Popular Culture Review 30.2
but dissonance is our inheritance . In ancient Greece , 100 head of cattle would be sacrificed to the gods at important moments . We are but “ a single calf in the hecatomb ,” the world telling us we are alone . Occam ’ s razor having cut away our subjectivity , filleting our personhood as one would a sacrificial bull , we have nothing left to do other than accept the existential dread and dreck of “ being and nothingness ,” an allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre ’ s book in which he claims that our existence precedes our essence , that without a creator god , we are free to constitute ourselves as anything we want , though this freedom is a kind of hell . We have wrestled with Søren Kierkegaard ’ s brand of existentialism before (“ The Sickness unto Death ” from the album Hunger and Thirst begins with us waking up , living alone ), but empirical evidence now suggests that it is Albert Camus , Sartre ’ s shorter-lived French existentialist contemporary , who makes the most of this senselessness . Camus will deem life fundamentally absurd : the idea that we have souls , anima , an unthinkable thought . We push a rock up a hill for no reason , only to have it roll down again tomorrow . This Sisyphean task is the only point of life : “ Asa Nisi Masa .” Still , our infantile hand reaches up , the existential Möbius strip of being and nothingness like a mobile hung above our crib . As the music changes and the song shifts , we imagine an entire life misspent , an entire life not understanding who we are and what it is all about . Being nothing other than a tabula rasa would make us into a sacrificial calf , served up to the world . And so all of life goes by . We imitate others who are alive , because all it means to be something is to imitate that something . We find a mate . We have children . Our children discover us in old age , looking in the mirror like the protagonist in Luigi Pirandello ’ s One , No One , and One Hundred Thousand , not quite knowing who is there looking back because whoever that is is someone seen
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