My little sister called me yesterday, all panicked, about her senior AP English project. She had chosen for her assignment to read six plays. But these weren't simple theatrical works. She chose, for some intangible reason which likely deals with the fact that she has an intellect larger than ideally controllable, to read plays possessing themes of absurdism. We debated it for a while. I've never really talked about absurdism in any class, and am only kind of aware of it. I do know that it should overlap with existentialism, if only because Camus' The Stranger is considered a work of both the absurd and the existential. Fortunately, my sister had no idea what existentialism was and after I had explained it the best I could, we compared the two studies. And we found the overlap!
Existentialism tries to find meaning in things which should have no meaning. It's a kind of counterpart to religions, which usually try to tell you what you should be doing with your life and more importantly, why you must do what you're told. But existentialism is more like one person:one meaning. You make your own decisions.
Absurdism, on the other hand, seems to throw many random details at you and makes use of your mind's inherent demand to find meaning in anything. Just as I can see faces in the front bumpers of cars, being presented with many random details, we will find the meaning, the lesson, the cause of such random events.
A famous work along these lines is No Exit best known for it's quote "Hell is other people." Four people find themselves in a room which turns out to be hell. When the door to the room finally opens, they do not wish to leave, because they've found a sort of meaning in the other people they've spent close time with.
And it's almost painfully true that you can only judge yourself by knowing yourself through other people. You can only do so much objective analysis of yourself before you realize you are nothing without a sort of external scheme to compare to. This scheme is presented by others. I've always assumed that I am quite tame in the sins department because I didn't drink alcohol or have sex until I was twenty, whereas most of my peers have much younger ages of first intoxication and lose of virginity events. I've also occasionally thought of myself as much more of a lesbian than any of my female friends because I've made out with somewhere between four and six women (I said I was a virgin, I didn't say my mouth wasn't a slut).
I wonder if this is at all misleading. In isolation you could easily grow to hate or love yourself to unhealthy extremes. But how accurate are other people's portrayal of you? Things like racism, sexism, and other smaller details like how tall you are or how pretty you look, go a long way in tainting people's assumptions about you. I just broke up with my boyfriend and I couldn't comprehend exactly why he was breaking up with me for the longest time. And when I finally found out his reasons, that he thought of me as harsh and insensitive in the way I communicated, I was shocked. That's not how I imagine myself at all.
And maybe we're both right. Surrounded by my family, my comments have been cultivated alongside my older sister and my parents, all of whom joke to the extremes. The sarcasm, the black humor, I can't shake it. I don't feel like I ever try to be overly mean to anyone. I'm easy to love most people, as long as they don't hurt me first. But what is hurt? And how do you judge if you've really been hurt or if you've just received a compliment from a very negative person? raised completely different compared to you?
So now I have to determine if I'm a bad person or not. But if hell is other people, maybe it would be preferable to being alone, with the last thing you remember being the details of how you uncontrollably and unintentionally hurt someone whom you respected quite a lot.
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