He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.
Interpretation
Life can sometimes seem meaningless and confusing.
In this quote, Philip Roth captures the essence of existential despair, suggesting that one of the harshest realizations an individual can face is the perception that life lacks inherent meaning. This perspective highlights the weight of disillusionment and the challenge of finding purpose in a seemingly indifferent universe.
In practice
During a discussion on the complexities of life at a philosophy club.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.
The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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