“The fact of having no effect or achieving nothing” def. Chambers English Dictionary.
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
by Wilfred Owen
Trench warfare during WWI was a tragic example of futility. Soldiers charging across no-man’s land through barbed wire to be cut down by enemy machine gun fire. The carnage, the battering by heavy artillery, the long hours waiting for the next onslaught in the wet mud.
There were some writers in the 1940s and 50s who examined life from an existential perspective, notably Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and a bunch of Italians that I read decades ago. Their literary characters drifted through life without any real purpose. It was as if they were waiting to be woken from their slumber by some exciting event. As spectators they found no joy in living but carried on anyway.
It is a hard road to walk, the road that leads nowhere. Accepting the pointless nature of human existence might appear depressing, but it doesn’t have to be. Rejecting conventional wisdom about God’s purpose and all supernatural explanations for the currently inexplicable can be liberating. Guilt should be the first thing to go. Why waste time beating yourself up if heaven, hell and deities are concepts you reject?
odespinner 