Interesting Abyss, Where Are You?

In its early pages it said, “Once there was a lonely person.” It might have gone on to say, “And isn’t it wonderful? That lonely person met another lonely person and now neither is lonely.” By declining to go there, the story now begins asking a more profound question: “What if a lonely person can find no way out of her loneliness?” This is where,

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile. Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse