Finally finished reading Paul Bowles'
Let It Come Down the other day after having misplaced it for a couple weeks (surprise: it was in a box under a bunch of tapes). Not as big of an existential gut-punch as
The Sheltering Sky, but still a fine descent with copious amounts of nihilism in the face of alienation (both cultural and interpersonal). Bowles is a great summer read, and finishing this up during what was (hopefully) the last of the brutal summer heatwaves here ties in nicely with the oppressive heat of the Moroccan settings.
Yet he felt very close to himself, perhaps because in order to feel alive a man must first cease to think of himself as being on his way. There must be a full stop, all objective forgotten. A voice says "Wait", but he usually will not listen, because if he waits he may be too late. Then, too, if he really waits, he may find that when he starts to move again it will be in a different direction, and that also is a frightening thought. Because life is not a movement toward or away from anything; not even from the past to the future, or from youth to old age, or from birth to death. The whole of life does not equal the sum of its parts. It equals any one of the parts; there is no sum. The full-grown man is no more deeply involved in life than the new-born child; his only advantage is that it can occasionally be given him to become conscious of the substance of that life, and unless he is a fool he will not look for reasons or explanations. Life needs no clarifying, no justification. From whatever direction the approach is made, the result is the same: life for life's sake, the transcending fact of the living individual. In the meantime you eat. [...] Everything he had ever thought or done had been thought or done not by him but by a member of a great mass of beings who acted as they did only because they thought they were on their way from birth to death. He was no longer a member: having committed himself, he could expect no help from anyone. If a man was not on his way anywhere, if life was something else, entirely different, if life was a question of being, for a long continuous instant that was all one, then the best thing for him to do was to sit back and be, and whatever happened, he still was. Whatever a man thought, said or did, the fact of his being there remained unchanged. And death? He felt that some day, if he thought far enough, he would discover that death changed nothing, either.
If one could only let go, even for a few seconds, if only one could cease caring about everything, but really everything, what a wonderful thing it would be. But that would probably be death. Life means caring, is one long struggle to keep from going to pieces. If you let yourself have a really good time, your health goes to pieces, and if your health goes, your looks go. The awful part is that in the end, no matter what you have done, no matter how careful you may have been, everything falls apart, anyway. The disintegration merely comes sooner, or later, depending on you. Going to pieces is inevitable, and you haven't even any pieces to show when you're finished. "Why should that be a depressing thought?" she wondered.
I stumbled upon this episode of the Moroccan/American podcast from last year that helps to contextualize Paul Bowles' place as an American writer who spent the last five decades of his life living in Morocco, writing all of his books in that setting, and what that ended up looking like on the cultural moral compass.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5eVGEo8dWSiHLeslyKZml0 (the link is to Spotify but it's surely out there on the other platforms).