Maya's Wednesday Post 2/26/2014

           One thing I found particularly interesting in the reading was on page fifteen when Tony and his friends talk about Robson’s suicide. Up until this point, the group of friends always takes a philosophical approach to things. This “analysis” is usually given when they are asked questions by their teachers or when something happens in their own lives. They talk about how Camus apparently said that “suicide was the only true philosophical question”. This was kind of a weird thing to say because normally, we think of true philosophical questions being those such as “Why are we here?”, “Is any of this actually real?”, etc. But, when you put suicide into the mix, that in itself brings the emergence of a whole other set of questions. Instead of “Why are we here?”, it becomes “Why do we continue to be here when we could easily just end it all?”. It’s an incredibly sad way of thinking about that topic, but it is not a perspective I would have registered had I not read that one sentence. 

            Not to sound like a broken record, but when we were talking about the wall and what not, we said that it was this sort of necessary part of life because without it all humans would lose themselves in infinite space and in turn would lose their minds. I feel like the inversion of the question “Why are we here?” mentioned above is much, much more terrifying. Asking that question raises doubt as to the necessity of and whether we want to partake in “the journey”. Instead of scouring the Earth from pole to pole searching for answers, that question implies that a person doesn’t have to deal with any of it. They, in fact, choose to. 

            I’m not saying we should all just commit suicide because the going gets rough. That was just how I interpreted that quote. To further cram more Dostoyevsky into this (sorry), where and who would we be without the give and take between suffering and happiness? Unfortunately, there are people who do not see a worth in this and do seriously consider suicide; something inside them is constantly telling them it’s not worth it. They ask themselves that inverted question much too often. At first I was kind of annoyed that Tony & Friends wanted to get something out of Robson’s suicide. But, then again, it could have just been a want to understand hidden under pretension.