Tuesday 102: All Things Ordinary

Note: This is another essay I wrote for work.

There’s no shortage of aphorisms about failure. Writers, artists, politicians, athletes, and most everyone who’s ever pursued anything of substance or value (at least perceived) has faced the existential prospect of falling short. Most sum up their experiences with some variation on the theme that if your effort is total, earnest, and in good faith, there is no such thing as failure. That as long as you learn from your errors, no failure is complete, and that if your goal is worthy, failure is equally inevitable and commendable. This is probably most succinctly captured in Samuel Beckett’s criminally decontextualized dictum, “Fail better.”  

Thanks for reading Tuesday! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Whether delivered with such curt, grave cogency or the mellifluous prose of some thoughtful modernist gazing out a window at the rain, little separates these notions from the vacuous banalities of today’s more marketable sports stars, who for example might credit a hunger for excellence and continued improvement to particularly dramatic losses, errors, or imperfections in the same way a sculptor might regretfully resign herself to the idea that her work, no matter how praised for its arresting beauty and immediacy, will always remain deficient next to that of Michelangelo. The most thoughtful analysis of humanity’s relationship to failure is, when paraphrased, inevitably trite and simplistic.  

The concept, however, still lends itself to a lot of thought. Is it worth trying to go deeper? How might one do so?

Born in Romania in 1911, Emil Cioran developed over his career a philosophy of pessimism preoccupied with themes of failure, suffering, and social decay. He wrote in both Romanian and French, most famously in aphorisms he called “fragments,” which composed books with such appealing titles as The Trouble with Being Born and On the Heights of Despair. Initially, Cioran’s work reads just like you think it would: It’s bleak, contemplative, indulgent. It’s also often very funny, and as you absorb it, something surprising happens: You begin to feel a bond, even a warmth —something connective and enriching that simmers beneath the surface of his unyielding, somehow urgent ennui.  

For Cioran, this affinity was only achievable through the conceit that failure is inevitable, life is meaningless, and society is absurd. His resonance is like that of Goethe, whose early romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (an unfortunate guiding light for bespectacled and self-serious young men on college campuses across the Northeast US) is similarly passionate, contradictory, and extreme, plumbing the depths of failure and despair in order to make the reader feel less alone.  

An optimistic perspective on failure as instructive or a vehicle for positive growth, Cioran would argue, is what ultimately leads to hopelessness and psychic despair, because it assumes the existence of a purpose to which we can aspire. Such optimism cannot reckon with what he saw as the fundamental absurdity of one's existence: the daily choice to continue. To endure. Modernity amounts to a distraction for Cioran, yet in qualifying individual existence as wholly peculiar and unimportant, he performs a trick of perspective, succinctly revealing an ultimate message of hope with dark, paradoxical jokes: "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself," he writes, "since you always kill yourself too late." Despairing in despair, then, is far more ridiculous than embracing and finding joy in it. Finding meaning and happiness in life begins with accepting that you can't. Emil Cioran died in 1995, at the age of 84, survived by Simone Boué, his partner of more than 50 years. 

In his 1947 novel The Plague, Albert Camus imagines the effect of a deadly epidemic of bubonic plague that tears through the fictional Algerian city of Oran. Oran is an ordinary city, populated by ordinary people doing ordinary things. As the story unfolds, a tension builds between the institutions of this quotidian modernity and the impassive wall of mortality, itself ordinary and naturally ordered. As the city's institutions—of healthcare, commerce, communication, labor, etc.—begin to fail, Camus exposes the unconscious trepidation at the root of society: In curating the comforts of an ordinary life, the citizens of Oran have built up a psychic wall against mortality, fabricating a system of moral capital that defines death as a failure of existence rather than a simple, dignified, necessary component of a natural order. 

In refuting this order, Camus and Cioran suggest, we become the architects of our own despair. It is only through the acceptance of this absurdity that we can discover purpose and merit in the abatement of suffering, however futile, ephemeral, or modest our efforts. And for most of us, even this remains elusive and ambiguous. In one of his most moving, haunting lines, Camus speaks through the character of Dr. Rieux, who has fought the plague in Oran for months: 

"This whole thing is not about heroism, it's about decency. It may seem like a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency." 

Asked what decency is, however, Dr. Rieux can only sigh. For him, it means doing his job.  

But in general, he can't really say.

Thanks for reading Tuesday! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.