The Futilitarians Read online

  Drinks were poured and names were traded among the dozen of us. With the exception of my younger sister Susan, and Chris, whom I’d met during the dark years around my sisters’ deaths, the others were all people Brad and I had befriended since we’d met each other about eight years before. We knew them from different spheres in our lives—work, art, kids. In addition to Chris’s eclectic résumé, we had a few writer/teachers, poet/musicians, a couple of visual artists, a construction manager and former journeyman plumber, and one psychology professor with a private practice on the side who’d long referred to himself as an “existential plumber.”

  Chris preambled with a little background information. He’d chosen the initial readings because he wanted to go way back, to hear from the ancients, get to the root of existential thought—at least the Western root—with a letter from third-century-BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus to King Menoeceus on “how to live well” and with Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament, believed written not long afterward. Brad and I had scanned the texts and emailed them out, so everyone either had printouts they’d made notes on or, in a couple of cases, a phone they’d scroll through to find passages. Then there were the conflicting legacies of both Epicurus and Ecclesiastes, Chris continued. Some scholars have claimed there were possibly a few different authors of Ecclesiastes, which would explain the inconsistencies, contradictions, and wafflings of the book’s speaker, the Preacher, commonly thought to be old King Solomon, son of David, looking back on his life and sharing what he’d learned. Epicurus had a reputation for being a cultlike leader, holed up in his garden commune with his followers, and his name has become wrongly attached to lavish hedonism. In fact, he advocated moderation and making do with little in order to better appreciate more prosperous times. His pursuit of pleasure was more connected to the absence of pain, not excessive sensuality.

  Chris read aloud from a section of Epicurus called “The Importance of Studying Philosophy,” leaning assertively on his Bostonian vowels. Comfortable behind a mike and in front of crowds, he reined in his performance persona, sized it to the room:

  “‘So, both for young and old, it is imperative to take up the study of philosophy. For the old, so that they may stay youthful even as they are growing older by contemplating the good things of life and the richness of bygone events. And, for the young, so that they may be like those who are advanced in age in being fearless in the face of what is yet to come.’”

  The promise of remaining youthful through philosophy was appealing to me, as nearly every day I was helplessly discovering signs of the disappearance of my younger self. If that self’s spirit could be captured and nurtured, then maybe it would be easier to let her body go, accept the inevitable. The oldest among us, Kevin, the bearded, laconic existential plumber, already seemed to have attained a dispassionate agelessness through his dedication to the workings of the metaphysical. Our sons were best friends, and if we ever found ourselves together at a five-year-old’s birthday party, I never had to worry about getting trapped in grating parent talk of car pools and charter schools; I could rely on Kevin to lead me down some hushed conversational tunnel about Nietzsche or the construct of authority, far away from the fracas.

  The two youngest in the room, Nate and Sara, strangers to each other, both writers in their twenties, newish to the city and to adulthood, already seemed way more advanced in age than I recall ever being back then, even comparatively fearless with their life choices and trajectories. Nate, the only person I’ve ever met from Wyoming, had been a student in my community writing class at a local university and was so smart and passionate I once ceded most of a class on a George Orwell essay to him. He’s a writer and editor who’d lived in too many places and had too many lives for someone his age, enjoying a picaresque early twenties, DJing in Buenos Aires, slam-poeting in Salt Lake City. Quiet and receptive, keeping to the background like the steady blues bass player she is, Sara already had a master’s degree at twenty-four and a profound expectation of poetry and the importance of it in her life.

  Post-Katrina New Orleans had become a trampoline for some millennials to get momentum and “experience” before vaulting off to better opportunities in more reasonable cities. We’d seen earnest waves of them come and go, with their temporarily funded post-disaster projects and nonprofit jobs. Surprisingly, Nate and Sara had stuck around. I didn’t know how they’d gotten so advanced so young, but Sara was having a quarter-life crisis and told me she was glad to have been invited to the group. I didn’t quite understand the concept of a quarter-life crisis, as I’d chalked up that whole decade to a sort of inchoate crisis of becoming, mostly spent in bars and bad relationships. I was a little envious they were getting the benefits of an ECRG at so young an age. Would it give them some kind of advantage going forward in life? I was hoping it would give me an advantage in just getting through the week.

  We began with the abyss. While both the Ecclesiastes and Epicurus were didactic, prescriptive texts about how to live one’s life, both were also contingent on acknowledging the void beyond our sensory perception, aka death. Chris said that some speculate that the spirit of Ecclesiastes may have been influenced by Epicurus and other Greek thinkers who sought to grapple with the nature of temporal reality, the here and now, and who discounted an eternal existence of the soul and seemed to struggle with the role of deities in the human condition. Influential to later philosophers, both these texts were considered radical and even dangerous. Epicurus was demonized well after his death. Dante placed his followers in flaming tombs in the sixth circle of hell, reserved for heretics. And “the whole duty of man” section at the end of Ecclesiastes is thought to have been tacked on much later—an attempt to make the near nihilism of the book’s message conform to the rest of the Bible’s teachings of adherence to God’s law.

  One of the first things that struck the group was our unwitting familiarity with Ecclesiastes, one of the more quoted and literarily raided books of the Old Testament. Melville draws from it repeatedly in Moby-Dick. It’s where Hemingway lifted The Sun Also Rises from; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; the Byrds, the entirety of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (“To every thing there is a season… a time to be born, a time to die”). Everyone owns “fly in the ointment” and “Eat, drink, and be merry.” On Ash Wednesday, the ostensible rationale for Mardi Gras, when the priest thumbs the coarse ash onto our aching heads, he reinforces our mortality with “All go unto one place; all are of dust, and all turn to dust again.” My favorite aphorism from Ecclesiastes doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction, literary or otherwise: “For to him that is joined to all living there is hope: a living dog is better than a dead lion.”

  The phrase “All is vanity” jackhammers throughout Ecclesiastes, by turns hectoring and exasperated and resigned, and is the book’s ultimate punctuation. Some of us gathered in the living room found this nihilism jarring alongside all of the lesson-teaching, others found it liberating. Either way, “All is vanity” became the running joke of the evening. Acknowledging the void, we could make fun of the void. Only an hour into the evening and already despair was seeming more manageable. Most people appeared both relaxed and eager to engage in the big talk. A few didn’t say much, but seemed to be attentively reading along on their printouts, or maybe they were inwardly dismissing the whole enterprise?

  I brought up the ending of James Joyce’s “Araby,” where the word “vanity” first stained my consciousness as a teenager. The young narrator is in love with Mangan’s sister, who lives down the street, and Joyce expresses the infatuation as a turn-of-the-twentieth-century adolescent Dubliner might have felt it, conflating Catholic ornamentation with romantic desire: “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.” Raised in a Catholic family in a Catholic city, I could relate, having been jammed into the pew every Sunday morning with my seven brothers and sisters, all of us born within eight years of each other—John, Kr
istin, me, fraternal twins Susan and Soren, Amy, identical twins Rebecca and Rachel. I’d be on my knees before the Lord with the rest of the family, but most of our bowed heads were confused with hormonal surgings and Saturday-night reverberations.

  In “Araby,” the smitten narrator is on a mission to buy an exotic gift for Mangan’s sister at the Araby bazaar. After his uncle promises to give him money to go, but then forgets and comes home late, the narrator arrives at the bazaar just as everything is closing, stall workers counting their money, the lights in the great hall shutting down all around him. The story ends with the epiphany: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” As a teenager, I knew instinctively to be moved by the one-two punch of music and meaning, the poetic import. As an adult whose adolescent vein of melancholy and self-loathing is still alarmingly rich, I read those lines and I think: Oh God, here I am, still empty-handed, still gazing into the darkness!

  At least now, that darkness has become familiar, circumscribed by adult responsibility and experience, but retaining those shadowy contours of longing and frustration and questioning. As I rediscovered that night of the first ECRG, it seems any lengthy discussion of the search for meaning leads inevitably to “desire,” that opulent hologram, thus creating a flurry of conversational flourishes on the subject, like:

  “We live in fear that our desires won’t be fulfilled.”

  or

  “We live in fear of losing desire.”

  or

  “Pleasure is the end of desire, and pleasure is the end of pleasure.”

  or

  “You’re just a hungry ghost, nothing but your spirit and your desire; you are insatiable.”

  or

  “And what about manufactured desire, the world of advertising constantly telling us what we desire?”

  We were starting to sound French, but no matter how heady our discussion became, references to materialism seemed inescapable, as if our souls were sticky with the problem of things. As twenty-first-century first-worlders, caught up in a vortex of vanities, how could we really expect to free our selves?

  Case, a construction manager, writer, and former journeyman plumber, kept bringing up an ex-girlfriend’s emotional attachment to a pair of shoes and how she had once become disconsolate when they were ruined in a rainstorm. Kevin said that this was completely valid, as the subjectivity of pain always is. But Case said that he couldn’t get past it, even though she was really hot, because this was after Katrina, when the whole city was suffering so much actual loss.

  One of the few ECRG members Brad and I met as a couple, right before we got married, Case seemed on an itinerant sweep through New Orleans, via a spread-out life that ranged through a graduate program in Mississippi, a young adulthood in the Southwest, and a childhood in Alaska. But Case stuck around after Katrina and threw himself into the city’s rebuilding—intellectually, artistically, and physically—with the same intensity he put into most things. He practiced what he called plumber’s yoga and occasionally wrote poems and stories on joists underneath the houses he was working on.

  While Case was in the gritty trenches of rebuilding, he, Brad, my sister Susan, and I had started a nonprofit that put on community events—readings, art shows—in the largely empty city. During that same wild, hopeful period, we also met Case’s new girlfriend, Nina, who worked on her own projects, elaborate floats and oversized sculptural puppets, in a massive abandoned school building commandeered by a few dozen artists. Tattooed and blue-eyed, tough with long blond ringlets, Nina was sitting next to Case on the couch, focusing a fierce gaze onto her printouts of the readings. Everyone else tried to steer the talk away from the hot ex and the shoes, but it was like a boomerang Case kept throwing into the conversation.

  Both Ecclesiastes and Epicurus had warned of the scourge of materialism, which has now brought the planet and its humans, including our friend Case, to a point of crisis. Seems that since people stopped roaming, settled down, and starting shaping jars from cliffside clay to hold their stuff, it’s been a problem for our souls. The Preacher-King was especially “vexed” by it and claimed that even though he had had it all during his lifetime—houses, gold and silver, “the peculiar treasures of kings,” orchards, vineyards, men servants and women servants, men singers and women singers—none of it mattered, all is vanity, because he’s going to die anyway, and after he dies, all of his labor will be left to the guy who comes after him. I’m here to tell you, he basically says, don’t even bother with it all.

  Nina, already on edge, was especially rankled by the patronizing tone of Ecclesiastes. She was independent, following her interests and ambitions all over the world, and I’d often wondered how she and Case were faring. “For thousands of years, old men have been telling us what’s best for us—it gets wearying and boring. And of course, wouldn’t we rather bother with it and find out for ourselves? If even one of those things softened the blow of mortality, one jar of silver, one manservant or singer, a couple of fruit trees, wouldn’t it be worth it?”

  Susan nodded her head in agreement as Nina spoke. She had enthusiastically accepted the invitation to participate in the ECRG, as she had just endured a difficult divorce and was suffering other protracted life trauma. She rarely let the wear show, and if anything, I thought her suspiciously cheerful. Since we’d grown up together, close in birth order, it was a comfort to have someone else in the room to wordlessly connect to, someone who shared blood, the vagaries of a crowded childhood, the ever-present loss of two sisters, and Dad’s illness, which kept us anxious from month to month, vacillating between cautious hope and fear.

  “Maybe the Preacher-King just had too much,” Susan said. “That’s what Epicurus seemed to be saying to King Menoeceus, too. Quality over quantity is what brings true pleasure.”

  It was Epicurus’s definition of pleasure, for him meaning merely “the soul is free of distress,” that Ellen wanted to question. Ellen is an artist who sometimes worked with Brad as a scenic painter for the movies, with sharp, elegant features and a south Alabama accent that tears opens her words so wide they seem to accommodate a different meaning. “But is it good to be free of distress? And do we even want to be free of all distress?” Some of us in the room, especially the passionate and acerbic Ellen, were very attached to our distress, thought that it was often an appropriate response to being human and to being connected to other humans. I pointed out that existentialists like Sartre claimed, “Anguish is natural to man. It means this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawgiver who is, at the same time, making a choice for all of mankind as well as for himself, cannot therefore escape the feeling of his deep and total responsibility.”

  I read that quote aloud from A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, a thin, gray hardback with brittle foxing pages, published in 1960. During our discussion, when I couldn’t articulate my thoughts or was stymied by my intellectual failings, or when the wine was slackening the connection between mind and mouth, the dictionary was my crutch. I found it years before in graduate school when I helped run an estate sale out of a crumbling old storefront in the French Quarter. I sorted through used, smoke-damaged books that the lawyer I was working for believed were cursed, because their deceased owner, a shady book collector, had not been a very good person and because bad things, most recently a mysterious fire in an adjacent storage unit, happened near wherever the books ended up. The collector supposedly had young male lovers pose as college students and steal valuable old books from the local university libraries. The lawyer told me the collector shot and killed one of these young men, claiming he mistook him for a burglar. Whenever I came across a three-hundred- or four-hundred-year-old tome with a ragged rectangle cut low on the thick vellum spine where the call number might’ve been, I wondered if it was somehow connected to the murdered book thief–lover.

  Alphabetical entries in
A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism begin with “Americanism”—“A monstrous complex of myths, of values, of formulae, of slogans, of symbols, of rites… the great myths of happiness, that of progress, that of liberty, that of triumphant maternity; there is realism, optimism; and then there are Americans who at first are nothing, who grow among these colossal statues and disentangle themselves as best they can” (Sartre)—and end with “Youth”—“Youth as the period of highest vital efficiency and of erotic exaltation, becomes the desired type of life in general. Where the human being is regarded only as a function he must be young; and if youth is over, he will still strive to show its semblance” (Karl Jaspers). (See also: Old Age; Past and Present.)

  Chris connected Sartre’s anguish about contingency, how our individual actions reflect on all of humanity, to Epicurus’s “immortal goods.” Epicurus defines that phrase as being truly alive, paying attention to the people and world around us, and acting accordingly, and he claims it’s the best we can hope for. That all seemed reasonable and doable to us, even though today, thousands of years after Epicurus lounged in his garden with his acolytes, we have an infinite number of distractions between us and our “immortal goods.”

  For most of the evening, Brad had been rather quiet. Listening, hosting, running interference with the boys, who kept raiding the snacks people brought, and handling bedtime. But he was the one who pointed out that both of the evening’s readings embraced another basic value: enjoyment of life through simple fellowship, one of the highest uses of our brief time here in the world.

  Which, many people agreed, we were already doing that evening, under the tall ceiling of our living room and the kind, indirect lighting, around a low metal table magnetized by the bottles, glasses, snacks, and our talk, which was building up time around it like good conversation does. It would be nice to describe the blue of that table as a mythic Aegean, but it’s actually an iridescent Malibu blue, chosen from an auto paint catalog and airbrushed on by Brad, more West Coast hot rod, a chunk of twentieth-century America weighing down the middle of the room, anchoring us with context even as our minds and talk got all timeless and universal.