Getting Really Absurd

When one hears that something is “absurd,” the last thing that comes to mind is reality. After all, what is absurd is what is surreal, different, emergent from the melted clocks and upturned mustache of Salvador Dali. But Albert Camus, the Absurdist philosopher and thus expert, said the following: “The Absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” That is, the Absurd and the world cannot exist without reference to one another.

This simple truth came to mind earlier this week when I was watching the series Louie, which is essentially Seinfeld’s avant-garde cousin with children. Throughout the show, seemingly absurd things happen: Louie confronts a series of conflicting traffic signs, he is attacked by a homeless man for no reason, and he cleans up strange liquids on the subway. But those actions reflect a twofold absurdity.

On the one hand, they showcase the hilarity of daily minutiae: they point to the sad and simple truth that much of what we do is both annoyingly simple and yet beautifully human.

On the other hand, Louie’s antics reflect the passivity with which many of us face existence. Too often we feel that the world just moves by; paradoxically we hear its “unreasonable silence” as our lives rush past with a drowned scream, praying for recognition. Even if we do control what is happening around us, everything else goes on. This fact is simultaneously a cause for immense calm and unbelievable angst.

In this sense, the Absurd cannot be divorced from the real; it is, in fact, the real itself brushing shoulders with the transcendent divine. It reminds me of the early Simpsons episode in which Bart is sent to a school for accelerated students. When asked if he can name a paradox, he hesitates and then says, “Well, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” The teacher responds with puzzled recognition. And yet Bart is right. That is a paradox, a paradox so Calvinistic and simple that it eludes the geniuses around him. That, dear reader, is the Absurd; it is Bart and Louie struggling with and growing in the life God has given them, wrestling in a sea of other thinking subjects who are experiencing the same daily paradoxes.

It seems to me that the pious life, the good life, starts with this simple recognition: that everyone else is struggling with the same absurd reality and that swimming against, and ultimately accepting the existence of, the current is the point.