers in Colorado Springs, and then to my Aunt and Uncle’s; we hopped around multiple times, to different apartments, as she tried to make ends meet. Some time later, she met the man who would, for a time, become my stepfather, during a family trip back to Scotland when I was approximately five years old. They married a year or two later, our living situation stabilized, to a degree, and through him we enjoyed a significantly higher quality of life than we had known the years prior. We lived in Colorado until I was about eight years old, then moved to San Ramon, California for a year following his job; a year later, the same move, for the same reason, out to Cary, North Carolina.

I still remember how hotly contested the move was, from a legal standpoint: my Dad, who I loved dearly, fought with every resource he – and his family – had to keep us in Colorado, fearing ultimately that the distance would propagate into infractions against his rights as a parent to see his children. From my mother and step-father’s perspective, it was a last ditch effort to impinge upon the happiness of their new family. My Dad lost, spending everything he had, and settled into a long role of helpless/hopeless protest against decisions my mother and stepfather made near-unilaterally around when – and if – my sister and I got to visit him once we arrived in North Carolina. What followed were seven years of turbulence, melodrama, suppressed emotions, and self-effacement in the name of preserving familial harmony. My mother and step-father, in a bid – however misguided, or perhaps accurate – to keep us safe from the caustic infighting and nearly ideological grounds for their bitter hatred ultimately informed me that, after the summer of 2012, I would not be seeing my father again. I spent many nights crying myself to sleep, wondering how I was going to make it through to that summer, and the home I felt most alive, myself, and happy in; how I was going to justify to myself, years into the future, sitting there and hearing the news without protest or action.

I came to the realization that the time was nigh to do something, and make my beliefs and wants known. I visited my Dad that summer out east in rural Colorado, discussed with him the logistics, and made my decision. I flew back to North Carolina, informed my mother and stepfather of my decision, and touched off a bout of horrid infighting which lasted for 126 days. I boycotted everything they wanted to do, was isolated from my hobbies, and spent the entire time resisting any persuasions, arguments, shouting matches, and fights to try and convince me otherwise. It ended with them sending me on a red-eye flight into Denver during a snowstorm Christmas Eve 2012, with nothing but what I could fit into my carry-on. My stepfather wouldn’t even look me in the eye when I left. My mother and I left things on contended ground, and my sister was furious with me. Despite the consequences, I knew that, had I not made the move, I would never have been fully alive.

Without peer, this was the most consequential event of my life.

What came after?

My Dad, who suffered from a few chronic illnesses related to his ectodermal dysplasia, COPD, and cardiovascular health, survived off of disability and food stamps; we were so poor, that at one point I needed to boil water on our electric stove if I wanted to have a warm shower before school. We argued, sometimes bitterly, over our differing ideas on how to get along and what relation, if any, I should still have with my mother. The victim himself of a chaotic, disruptive childhood home, and likely struggling with his own demons surrounding the divorce with my mother and the separation from his children, I often imagine that he was a better man than he had the capacity or awareness to recognize and be. Even so, the extreme changes in his temperament as he passed into anger over even the slightest things left me bewildered, disconnected, and defensive around him.

We experienced an incredibly turbulent relationship with one another, as I came fully to voice and express my own ideas, beliefs, and values and he attempted to overpower mine with his. There came, at one point during the last summer I spent home from college, a moment where an argument between us had become so extremely heated that I found myself literally dragging my belongings down the road to my then-girlfriends home. My initial plan: to gather everything I owned into my car, and leave; this was foiled by my Dad, who, by some stretch of imagination, thought the only fitting thing to do was to start pulling the spark plugs from the engine block of my Saturn. A local police officer, seeing the sight of some nineteen-year-old angrily dragging a steamer trunk full of books down the road, was kind enough to lend a hand and offer a few words of advice. When I returned to college, we were very much on turbulent ground. This continued for the six months, until he died January 22^nd, 2016, and we left our relationship unreconciled.

The complicated grief which followed – screaming nightmares in the middle of the night, hopeless depressions, meaningless arguments and fights with my then-girlfriend, and complete reclusion from everything and everyone, I loved – took years to process. The certainty and hope that I had felt moving to Colorado lay irrevocably broken at my feet, and, as the years continued and I came to learn more about my Dad, my mother, and my former stepfather, became a distant and fleeting memory belonging to a person I neither knew nor recognized.

It’s funny to think about how distinct – as well as how hazy – that period of my life was: the simultaneity of how acute and omnipresent the loss was, alongside the obliteration of many weeks and months to inaction, shoegazing, and despair, baffles me even now. That illucid period of nihilistic self-destruction blurred together so homogeneously, discerning between the moments in elevators, train rides, morning showers, and sleepless nights became an ultimately impossible task for the next year after his death. I spent most of my time numbing myself to my responsibilities at school and my jobs with mindless activity, and escaped from my responsibilities to my friends and loved ones through an old childhood favourite: open-world videogames and novels. Limping through my sophomore year at the Colorado School of Mines, I enrolled, as a way to at least attempt to retain my sanity in the midst of my mathematics program, in Dr. Jay Straker’s Literature and Society course: I figured that, by indulging the part of me that longed to be a literature major, I could help numb a little of the pain I felt on a daily basis, and claw back some sense of enjoyment of my life in the midst of the most difficult year I had ever known.

Little did I know, that Dr. Straker’s class was exactly what I had needed at that moment in time: as the hour began, our first task was a quick-write analyzing elements of the novel/essay we were currently working though – a thematic/character analysis, a description of the importance or connection of a scene to a previous passage in another literary work; identification of important cultural or historical items to the current work; comparing/contrasting important ideas and movements through the history of the world through literature. In ten minutes, Dr. Straker had cleverly sown the seed that would become fruitful conversation topics for the next 50 minutes of discussion, debate, and interpretation for a class of two dozen students, as well as the notes required for essays of incredible depth and reflection on novels of our choice within the class. His room was the interface of historical background, cultural study, and literary analysis of a depth and rigour I had not seen before.

Here, in this brief respite from the rest of my daily life, I found myself relinquishing my problems for a moment, engrossed in the philosophy of continental European writers. In particular, his introduction of Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague and his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus there so poignantly and directly addressed the deep, existential questions I had about the purpose and direction of my life in the absence of my Dad that they later became some of the most formative influences in my life.

I’ve written and thought about The Plague, Absurdism, Existential thought, and Albert Camus’ thinking in several essays – having read Camus’ novel for the third time, it serves as a cornerstone for a developing life philosophy for me many years in the making. What follows below will be an alternation between discussion and analysis of the novel itself, alongside the philosophical discourse surrounding the key ideas and insights necessary to fully appreciate the actions of the novels characters in a hopeless scenario, and what can be utilized within a personal philosophy in the face of certain difficult truths.

The Plague opens with an extended meditation on an ordinary populace, harried by entirely ordinary affairs. Camus describes Oran as “… a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern… the men and women consume each other rapidly in what is called ‘the act of love’ or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality”. In essence, it is not unlike it’s analogue in the real world along the Algerian coast: balmy, warm, dry, and anathema to sudden catastrophes. The narrative expands into disbelief and disregard as waves of rats begin dying publicly in city streets, landings, kitchens, and hallways; thousands are piled into trash heaps, into gutters, and dragged out into the open air. Not long after, the first citizen of Oran, a porter, Michel, falls ill with a strange malady likening much to the bubonic plague, that scourge of medieval Europe. Others are soon to follow, and “M. Michel’s death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gave place to panic”.

Dr. Rieux, a local doctor and the narrator of the novel, begins treating buboes and cysts, attempting to ease the suffering of the populace. He also meets with his colleagues and the local magistrates, attempting to take the most direct and logical action against the evidence of plague he’s seen with his very eyes. In two separate meetings with local governance, Rieux, alongside his colleague Dr. Castel, call a spade a spade and ask for direct and immediate action from the administrators to begin making preparations for containing the spread of the contagion. The authorities, perplexed and shocked, ask for time to wait and see, or to otherwise confirm that such a seemingly ludicrous event hadn’t truly come to pass. Rieux and Castel try, to no avail, arguing with the prefect the matter of semantics: whether or not the disease they’d witnessed directly was the plague, the primary concern was the containment and prevention of unnecessary loss of life, where Rieux elucidates: “You’re stating the problem wrongly. It’s not a question of the term I use, it’s a question of time… It doesn’t matter to me how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population wouldn’t be wiped out; for then it would be”. The focus here: the conscious acknowledgment of the problem – or the lack thereof.

While the perspective of the narrator serves as much of the philosophical and narrative core of the novel, a few other characters of note contribute much to the conversation surrounding absurd themes in Camus’ novel. Of particular interest: a stranger to Oran, principled, and in possession of a winning smile.

Jean Tarrou, a resident of a hotel and fellow chronicler of the events to come, begins his contributions with observations of the architecture, habits, and conversations around him. He listens in in street cars, gazes at neighbours on balconies: the habit of one eccentric man, taking pot shots at cats with globs of spit, fascinate him as much as any novel, play, or day on the beach. Tarrou’s fascination here is the response to an inward observation. Fascinated by the nature of Oran, he meditates and acts upon the question of how to best spend one’s time, with the answer “by being fully aware of it all the while…. By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentists waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queuing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat”. In a word, he directs his focus and awareness of his existence through the lens of the inarticulate, unconscious, or otherwise rote behaviours of those surrounding him. A reader may at first be led to believe that Tarrou has something of an inhumane, detached fascination with society; such a reading can quickly be dispelled by the disappointment and sadness Tarrou feels in no longer seeing the old crack shot on the balcony, or the town magistrate, Othon, parading his thorough-bred family about in dining halls of fancy hotels. Paradoxically he endeavours to understand a problem of much grander proportions by appreciating humanity through his trite, inconsequential observations of the smallest variety of human interaction and being in the world. He is far from removed.

By book two in the novel, the true nature of the crisis comes roaring to the foreground. The city gates lock, the roads close, and sentries are posted; ports refuse entry to inbound ships, and cafes are patronized by the stupefied. Lovers are parted, families enter into a state of exile, and everyone, finding themselves so thoroughly and immediately thrust into the grips of despair and anguish, find no reprieve in unburdening themselves onto a friend or stranger. How could they, when all know so well the exact details, the finest elements, of the shared despair? Having become such a commodity among the populace, all of the highest sentiments and faculties of the people are much reduced.

Rieux and his colleagues have set their teeth and began the long war of attrition against the inevitable. Beset by the ill and dying, as well as those seeking specific and special accommodation out of the city, they do what little can be done to alleviate the suffering and slow the advance. Here we see the horrific “abstraction” of death that Rieux must undergo to survive the current circumstances: in the face of so many overwhelmingly fatal cases, Rieux finds himself hardening to the plight of his patients, and becoming aware of a “bleak indifference” befalling him.

This, the man who smiles at the antics of children only a few pages before.

In time, and by small measures, the people of Oran become conscious of the true enormity of the events upon them, but not without fits. Here, Camus introduces the character of Paneloux, a Jesuit priest who gives aid to Rieux and the efforts to fight disease, but who also serves as an effective foil to both Rieux and Tarrou. Paneloux opens a powerful sermon, stating “calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it”. What follows is a likening of the plague to the scourge of God, brought down upon the proud and “comely as Lucifer, shining like Evil’s very self… hovering above your roofs”, “… the flail… whirling above the town, striking at random, swinging up again in a shower…”. The plague, without matter to origin, had befallen Oran and been given some authoritative purpose.

It’s here we begin noticing as a reader the first observations on a crucial element to Camus’ philosophical writing and to one of the core themes of The Plague: attention. Rieux, it can be noted, begins as one of the few lucid individuals within the city, capable of identifying the true scope and nature of the calamity rushing onto the residents of Oran. Readily he begins warning and preparing with the other professionals he knows, and makes every attempt with the magistrate of the city to begin preparation for a long and serious confrontation with the plague. It is not long after that he spearheads the creation and administration of hospital wards to comfort and attempt to treat the ill and dying, struggling with everything he has to attempt to ease the ill fortune befalling so many in the city. Note, however, that such awareness and attention comes at quite great a cost: Rieux begins a long marathon against apathy, one in which it’s evident in later books of the novel that he’s only just staying abreast of.

Paneloux, on the other hand, resorts to a method that not only assigns some purpose and role to the disaster, but also immunizes the people from responsibility and awareness: when Paneloux takes the liberty of illustrating the plague as the scourge of God, striking at random within the streets of the city and whirling overhead in the gusts of summer, he necessarily leaves man disjoint from the world, simply in awe and terror. The residents are left gawking at portents and signs. The effect: a collective resignation of an internal locus of control, and for many, a descent into quietude and resignation that leaves them entirely at the mercy of what they interpret to be the capricious nature of something entirely beyond them. How many does Paneloux’s sermon rob the initiative from? How many choose inaction, in the face of the alternative?

Contrast Paneloux’s sermon with a conversation, later in book two, between Rieux and Tarrou. As the consciousness of the town turns towards the inevitability of their circumstance, men come to the question of action. What is one to do in such circumstances? Tarrou meets Rieux at home, and makes the observation that the sanitary services of Oran are proving inadequate; he recommends a voluntary, rather than compulsory, creation of sanitary squads to assist the doctors in transportation of the ill, cremation and burial of the dead. Tarrou has already formulated a structured organization in which he needs only Rieux’s assistance with the magistrate to lend it official weight. Rieux reflects on Paneloux’s sermon, remarking “… it helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague… Paneloux is a man of learning… he hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth – with a capital T”. Rieux doesn’t know whether he believes in God, but he acknowledges the task in front of him: that there are sick people, and that they need healing. Here, a crucial conversation occurs between the two:

“ ‘...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?’

Tarrou nodded.

‘Yes, but your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.’

Rieux’s face darkened.

‘Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.’

‘No reason, I agree… only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.’

‘Yes. A never-ending defeat.’

‘ere the record of St. James’ infirmary plays again.

Rieux warns Tarrou of the dangers present in volunteering to assist him. When pressed, Tarrou justifies his decision to help on his morals, which are based upon comprehension. The very next day, Tarrou sets to the task of recruiting his force, and organizing what resistance can be mustered against the inevitable.

In an absurd world, does its absurdity dictate death? To know, Camus argues in his essay, The Myth of Sispyhus, we must follow a bitter logic to the point of death – an absurd reasoning; an acknowledgment is necessary that all true knowledge of oneself is impossible. The most fundamental problem is to address self-destruction: when one acknowledges the absurdity of one’s existence, what are we to do? From such recognition in which the heart yearns nostalgically for a lost connection to the universe comes the true struggle of a man in the world. The revolt of the flesh against tomorrow, the turn from the beauty of a sea shore or the curve of a woman to denseness, strangeness, our discomfort in our own inhumanity – all of these things constitute the absurd. And yet, “In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation”. Despite everything, we have a predisposition to sticking around, and not, say, diving headfirst off the nearest overpass. Suicide is not the answer.

In relation, the minds first step then is to assert what is true and what is false. To understand is to unify, but in this circumstance, attempts at unification beget not only the proof, but the vexation of the counter-proof – a paradox. To understand the world, it must not be reduced to terms of thought, which is to say human terms. Better: to understand is to speak a contradiction. The very tool by which we can come to experience and know the world around us is, at the very same moment, the limiting faculty that prevents us from experiencing a oneness, a belonging, with the world around us. By its very nature the world is beyond all human bounds – the world exists, just as it was, and as it will continue to be. In attempting to circumscribe it with what is intelligible to mankind, we only succeed in recognizing the limits of rational thought and human capability. We come to understand quite fully that we cannot understand, and recognize the limits of rationalism. In a world like this, what’s left to us? Only experience, direct observation, and the acknowledgment of the warp in the image produced by what our perceptions create of the world around us.

Another thought: Existence precedes essence. Sartre claims in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism the being for whom existence precedes essence is mankind. “man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself… Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be. Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”.

Within existential thought, a bifurcation: from where does excellence, purpose, telos, and essence come? There are two schools, and unsurprisingly the camps fork along theistic lines. Theistic philosophers/writers, such as Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky ultimately acknowledge the necessity of the existence of some higher power from which an authoritative meaning and excellence originates. Atheistic philosophers, i.e. Nietzche, Sartre, and Camus fail to reach the same conclusion.

According to Sartre, man first enters the world and “encounters himself”; there comes some moment of conscious awareness of the world, and our existence as a rational being within it. “Man is not only that which which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. That is to say, he is without nature, without essence; without the projection of man’s will into the future and his consciousness of doing so, there is nothing. This, Sartre refers to as the subjectivity of man’s existence which encompasses all that can be experienced and, that without experience by mankind, is ultimately meaningless.

This, Camus writes, is the tension binding man who longs for a knowable world and the exact and extended moment of consciousness. We cannot/must not abrogate a term of the problem. In spite of all our hope and desire for unification, in the light of knowing our only true faculty cannot ever fully explain our reality, it is the only thing we know for certain. We must, then, accept the irrationality of the world for what it is – a place not designed for man, but a world in which man simply exists.

So, what can we take away from this initial statement of the problem? What are the logical consequences? What comes next? For starters, accepting as a basis the limits of rational thought, the only lucid path is that of revolt in the world of which we are not exactly part as rational creatures. “henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity… forgotten how to hope, … abstract evidence… spiritual conflicts…. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd? The body, affection, creation, action, human nobility will then resume their places in this mad world.” Upon recognition, our responsibility is action.

if we are conscious of our existence and its subjectivity within the world invariably we are confronted with a few particular challenges. An existential philosophy implies the existence of anguish, abandonment, and despair.

It’s in book four we begin to see the effects of the monotonous fight against the plague take its toll on Rieux, Tarrou, and everyone involved. For Rieux, the advance of death, for so long and so consistently overwhelming, has caused a lapse in attention to detail and the economization of action: in everything, only the slightest and most efficient use of resources, time, and effort can be involved. The advance of the plague has obliterated sentimentality, pity, or remorse; there is only the task at hand, handled abstractly, almost inhumanely. Tarrou, in the face of all odds, remains steadfast in his efforts to continue recruiting new volunteers, assist the doctor, and provide opportunities for the people of Oran to change heart and lend themselves to the cause of fighting back.

There are two major passages here that strike the reader: one, the efforts of Rieux and his assistants to save the life of M. Othon’s son; the other, Rieux’s last conversation with Tarrou.

Midway through the book, Rieux is asked to visit the home of Oran’s magistrate; when he arrives, he confirms the worst suspicions of the family and takes their young son to the hospital for treatment against the plague and sends the rest of the household into quarantine. As a last-ditch effort, the doctor attempts to use a serum created by Dr. Castel on the boy, hoping it will give him a fighting chance against the infection running rampant through his body.

What follows: convulsions, agony, and a desperate, full-bodied struggle against the inevitable. What spills out across the next handful of pages fully illustrate in as personal and intimate a setting as possible the true injustice, nonsense, and horrible consequences of an infection with the plague. Othon’s son, an innocent child, plays out a horrid scene, one that has unfolded across the city hundreds of times a day.

Rieux, Tarrou, Paneloux, and every main character in the novel are present for the death of the child; each, in their own way, witnessed the tortured, protestant howls as the boy’s voice dwindled and he succumbed to what harried him for the better part of two days.

Anguish stems from our responsibility to make decisions and take action. Operating out from the assumption of our acknowledgment of our existence, we are, at all times, responsible for choosing how to be and act in this world; and likewise, responsible for the same relating to all mankind. “A man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility”.

The essential state of man in the world is that of constant choice. The conscious man is discerning, measuring, and conflicted; to avoid making a decision, or to ignore this realization is what Sartre calls acting in “bad faith”. Every man ought to choose and act as if all humanity were watching, as the subjective nature of our existence requires us to acknowledge the necessity of existing alongside the other. If we fail to ask ourselves if we’re entitled to act in this way, we are masking our anguish.

A criticism against existential thought follows the accusation that a possible solution to the constant state of discernment lies in a quiet or inactive life. But Sartre writes that, instead of leading to quietism, this constant state of anguish leads to a pure and true precursor to action: the only way through the feeling is through deliberate and chosen choices and following through in alignment with our belief.

Abandonment arises from the recognition that “God does not exist, and we must bear the full consequences of that assertion”. Without a priori existence of God, Dostoevsky is right to say “If God does not exist, everything is permissible”. We are completely alone, and we cannot rely on any signs to guide us – after all, we interpret the signs as we choose. We are entirely bereft of a system of ethics or morals with which to guide us. Thus, the necessity of invention: we are responsible and obliged to create such a system.

Despair is the final consequence, where “we must limit ourselves to reckoning with these things that depend on our will, or on the set of probabilities that enable action”. Given that all men choose for all humanity, I cannot count on others – based on faith, human nature, etc – to carry on my work. We are free to choose, and things will be what we have chosen them to be. I should have no illusions and do whatever I can; no hope is necessary to undertake anything. Given that is his own project, he is nothing more than what he realizes. There is nothing else apart from this.

If we desire to be within this world, we are to live without appeal. For Camus, The most fundamental part of maintaining our existence rests on our ability to accept and trust our experiences, the sensations of the body, and the direct experience we can gather about the world around us. Under the acknowledgment of the limitations of our faculties, we must trust in them only insofar as they are able. Suicide, whether literal or metaphorical, is a leap beyond what we can know in terms of acceptance – which negates a term of the absurd. If there is no future, man’s freedom can only be discerned to be individual, and taken in light of consciousness of our death.

As a consequence, value judgments give way to factual judgments; the best way of living gives way to the most living, and to the most conscious and maximal of existence. We may only judge ourselves on these terms. Truly, the only “wrong” way to be is, to paraphrase Sartre, to act, reason, and exist in bad faith with the world around us.

Now, we have three reactions and results: Revolt, Freedom, Passion. From these, Camus offers his reader their responsibilities.

A man’s task in the world is to live without appeal; to live without external judgment, within the time he has. Interesting, then, is the question of morality: an absurd man is an innocent man, but the absurd is binding, not liberating. Everything is permitted, but not nothing is forbidden. Remorse is futile, and all consequences are equivalent in death, but what we accomplish in this world is never without witness; our relation to others can define and dictate what is acceptable and good in this world.

In choosing for ourselves, we are simultaneously choosing for all people; what we believe is good for an individual must necessarily translate into the good of all mankind. Without anything greater than our own conscious experience to rely upon, we’re left with the faculties of our mind to make determinations and judgments, decisions and choices. Operating under the same assumption of cogito ergo sum as Descartes, Sartre states “… we each attain ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Therefore, the man who becomes aware of himself directly in the cogito also perceives all others, and he does so as the condition of his own existence… he cannot be anything… unless others acknowledge him as such.” This is what Sartre calls inter-subjectivity.

Paneloux, in an attempt to comfort Rieux, approaches him outside of the hospital room, and witnesses a man very near defeat. Rieux makes a declaration here against God, who finds it suitable to allow a child to suffer in such a way; in a very different idea of love, he refuses to acknowledge “a scheme of things in which children are put to torture”. Here we see Paneloux experience a moment of truth: turning to the doctor in this moment of vulnerability, he says only “Ah, doctor… I’ve only just realized what is meant by ‘grace’”. Rieux and Paneloux, it is now apparent, are working on different levels, but towards the same goal, and Paneloux, forlorn that he can’t break through to Rieux, carries on to give another sermon in which he in Kierkegaardian fashion chooses a leap of faith instead of a sober accounting of the facts. He chooses to “keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering, the tortured body on the Cross; he would stand fast, his back against the wall, and face honestly the terrible problem of a child’s agony”. One is either saved or damned, without half measure. Tarrou remarks: “When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith, and he will go through with it to the end”. Within a week, Paneloux is struck ill, and, after a silent struggle, unaided until the point of hospitalization, Paneloux succumbs against the scourge for which he had made his stand.

In order to better understand Paneloux, it is perhaps useful to understand his interactions with Rieux, and the people of Oran, through a particular lens: that of faith and resignation.

“No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world… for he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all… everyone became great in proportion to their expectancy. One became great through expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all… greater than all was Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self”.

~ Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, employs the Hegelian dialectic to explore an essential question: what makes Abraham great? Is it his devotion through faith to God, which supercedes all particulars, including the duty he has to his own son? To the implicit suffering and anguish he experiences, knowing full well the purpose God has for him and Isaac? In thinking deeply about Abraham, we experience the paradox: If Abraham is great, how can he be if he sacrifices the universal good (the particular good of himself, his family, and of the good of all men) for his own faith? Must one fulfill an absolute duty to God at any cost? Ethically, is Abraham right to hide himself and his intentions from his wife, Sarah, or even Isaac?

Kierkegaard is well versed in Hegelian ethics, particularly his use of the dialectic to address contradictions in thinking and knowledge which force us to take two known, true ideas, pit them against one another, and emerge with a new truth.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

At the heart of the story of Abraham, the contradictory requirements imposed upon him, his near-silence, and his terrifying dedication to the task stir a great deal of discomfort for the reader. On one hand: Kierkegaard identifies the Hegelian belief that, as beings within the universal, our ethical duty is to uphold and act upon the good of all people, sacrificing our own particular good as something baser, more mundane. All human experience is enclosed. The ethical is the limit and the completion of human capability. For Hegel, das Äussere (the external) is higher than das Innere.

These lesser goods Kierkegaard defines as the aesthetic: notions, images, and ideas worthy of poetic or dramatic consideration, but without deeper ethical or moral importance. The first immediacy of the ethical, he writes, is addressing and identifying the aesthetic and its limitations, as well as the boundaries between them. He defines the aesthetic as the deeply personal experience and the immediate; dramatic irony in tragedy stems from concealment, the free action of an actor from another, which must be revealed in what the Greeks refer to as anagnorisis. Insofar as this pathway from concealment to revelation creates dramatic yeast and piques our interest, it lies in contradiction to ethical action. The ethical as the absolute good of all cannot bear concealment; to reconcile oneself with society, we must move towards revelation and remain there indefinitely as rational beings. In this, we can be made heroes worthy of story – Kierkegaard employs Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia as an example of such a tragic hero: tragic by the very quality that, in recognition of the universal, Agamemnon sacrifices the particular. And yet he argues in faith we can say that a person’s telos – their inner excellence, or purpose – lies outside the universal – with the absolute, with God. By means of the universal, one who gives it up for the absolute stands in absolute relation to the universal.

The question of Abraham’s concealment from Sarah or Isaac takes on aesthetic tones when we consider the pain of Abraham and the dramatic irony of his knowledge. However, Abraham's actions are beyond the aesthetic: he has knowledge of his relation to God, and of his duty – we can’t possibly admire a lapse in awareness. What makes Abraham interesting then is his existence at the boundaries of the aesthetic and the ethical: the interesting is the liminal space between where we find ourselves torn asunder, attempting to discern what else may exist besides our ethics. Even further: since we know Abraham stands in relation to God, who is absolute, he’s transcended both the ethical and the aesthetic and abrogating the universal entirely for the absolute.

Necessary for an understanding of going beyond the universal, is the infinite movement Kierkegaard describes the knight of faith making.

We are capable of coming to rational accounts with the world, of coexisting in the present and it’s affairs lucidly. But such understandings come at the cost of human aspiration. Kierkegaard makes use of an analogy of a prince pining over a princess, whose hand he’ll never win; even so, in resignation, the prince gives up his hope of an impossibility and makes his peace with the present. In consciously recognizing and focusing our life’s content and meaning to one wish, and summoning the strength to focus this consciousness into one act, we make the movement of infinity: we relinquish the particular for the universal. Through infinite resignation, the prince is reconciled with existence. This upward movement remains difficult, and a noble and high aspiration for all people.

“In infinite resignation there is peace and repose; anyone who wants it, who has not debased himself by … belittling himself, can discipline himself into making this movement, which in its pain reconciles one to existence. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself… in infinite resignation there is peace and repose and consolation in the pain, that is if the movement is made properly”.

However, Kierkegaard believes there’s another movement yet to make. In making the movement of infinity, the knight of resignation lets go of his hope for an outcome. Through faith, though, and a relation to the absolute, all things are possible. If the prince were to offer up everything in resignation, but yet still believe he shall have the princess on the strength of the absurd, he shall have her. Indeed, everything done on the strength of the absurd allows one to live without the pain of resignation, but to take back from his sacrifice the very thing he has let go. This, Kierkegaard says, is the leap of faith.

“...Let us now have the knight of faith make his appearance… he does exactly the same as the other… he infinitely renounces the claim to the love which is the content of his life; he is reconciled in pain; but then comes the marvel, he makes one more movement, more wonderful than anything else, for he says ‘I nevertheless believe that I shall get her, namely on the strength of the absurd, on the strength of the fact that for God all things are possible’… the absurd… this he grasps by faith. Faith is no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence”.

Kierkegaard defines Faith, then, as the paradox that das Innere exceeds and goes beyond das Äussere. Love of God – that is, love of the absolute – can give expression to action in opposition to what may appear to be one’s duty. This paradox is immediable, and the contradiction is apparent to everyone within the universal having the effect of making oneself unknowable to anyone! Even for two people undergoing the movement of faith, they will never understand one another. For one undergoing an act of faith, the temptation remains omnipresent to reduce oneself to a tragic hero and return to the absolute; the act of faith, however, requires one to remain transfixed within the tension, neither the witness nor the teacher, forever present with the experience.

For many, Kierkegaard’s definition of faith, and the consequences of what faith truly means for an individual (ostracization as one excludes oneself from the universal and the aesthetic, and submits to a truly individual experience with the world and with the absolute) strikingly resembles many of the elements described by both Sartre and Camus. For all of these writers, human experience inevitably butts against some limit: what we are capable of understanding rationally about the world comes to some boundary beyond which our faculties cannot carry us. Furthermore, the knight of resignation/faith resembles Camus’ absurd man inasmuch as both exist in states of tension. For Camus and Kierkegaard, one must reconcile oneself with what can be understood and what must be beyond our understanding; that maintenance of such a state in between requires a great deal of awareness, attention, and effort. However, differences begin appearing in the nature of exactly what is being transcended, if transcendence happens at all. For Camus, resignation is an act of quietude, and an abandonment of all that man is capable of within the absurd upon making the recognition of our world and what we are capable of within it; Camus would have us revolt, insofar as it is what remains entirely within man and gives rise to an immense measure of happiness, beauty, and enjoyment of life, conscious of the facts that we can know and of those we cannot. We remain in the world, on the world’s terms, and continue to act nonetheless. For Kierkegaard, what’s necessary is not only resignation to the infinite – which bears many of the same identifications that an absurd viewpoint makes – but the step further beyond everything we know: the procession of the individual in relation to the absolute beyond the universal in a leap of faith, utterly unintelligible to others and as remote as any man can be from another.

This distinction is what we see at play when Paneloux speaks to Rieux of grace, when Paneloux gives his final sermon. Rieux, who rebuffs the father’s entreaties, makes the choice to stay within the tension, within the limits of what he can see and experience; the other, in the face of the true iniquity of the world laid bare in the death of M. Othon’s son, engages in a fully personal relation to God as he moves beyond what he is capable of knowing in the world on a human level. Paneloux truly becomes outside of the world, and after his final words, acknowledging the terrible individuality of his experience with the absolute, perishes at last in the movement of faith.

In the last pages of The Plague, Tarrou makes his admission and himself known. Tarrou, who had come from a family of affluence and local influence, witnessed his father condemning a man to death. Horrified at what he saw – the courtroom used as an implement of death-dealing – he took up arms against the society that accepted such a state, himself aiding through his efforts in the killings of those against his cause. He came to understand, paradoxically, that no-one was able to truly remove oneself from the problem of ending a man’s life, however noble the cause; that, as it were, we are all “plague stricken”. His only goal for the rest of his life would be to consciously and actively work against the inevitable connection and abetment of the crime he so desperately attempted to avoid. His only goal had become to do the least harm possible, and work eternally towards helping his fellow men, in what limited capacity he has. “The good man”, he claims, “is the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention… I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to ‘make history’”.

In book five, we witness, perhaps, the most painful loss of the novel. By then, cases of the plague have begun to decline. Hope soars that Castel’s serum has begun effectively reducing the probability of death and increased the chances for people to coalesce. So alienated from hope, the people of Oran are at first distrustful – or outright doubtful – of the evidence. Only after sustained declines in cases over the course of weeks do the people begin accepting the possibility, stoking their anxieties and leading to a new wave of attempted escapes, impatience, and wild oscillations between incredible optimism and deep depressions. The full wavelength of human emotion had returned, painting the town garish.

Only a few days before the gates of the city were to open, Tarrou falls ill. Rieux, who confirms the symptoms, houses Tarrou in his own home, under his personal care and that of his mother. Through a smile, Tarrou accepts inoculation with the serum, and asks the doctor to continue telling him the truth regarding his illness. Rieux promises this, and Tarrou sets into the feverish struggle that will ultimately claim him.

Tarrou’s immense frame is racked painfully with fever, convulsions, and cysts; Rieux, all too familiar with the adversary he now combats in his closest confidant, attempts with everything he has to buy Tarrou as much of a fighting chance as he can. Helpless, he can only watch and hope. Accompanied by the wail of ambulances and cries from jubilant crowds outside his window, he keeps the vigil over the declining man throughout the night. In the light of morning, the last advance of fever. Through increasingly less frequent periods of turbulence, Tarrou’s body gives way, until at last he turns to voice his death rattle to the wall.

Rieux, blind through his tears, can do nothing but watch.

“...If that was what it meant, winning the match – how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for! … thus, most probably, that Tarrou had lived, and he realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions… Tarrou, denying as he did the right to condemn anyone whomsoever – though he knew well that no one can help condemning and it befalls even the victim sometimes to turn executioner – Tarrou had lived a life riddled with contradictions, and had never known hope’s solace. Did that explain his aspiration towards saintliness, his quest of peace by service in the cause of others? Actually Rieux had no idea of the answer to that question, and it mattered little. The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who firmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless. Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.

… what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match”.

~ Albert Camus, Book V, The Plague

I began this essay nearly eight months prior in November; two months later, in January, I remember fondly a discussion I had with a few of my friends in the freezing dark on my back patio, spurred on through cigar smoke and the fleeting, heady respite of a good rye whiskey cocktail. Griffin, Daniel Butler, David, and I had gathered around to enjoy one another’s company, and discuss our intentions and words of the year for 2022. My word was action.

Through my introduction to The Plague, I recognized, after many months stumbling through the dark, that I had come to grips with truly existential questions: what purpose, if any, does my life now hold in the absence of my Dad? With what can I justify the scorn of my old family in North Carolina, the loss of my old friends, and all the creature comforts that came with my old life? How do I reconcile the pain of his loss, the great anger I have towards him, and the despair of losing what hope I had previously held so dearly? For the first time since his death, I didn’t feel so terribly alone. It took years of thinking and slow, oftentimes unconscious work (often with the immense help of others) to grow out of that pit I had found myself in, but what ultimately helped was the conscious recognition of my own responsibility to myself. Bereft of any guideposts or lights on the shore, the task was up to me to navigate the waters as best I was capable of, and to do so lucidly. In recognizing that there is nothing/no-one to save me, it is my responsibility to save myself.

As a consequence, I often find myself in cycles: periods of action, dynamism, growth, and conscientiousness, foiled by nadirs of escapism, inattention, and self-centered rumination. What I’ve come to acknowledge and understand in spite of this though is that all of this is part of the path: in choosing responsibility and consciousness, I must acknowledge my own abrogations, contradictions, and failures. What I gain though is a framework for acknowledgment and understanding of these patterns, which guide me forward. What I choose, I must choose wisely, responsibly. What I do, I must find my own meaning within with the little time I have until my inevitable end. I acknowledge only that which I can experience, as well as the limits of what thought and the rational mind can understand; to know, as well as I can, what exists within an entirely human experience in the world. In recognizing this, I recognize others, and identify within them the selfsame experience, struggle, and work present in my own life.

What I can’t doubt is the necessity of maintaining this lucidity and tension: there is much about the world that I don’t – and likely never will – understand. Yet within this state, in one hand acknowledging the limits and finite nature of what I am, in the other I hold the joy of the time I have with the people I love; the warmth of affection, love, and camaraderie between myself and my family, friends, and my partner.

In embracing that which so wholly terrified me after the loss of my Dad, I make an active choice to be within this world. In recognizing no other alternative than my own personal responsibility for myself and the enjoyment of my freedom in a finite world, a cold night of honest reflection from the heart with my friends is paid the full recognition it is due, and it is all the more dear and real for it. One day these will all be memories, but, like Tarrou, perhaps that means I’ve won the match.