You Will Find This One ABSURD 💜

“Who,” asked my brother, Steve, as he and I and our father sat at the dinner table the night after Thanksgiving, having finished a round of leftovers and a few slices of pie (apple, pecan, pumpkin) from nearby Verrill Farm, “are your favorite Australian actors who no one realizes is Australian?”

That’s easy, I thought: “Morgan Freeman,” I said. “And Josh Gad.”

If I have to explain to you why that’s funny, well, I’m not going to, except to say that this type of humor is very much the type our family runs on. Among Steve, our dad, and myself, and often spiraling out to the other family members, there’s a bit of low-key competition going on, to see who can quip and comment on the conversation in a way that just barely makes sense but is at heart nonsensical, especially in its eagerness to reference half-forgotten cartoons only a couple of us ever saw, or third-rate Monty Python bits, or a ridiculous thing my parents’ friend said at a dinner party 40 years ago that has since become a bit of essential family lore. The humor lies in its desperation, in its valiant attempt to connect the disparate elements of all our lives in ways that can , after all these decades we’ve spent together, surprise and delight us.

This is Gross family absurdism. It might not be all that different from your family’s absurdism, or from absurdism in general, but it’s the style I know best. It might not actually be funny—we are not real comedians, although we did once, when I was 10 or 11, vacation at the grand Borscht Belt resort Kutsher’s, in the Catskills, and one of our distant relatives was once a member of a fourth-rate Three Stooges knockoff troupe, so you know: It’s in our blood. The absurdism feels Jewish, but then again Jews have a lot of historical experience with the absurd, so there you go.

We live in absurd times. We live in absurd times, and those times encompass all the meanings of “absurd.” The politics are so childishly drawn that I’m reluctant to relate them, but let’s do so, just for kicks: Our incoming president is a felon and a clown; he’s setting the world’s richest man the task of disassembling our government via a committee named after a second-tier cryptocurrency named for a memeified 2010 photo of a Shiba Inu; he’s picked people to run departments devoted to health, energy, and the environment who are willfully uninformed about health, energy, and the environment. Even if you support the guy, you have to admit this is pretty absurd.

And that absurdity points to the even bigger absurdity, the one Camus writes about in The Myth of Sisyphus, which I am rereading for the first time since high school: How the fuck do you go on living in the face of all of this? Why bother trying when the worst people are not only winning but destroying any chance for any of us to have better lives in the future? With no god to believe in, no “arc of the moral universe” whose bending we can trust, what is even the point?

Camus, who was writing smack in the middle of World War II, framed the question rather literally: How do you decide whether or not to kill yourself? Which, like, dude: Dark! Is suicide really our (ahem) jumping-off point here?

Today, 82 years later, his question feels a little melodramatic. We’re not literally going to kill ourselves because things are bad. Right? (Right?!?) But I would say we do face a form of spiritual suicide. That is, as awful as our overlords are turning out to be, it’s exhausting to keep up the fight against this crap. For some of us, we could just do nothing and gut out the next four years (man, let it only be four years), muting our comments, minimizing our resistance, and retreating into acceptance of the inevitable. Which is, of course, what the awful ones want, and while we never ever want to give them what they want, we’re also just tired. We are all too old for this. Even the young people are too old for this.

If it were all just always absurd, that would be one thing. We can laugh, or at least marvel, at the truly absurd. But after nearly a decade of this, the absurd is becoming quotidian, boring even. How shocking are any of the details I mentioned above? Is anyone surprised by each new jester move by our once-and-future king? I hope not—these people lack imagination. But the consequence of the absurd banality of their evil is that it slips by so easily. How do we even react except to state literally what has happened? Delivered by a skilled comic, it prompts a chuckle. Delivered by an AI voicebot, it drones us into submission.

But this is, too, one of the stages of the Sisyphean journey, which is worth recounting here, on this 30th installment of “Trying!” Sisyphus, as you may recall, was the king of Ephyra (an earlier name for Corinth), and although he was the cleverest of men, right up there with Odysseus, he was also a real dick who would kill visitors—should we perhaps say migrants?—just to prove he was ruthless. The gods, however, had rules about treating, or not mistreating, guests and travelers, so this breed of ruthlessness was a big no-no. For that, and for a whole bunch of other, more sophisticated crimes, they punished him in Hades by requiring him to push a boulder up to the top of Mount Tartarus, then let it roll back down to the bottom, where he’d have to start over. On the scale of Ancient Greek punishments, it beats having your liver pecked out daily by an eagle, but not by much. Me, I’d rather be turned into a bee.

Camus’s famous insight here was: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That is, as Sisyphus watches the boulder plummet, and as he trudges downhill to retrieve it for the n^th time, he may at first be melancholy—”this is the rock’s victory,” as Camus says. But then Sisyphus shifts his viewpoint, and accepts not only his fate but the long series of choices and actions that have brought it upon him. And he decides: The meaning of it all is no longer determined by gods or by rocks. “The rock is his thing,” Camus writes, and Sisyphus can therefore make meaning of it, and of his fate, however he chooses. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

As much as I love this sentiment, I think Camus misses one thing here: This is not a permanent state of affairs. As much as we like to imagine we can, with the switchflip of a neuron, alter our worldview, it’s a lot harder than that. We waffle, we revert. Me, I imagine Sisyphus happy… for a while. And then that rock starts to get to him again, and he feels the full weight of its punishment. The eons really are eons, and really will never end. The rock is winning, and he may spend millennia suffering, only to slowly work his way back to triumph and happiness. And who knows how long that will last, either? These oscillations are his destiny, and they add yet another layer of absurdity: He knows how to feel better about his existence, he knows he’s worked himself out of melancholy before, and still—it’s fucking hard. And vice-versa, for when the struggle fills his heart with joy, he must also know that it may not last, that a day or a century later, the rock may win again. Does this knowledge make the absurdity an easier burden to bear? I hope so. I don’t know that it really does, but I hope so, because that’s our world right now.

Earlier that Friday, we visited my uncle, Gary—my dad’s younger brother—in a nursing home. Gary’s had a rough few months. Well, a rough 74 years. He was born with cerebral palsy, and is now blind, but has lived a very full life despite those challenges, with lots of friends, a mostly independent existence at a village for the disabled, and keen interests in sports, politics, and books. Gary’s a sharp, funny guy.

At the end of September, however, he was rushed to the emergency room with a systemic infection from his catheter, and during surgery his heart briefly stopped, and while he’s mostly recovered, he’s not healthy enough to return to his home yet, so he’s in this nursing home. When we saw him, he looked small. He’d never looked small before. In fact, he had been fairly meaty—not fat, but physically present, maybe because his wheelchair added to his earthly footprint. Now, in his nursing-home bed, he was spindly, his fingers long and angular, the skin smooth and a little waxy.

He wasn’t particularly happy, either. The food was bad, he complained, and his hips ached, and his feet itched, and the physical therapists only worked on him 30 minutes a day. Usually, complaints are for Gary a sign of high spirits—there’s nothing he loves more than kvetching about a shameless politician or a well-regarded book or movie he recently suffered through. Not today. He was also missing his friend Ruth, who’d been visiting him almost daily but was away for a couple of weeks visiting her family. Also, his new Alexa was tricky to use. Also also, he was wondering how long he’d live, and whether anyone would bother to show up to his funeral.

Now this was absurd. Gary has dozens of friends and supporters, in the communities of central Connecticut and far, far beyond. His funeral, whether it takes place next year or five years from now, will be very well attended, and we made sure he knew it.

But I thought he needed something more. “It won’t just be your friends, Gary,” I said. “It’ll be your enemies, too, there to make sure you really are gone.” Then Steve chimed in and said something like, “Enemies are a sign of a life well lived.” (It might not have been exactly that, but let’s pretend it was.) At that Gary opened his mouth wide and laughed—a quiet but genuine laugh I hadn’t heard from him in a while. At that subtle moment, and maybe only for a moment, the struggle had filled his heart¹, and we both saw what we’d known but needed to be reminded of: that we alone give meaning to our destinies.

And in this we will always be superior to the jerks who seek to put us down and keep us down. Because while they measure their lives by the banalities of money, status, and power, and will be disappointed by their gods when they fall and fail, we recognize and embrace the absurdity of the situation, the cosmic joke whose punchline is us, and can move past it, even within our suffering. We can laugh at ourselves, and they can’t. The rock is our thing, not theirs, and we can imagine ourselves happy. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. He’s seeing his cardiologist next week—wish him luck!

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