Someone told me to read this article, essentially an interview with the writer T.C. Boyle.
Life, says TC Boyle, "is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all." He is sitting contentedly with a glass of wine in the west room of his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, California. "Science has killed religion, there's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all."
If you can, Mr. Boyle, if you can.
I expect being able to afford a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright helps keep the chuckle-muscles healthy.
A new collection of his stories, Wild Child, will be published next year, and he has amassed another volume of his lifetime collected stories. This summer he hopes to complete his 13th novel, about ecological restoration in the Channel Islands off the California coast. "More and more what I write about is man's relationship to nature, and my take on it is extremely depressing," he says. He tackled climate change and ecological collapse in A Friend of the Earth, published in 2000, and now he has even less hope that an apocalyptic future can be averted. "I think it's going to turn out like Cormac McCarthy's The Road within 50 years. We'll eat everything left to eat and then we'll eat each other. But my plan, personally, is to die. That's how I'm going to deal with it."
Yes, dying is how I intend to deal with it, too. I wonder how Mr. Boyle's "three grown children" will deal with it. No doubt they'll have no choice but to "laugh in the face of it all".
I feel like it's about time I posted these:
I found them here.
I didn’t watch the videos, but I read the discussion at Thomas Ligotti Online. For me, the fundamental issue is that of procreation. Everyone should be free to choose to continue living or not. However, no one has the moral right to choose for others whether they should have life forced upon them nor life taken away. Morally speaking, procreation is the moral equivalent of murder in that both are making a choice for someone else. If somehow I was given a choice, I would rather not have been born. I’m glad that my parents enjoy their lives… good for them. But why did they feel it necessary to force it upon me? Then they send me off into the world and now it’s my problem. I’m supposed to be accept responsibility for a life I don’t even want?This situation is similar to being born a citizen of a country. I never chose to be a citizen. I’m forced to follow laws that were created by other people. I have no real choice. I either follow the laws or I go to jail. Similarly, I either deal with this suffering life or I kill myself. The problem is that prison and/or suicide just aren’t that great of alternatives. I’d rather simply not have existed in the first place.Many people actually do enjoy life and even I enjoy life relatively speaking… relative to the horrific lives that many people live in the world. How I see it is that, despite the myriad pleasueres of life, there is more suffering than pleasure. Also, anyone who lives long enough will most likely experience great suffering.It comes down to the fact that procreation is a mindless biological urge. People can’t help themselves and they rationalize this urge that compells them. Related to this is the way our bodies disallow us to fully grasp our own suffering. There are many neuro-chemical and psychological mechanisms that create blocks to our awareness and sensitivity. For instance, giving birth causes immense pain. To counteract this, the body produces a neuro-chemical that stops memories from being formed. Mothers don’t remember how horrifically painful the experience it was. If they did, there’d be a lot fewer children. This is how life begins…. suffering and forgetting.
Morally speaking, procreation is the moral equivalent of murder in that both are making a choice for someone else.Although I don’t look at people who have children and think, “You are a murderer” – perhaps in the same way I don’t look at people who eat meat and think, “You are a murderer”, even though they are doing something unnecessary that requires death – I have thought for a long time that having children is in some ways worse than murder (in its consequences, if not its motivations). It’s fairly easy to demonstrate that life is just unacceptably horrible. Films and books that are popular and successful never portray life as it is actually experienced (I’m fairly confident of this). We seem to have a capacity and need to imagine a better world. And this world is so utterly vile, that it’s not hard to imagine a better one. As the other Quentin Crisp said, “Any film, no matter how bad, is at least better than real life.” I find myself wondering sometimes, well, why can’t life be nice? Why do people go to such lengths to rationalise a world in which it’s possible for soldiers to cut open pregnant women and parade the foetuses through the ransacked village impaled on their bayonets? Or even, simply, a world where ‘no one ever gets what they want’, and ‘everybody dies frustrated and sad’. I’d rather life was a Disney film, any day. I keep hoping to wake up from this nightmare. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but I’ve got the horrible feeling that, if it will happen at all, then, “you’ve got to wait to die”. In which case, why bother even having this nightmare of Earthly existence?
“Although I don’t look at people who have children and think, “You are a murderer” – perhaps in the same way I don’t look at people who eat meat and think, “You are a murderer”, even though they are doing something unnecessary that requires death – I have thought for a long time that having children is in some ways worse than murder (in its consequences, if not its motivations).”Yep. I certainly don’t walk around giving evil stares at every person with a child I come across. People can’t help themselves. Most people never think about why they have children. Procreation is just what animals do. It only becomes a moral issue when we consider ourselves as something other than just animals… whatever that might mean. We humans are able to think in abstractions and so we can theorize about the possibility of suffering not existing. However, as Ligotti speculates, our higher thinking skills (with its concommitant self-consciousness) just leads to even worse suffering. We’re very aware of suffering, but it doesn’t change the fact that we seem incapable of doing much about it. To not procreate is a rational choice, and as soon as a truly rational species evolves maybe they’ll make that choice.By the way, I loved the following line from your post:”I expect being able to afford a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright helps keep the chuckle-muscles healthy.”That is just perfect. Wealth may not make one extremely more happy than the average person, but for sure it can help to dull the acute awareness of suffering.
Thank you.It’s probably wrong to anticipate a writer’s work based on an interview – I mean, I don’t feel like I’m a good advert for my own work, really – but if this interview is anything to go by, then I think that T.C. Boyle’s work must be dreadful. He comes across to me as utterly complacent. I suppose the phrase that immediately springs to mind, though there are probably more accurate phrases, is ‘designer nihilism’. Imagine the old why-conversation between Boyle and his kids:”Daddy, why are we here?””Life is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Tee hee hee.””Then why did you bring us into the world, Daddy?””Oh, no reason. It was tragic and absurd. Ha ha ha. Tee hee hee.” “But what are we here for?””To laugh in the face of it all, like me. Ha ha ha ha. Tee hee hee.””Daddy, you’re an arsehole.””Ha ha ha. Tee hee hee. I know. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread nihilist man. Tee hee hee.”I imagine the experience of reading one of his books must be similar.Yesterday I started reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Zadie Smith, apparently, says, “Every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope.”The synopsis blurb:Ivan Ilyich is wasting away. He lies alone, dosed up on opium and deceived by doctors [some things never change], haunted by memories and regrets. His friends come to see him, their faces masks of concern. His faithful servant tends to his every need. But as he forces down false rememdies and listens to empty promises, Ivan grows aware of one terrible truth. His wife and his children are not awaiting his recovery. They are waiting for him to die…Now, I’m not sure of the precise reasons that Zadie Smith feels like her life is being put under a microscope when she reads this. It seems that there are two main possibilities: She is aware of being a superficial social climber like the hero of the story, and just about all the other characters, or it is something to do with the idea of facing death in and of itself, without reference necessarily to whether or not you are the moral equivalent of Simon Cowell.Here, Ilyich begins to realise he is really dying:”Death. Yes, it’s death. And not one of them knows, or wants to know. They have no pity for me. Too busy playing.” (Through the door he could hear the distant sounds of a singing voice and the accompaniment.) “They don’t care, but they’re going to die too. Fools! Me first, then them, but they’ve got it coming to them. And they’re enjoying themselves! Animals!” He was choking with spite. And he felt a wave of agonizing, unbearable misery. It surely wasn’t possible that everybody everywhere should be condemned to this awful horror. He sat up.
“Something’s not right. I’ve got to calm down and think it through from the beginning.”Needless to say, no matter how he thinks it through, he can’t escape the fact that he is dying. Death, as far as I’ve read in the novel, is presented as an unthinkable, which is how it has often been presented to me. Interestingly, one person who presented it thus to me was a doctor. “It is actually impossible to come to terms with death,” he or she said. “Speak for yourself,” I thought to myself, “And I’m glad that we’re in such wise and confident hands in the medical profession.” Now, as I said, I’m not entirely sure of the details of Zadie Smith’s reaction, but although I think my life is far from irreproachable, I don’t feel pierced by a terrible self-recognition when I read this novel. Either I’m too stupid to realise it, or I’m not the kind of social climber that Ilyich represents. Then there’s the question of death itself. That’s a question that – for some reason – I have lived with at least since I was about sixteen. Some time after that, there followed upwards of ten years in which, every minute of every day, death never left my thoughts. I thought of it with the same kind of horror depicted in this novel by Tolstoy. And then, more recently, something gave way in me, and I stopped being afraid of death. The fear of death still remains sufficiently that I can recognise it and taste all its terrible little subtleties when, for instance, I read about it in this novel. But unless I’m coerced into feeling fear – unless, that is, I catch it from someone else – these days I rarely experience it. Then again, maybe that’s “rarely” by my own standards, as I know them from my late teens and twenties. I’ll accept that it’s quite possible that I die screaming, clawing and clinging as I slide into the maw of darkness.But even writing that, I do not shudder as if I’m tempting fate. Having said all that, this unthinkable quality of death is so widespread (shall I say, with gross inaccuracy, “in Western society”?) that to bring children into existence and under the umbrella of that unthinkable, is a terrible, terrible thing. And such a terrible, terrible thing can only be perpetrated so calmly because it is unthinkable, and so, naturally, no one finds themselves able to think about it. It surely wasn’t possible that everybody everywhere should be condemned to this awful horror. Quite possible, yes, but simply unthinkable. It’s also possible that not everyone will undergo this same horror. But that most people probably will, and maybe even all will, to some degree, seems to me one very good reason not to have children. “Something’s not right. I’ve got to calm down and think it through from the beginning.”It’s certainly true that something is not right. The question is, what? I’m finding this quite a fascinating novel, and far more humane than it is morbid. My feeling is that the ‘something’ that is not right is a kind of hypnotic spell that holds sway in society leading people to identify with such ridiculous things as being a respectable member of the legal profession and so on, and the binding agent in this spell is a subtle kind of poison that accumulates in the system, and comes out very painfully when people have to face death. I feel like it would be possible for Ilyich to realise this, and to face death in a liberating way, but maybe that’s easy for me to say, as I am not aware of having any terminal disease right now apart from life itself. And I’m fairly sure that Ilyich’s end does prove to be ‘unthinkable’. Those philosophies in this world that encourage people to face death, rather than see it as merely unthinkable – generally speaking, this means Buddhism and other Eastern traditions – interestingly, seem to be those that are more inclined to discourage childbirth. In the Hindu tradition of reincarnation, and the Buddhist tradition that apparently derives from it, being born into this world is really a matter of commiseration. I think the phrase “the evil of birth” may be found in The Bhagavad Gita, if I remember correctly. While I have some questions about this worldview, I can’t deny that it agrees with just about everything I have observed of life. Being born really is a terrible bummer. I think, unless Jehovah is going to appear in a puff of smoke and start handing out Christmas presents and explaining exactly what the meaning of it all is, we could be perpetuating the torture of human existence needlessly for… well, perhaps not that much longer judging by the way things are going, but, on balance, I think that there can never be anything wrong with the option of simply ceasing to reproduce, while there has always been a great deal that is intolerable about reproduction, perpetuating, as it does, this mode of unthinkable suffering.
I’ve never read Ivan Ivan Ilyich, and it doesn’t really seem like a book I’d be interested in. It sounds rather depressing and I don’t need any help in that department.As for death, I’ve thought about it enough. But I can’t say I have any clear opinion about it. I’m not sure what it means for death to be ‘unthinkable’.”Those philosophies in this world that encourage people to face death, rather than see it as merely unthinkable – generally speaking, this means Buddhism and other Eastern traditions – interestingly, seem to be those that are more inclined to discourage childbirth.”This reminds me of some traditions that have existed in the past here in the West. In a darkly perverse way, it’s sorta amusing that the Cathars were wiped out by the Catholics. The Cathars saw the world as a bad place and discouraged procreation. Aren’t the Catholics a funny people? They find some people who don’t celebrate life and so they kill them. That’ll teach ’em. One unusual element is that the Cathars were more accepting of sex than the Catholics because sin wasn’t passed by carnal knowledge. This makes me wonder about Catholicism. God demands we procreate abundantly and yet it’s through procreation that we are born sinners. Along with this, many Christian theologians (such as Augustine and Calvin) believed only an elect would be saved. That is quite different from Buddhism. I should mention that some Christian theologians had a more universal bent in their views of salvation. If I remember correctly, Origen believed in Universalism and also he was judged for supposedly having castrated himself. Am I starting to see a pattern here?Manichaeans were also another group that discouraged procreation and were persecuted by Catholicism (by Augustine in particular). Interestingly, it lasted much longer in the East. Buddhism came first and Manichaeanism included Buddhist theology such as asceticism.
I’ve never read Ivan Ivan Ilyich, and it doesn’t really seem like a book I’d be interested in. It sounds rather depressing and I don’t need any help in that department.I imagine different readers will be affected differently, but I didn’t actually find it depressing. I find the idea of facing death to be simply very necessary. I thought this was done in the book without being morbid. I don’t think I can really fault the tone. After finishing it, I was left thinking that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing just to let go of the things that I’ve been clinging to, to let go of whatever lies I’ve been telling myself, and so on. That’s not to say that I actually have done, but after reading the book, doing so seems less frightening than before. I feel, in some way I can’t currently articulate, that it’s a message needed now more than ever. As for death, I’ve thought about it enough. But I can’t say I have any clear opinion about it. I’m not sure what it means for death to be ‘unthinkable’.I suppose I was using the word ‘unthinkable’ to mean that it cannot be thought about, because its reality is both unfaceable and impossible to comprehend. This is not really my view, but it seems to be the view of many. I can understand it, because that’s how I felt for years. However, it seems to be something that is culturally perpetuated. There are many people who actually want death to be unthinkable, for some reason, like the doctor who spoke to me who said it’s impossible to come to terms with death. I think I’d like a second opinion. And this is a person in authority, in a social role that has a lot to do with coping with death. That’s how sadly superficial society often is. If even doctors are saying, “You can’t come to terms with death”, then it’s no wonder that many of their patients feel lost and despairing. I find it to be a ridiculous, juvenile attitude for a doctor to have. It’s like saying, “That problem is too big – let’s not even think about it.” That’s similar to the ecological situation. People simply have not wanted to face the truth, and so it has got worse and worse. In Tibet, of course, there are particular services meant to guide the dying person into the next life. Here such a thing is ‘unthinkable’ because it would entail taking spiritual matters – the only things that really matter, anyway – seriously, which is something that just cannot be done in a vapid, materialistic society like ours. Even our religion is materialistic. In fact, as I’ve said before, Christianity and materialism are really conjoined twins. Christianity, as promulgated by various churches, was designed to place spiritual matters out of the reach of the peasants. God was locked away in the sky. Science and materialism inherited the secular world that this created. Science strives for power by saying there is no spirit, therefore you cannot rely on your own spiritual guidance, you have to listen to the voice of us experts in matter instead. It’s really the same power game as the church has been playing, but worse, as it denies all possibility of spiritual life. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think that people should give themselves a break regarding death by realising it’s unavoidable. Therefore, it’s not their fault. It’s not as if, by doing something differently, they could avoid it/have avoided it. It will happen and you don’t have to do anything about it the way that all the vile, stupid people in this world are asking you to do things about other things that don’t matter – “You must fill in your tax form! You must tidy your room! You must stop thinking inappropriate sexual thoughts! You must make your contribution to society!” Etc. Etc. These are all troublesome things that you have to do something about – apparently. You don’t have to do anything about death. It will happen, gratis. It will simply be easier if you accept it, and it will probably make other things easier, too. I certainly don’t want to sound wiser and more balanced than I actually am, but, anyway, such are my thoughts on death at the moment.