Further into Marcel

Color me Existentialist

I read, smoke dope, drink cheap wine, abandon myself, type in despair, then from a sense that job pursuits for hourly pay, employment then astonishingly enough, with no work for 3.5 years at age 66, my idea is yes, of course, all jobs do need me as much as I need the $1100 monthly.

My situation as a widow intolerable. Accepted, Acknowledged, even yes Appreciated as a benefit going forward for the deceased-frighteningly-and for me a benefit in a profoundly different way.

Self employed I am a bull dancer understanding the dangers of being gored.

Now Marcel-

It seems to me obvious that if one attends only to the data of reason, or, fundamentally, to a mere estimate of probabilities, one cannot help seeing us as being dragged towards catastrophe: towards the fall of the Tower of Babel, by which I mean towards such a large-scale destruction of our industrialized world that the few survivors will have to start from, nothing, in nakedness and faith: indeed, in the nakedness of faith.

And yet this catastrophism does, it seems to me, admit of one slight qualification: we ought not to accept such prophecies in a complacent spirit and there is even, mysteriously written in the depths of our being, an obligation to reject them. In my plays, in relation to quite concrete situations, I have several times put my emphasis on what I later defined as the duty of non-anticipation. What is true for each of us within the narrow yet inexplicable limits of his own life is true afortiori for the human world considered as a whole. I cannot withdraw any of my objections to an optimism obviously profoundly incompatible with our condition as sinful

THE DEGRADATION OF THE IDEA OF SERVICE

Yet it remains our duty to act as believers; as men, that is, who believe in the miracle, and for whom human action at all times ought to be ordered in relation to miracle or parousia. Only, from our point of view, what is the practical significance of this duty or this demand?

I think that I should be formulating my thoughts fairly exactly if I said that each of us has a duty to multiply as much as possible around Him the bonds between between the son of Being, a also to fight as actively as possible against the kind of evouring anonymity that proliferates around us like a cancerous tissue. But these bonds between being and being that I am speaking of cannot be anything else than what has traditionally been called ‘fraternity’. It is as illuminate body the notion of fraternity that that of service, to-day, can develop all its concrete richness. But one very important remark must be made here; we have to renounce for good the irrational and unmotivated connection which, at the time of the French Revolution, certain thinkers, wholly lacking in the power of reflection, attempted to establish between fraternity and equality.

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