Camus

“The Quiet Christmas” illustration 2016 by jpbohannon

In Camus’ iconic novel The Stranger, a man murders another and spends the second half of the novel trying to understand and rationalize both his actions and their consequence. Despite Camus’ distancing himself from the term, The Stranger is the quintessential “existential” novel.

As is the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad’s novel Professor Andersen’s Night.

But unlike Camus’ Meursault who kills an unnamed Arab on a beach in Algiers. Professor Andersen does not kill but witnesses a murder, on Christmas Eve night in the apartment across from his. And his internal struggles are every bit as Sisyphean as Camus’ protagonist.

Dag Solstad (photo from http://reading-randi.blogspot.com/2010/11/tanker-om-bok-dag0solstad-professor.html)

In Solstad’s novel, a literature professor in Oslo who specializes in Ibsen is a loner who enjoys both his solitude and communal traditions. (Shyness and Dignity—Solstad’s first novel translated in English–featured a high-school literature teacher who had his moment of crisis while teaching Ibsen.) Thus on Christmas Eve night, Professor Andersen dresses in a suit and tie, cooks a traditional Christmas dinner and opens the two gifts under the fully decorated, full-sized tree while enjoying his after-dinner coffee and cognac. It is the perfect traditional Christmas Eve… except that he is willfully alone.

To compensate, he draws the curtains of his apartment window and stares out at the festivities in the windows across from him. In the various windows, he sees people sitting at meals, standing convivially with drinks in hand, sitting around distributing gifts.

And one man strangle a woman.

Naturally, Professor Andersen is shocked. He reaches for the phone, dials the police, but hangs up before he is connected.

He cannot make the call.

Through the holidays and for the next month after, he is obsessed with the murder and with his decision not to call. He searches the various newspapers for mention of the murder or mention of a missing woman. He goes over to the apartment building and discovers the man’s name. He watches from behind the curtains the man’s comings and goings.

Book cover of the Norwegian paperback edition.

At a dinner party, he considers telling his friends, all radicals when they were together in college, but now quite comfortable in their professions. He knows that they would not understand his decision, that their advice, concerns, discussion would be far off the mark.

And so he examines his every thought–past and present. Is he committed– as a member of a civilized society–to tell? Or does his championing of the individual commit him not to tell? He considers his options, his mental growth, his expertise in literature (where, after all, he is consistently analyzing men who are put into crisis and must act). He examines his soul, his basic beliefs, to a degree that most of us do not.

And then he meets the murderer–unintentionally, in a sushi restaurant. Afterwards, he invites the man in to his apartment for a drink.

Even this encounter, does not quell his internal wrestling. He has a quasi-religious experience, believes he has received some sort of divine grace. And yet still he must ponder the consequences of both his acting and not acting.

Professor Andersen’s Night is a short, but dense, novel. The internal dialog that Professor Andersen conducts is wrought by philosophical quibbling, rich in existential anguish, and accessible in its “everyman” applicability.

Like Elias Rukla in Shyness and Dignity, he too comes to doubt all that he has believed and professed, to second-guess his career and all that it purported to do. And he too must fathom, exactly what it is he stands for and where he goes from here.

Professor Andersen’s Night is a thoughtful novel–a novel of ideas and questions. It is a novel that stays with you for the better.

And makes one consider where any of us actually stand.

I am reading about nothing. Literally, about nothing. I am reading about the concept of nothingness, and it’s a pretty difficult thing to get one’s head around.

Philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, and physicists have been puzzling the concept for a very long time, and it is quite a hot button in philosophical and scientific circles today.

In the West the concept of nothing is relatively new.

In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-14th century that the idea of “zero” came to the West. And then, it came to us through accounting. Something had to stand between asset and debit.

The East, however, had long dealt with nothingness not only in their mathematics but in their spirituality as well. For after all, attaining “nirvana” was equal to attaining nothingness, to achieving “emptiness.”

The Hindu word for this nothingness was sunya, which became in Arabic sefir, which came to Europe in the Middle Ages and is the root of our word “zero” and “cipher.” And when it came to Europe, it came along with the rest of the Arabic numerals that we use today.

And yet what is nothing? There are many who say that no such thing exists.

The philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine nothingness. He simply kept subtracting all that he knew existed. However, when he reached the end he felt there was still something–his inner self which was doing all this subtracting. (An enlightened Buddhist would perhaps be able to extinguish that entity, but most of us cannot.) He concluded that imagining absolute nothingness is impossible.

Another philospher, Bede Rendell, saw that the failure in imagining nothingness is that after one had subtracted everything that was in the universe, one still had the space where those things once existed–a universe skin collapsed on itself.

The entire conversation is both intriguing and maddening, puzzling and wondrous. (Sort of like in Alice in Wonderland when the Red King concludes that since nobody passed the messenger on the road, then nobody should have arrived first.)

I am having this “conversation” with myself because of the book Why Does the World Exist?–An Existential Deterctive Story by Jim Holt. Holt’s book, which is somewhat addressed to the lay reader (I can only imagine what a technical book on this subject might be like), springs from the question “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?”

This question, I have learned, is one that has puzzled philosophers for aeons.

And when you get to the question of “something” and “nothing” you are led to the question of what “existed” in the universe before the “Big Bang” created the universe. The theologians have their answer. The scientists are not all that sure. But they have their theories.

And both try to define or dismiss “nothing.”

All of which makes for fascinating reading. Even the mathematical equations (which Holt has to explain to me or which I run to my resident philosopher/mathematician) are fascinating. For instance, his mathematical equation for absolute nothingness is

(X) ˜ (x=x)

and now seems to makes some sense to me. But it took a while for me to get to. (The equation means that X [the empty universe] is not where x = x [where something is something.]) He explains it much better and is much more entertaining.

I am no philosopher or mathematician. My sense of the void, of nothingness–aside from my own existential angst and probings seeemingly hardwired in my soul–comes from Satre, Camus and Beckett. And Holt brings these into the mix as well. (The cover of the book features a photograph of the Café de Flore, a favorite haunt of Sartre’s.) The book, in many ways, is almost a primer of thinkers, ancient and new, and a wonderful introduction to the confluence of metaphysics, philosophy, literature and science.

And what they ask is: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a world? A universe?

These are pretty big questions to roll around with and Holt’s book makes it a entertaining and informative ride.

But to be truthful, I still don’t know the answer.