My Paper

My unedited paper with errors and no work cited:

I wake up like always: in the most comfortable damn position ever. My legs are in the perfect spot; the pillow is like a soft bunny under my fat head; and my arms are awkwardly placed, yes, but still pretty okay. I'm warm, happy, with a hazy, sleepy, morning high, and prancing puppy dogs float away from some grand dream. How can it get any better than this? Why bother with this whole "life" thing? I'm perfectly awesome right here, thank you very much. But I stand anyway and sway from side to side. Whispering disgusting profanities under my breath that would make Penn Jillette blush, I stumble onward to the shower. My eyes are closed. I wish I could stay inside this hyperbolic time chamber (a.k.a. shower) forever, forgetting about the evil outside world. But I head to class in the dreary cold and plague. The horribly romantic mountains are in the distance, and all the people laugh around me in their horribly hip clothes. I would probably mock them to my friends, but inside I secretly want to be like them. The mountains fade away, thank God, and I sit in class, wondering where my life will end up after all this. I don't want to do anything really except read, watch movies, and generally avoid most other people. In "Office Space", when Peter is asked what he would do if he won a million dollars, he says, "Nothing [...] I would relax. I would sit on my ass all day. I would do nothing." The man says back, "Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit." I will return to this later, but Peter raises a good point. Is life really worth all this stress? Albert Camus said the most important philosophical question is whether a person should commit suicide or not. And in many ways, both The Book of Ecclesiastes and The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer ask this question. Why continue on with this life thing?

"Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2) says the opening lines of Ecclesiastes. In the tradition it is Solomon who wrote these words, but to many experts, this man or woman is named Koheleth. Koheleth continues on, "A generation goes, but the earth remains forever " (Ecclesiastes 1:4). In an almost melodramatic tone, the writer poetically lists through the ever present earth's processes. The sun will always rise and set. The wind will always blow. The streams will always run to the sea. The eye will never be satisfied with what it is seeing, and the ear never satisfied with what it is hearing. Koheleth says, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done," and then laments that "there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Koheleth seems to be having a mid-life crisis. However, unlike most middle-aged men, he doesn't buy an expensive car and start wearing cool comb-overs. No, he (or she) writes his struggles down, and what he (or she) particularly appears to be struggling with is life's futility. Nothing a person does will last or be remembered, it will all eventually be washed away in the sands of time. We fool ourselves with illusions of importance, but these are "vanity". According to Northrop Frye, this vanity shouldn't be understood as a form of narcissism, but instead should be translated as fog. Frye describes it as such:

This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapor, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It thus acquires a derived sense of "emptiness," [...] To put Koheleth's central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. (Frye 123)

Like Frye says, this image of emptiness recurs in the New Testament in Philippians 2:7 (something Frye calls Typology). The New American Standard Bible says Jesus, "emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men". What does the Bible mean when it tells us Jesus (in the words of the Weymouth New Testament) "strips Himself of His glory"? It is implying that there is something very different between the divine and mortals, and I would argue that thing is being able to die. Death makes what time we have very beautiful, but at the same time tragic, and it also reminds us that everything we see, feel, taste, smell, or hear are distractions on our march to death. Every person you meet, every mountain you see, every sidewalk you walk down are filled with "emptiness". Everything is empty, everything is in vain, because some day you will die, and there is nothing you can do about that. This is what Jesus means when he "makes himself nothing", he enters into a world of death and constant sorrow. Nobody leaves this place unscathed and nobody can die for you. The Gospels show us this in Jesus' ultimate sacrifice to men, and he does this by dying. Wallace Stevens wrote, "Death is the mother of beauty". Dying makes every moment precious, but it also makes every moment pointless. This is the problem Koheleth is dealing with.

Stretching this concept to the story of Jacob and Wanda-Sara in Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave, we see a man, Jacob, struggling with these same things. Jacob applies laws and rules to his life that appear to limit him. He is forbidden from all carnal pleasures. He cannot indulge himself in non-kosher foods and later even restricts himself to a strictly vegetarian diet. Most of all, he cannot marry the women he loves. Finally, when he does ease off his strict rules and marries Wanda, he doesn't find peace, but instead finds further pain. Now Jacob is a slave to something else: Wanda. He becomes a social outcast and disguises his wife as a mute. The threat of her discovery terrifies him, now he not only has to look after himself but Wanda and the coming baby too. When their ruse is finally uncovered, and Wanda dies in childbirth, Jacob is still a slave. He cannot escape her, he cannot escape their child, and he most of all cannot escape his laws. A ferryman, Waclaw, explains to Jacob (and the theme of the book), "You own a cow or a horse and you're its slave. Marry and you're the slave of your wife, her bastards, and her mother" (Singer 260). Jacob considers what he says, and reminds the ferryman not every one can be free. Who would raise children and grow food? Besides that, who would have had have him if his mother didn't? He answers back, "I didn't ask for it. She wanted to have a man, so she did" (Singer 260). Jacob discovers that the ferryman is right. He has been a slave all his life.

Waclaw is a very Koheleth-esque figure. He actively questions God and gets rid of all responsibilities because he realizes life's futility. In a very powerful moment, Waclaw tells Jacob:

What does anyone know? In India they worship snakes. The Jews put little black boxes on their heads, and shawls. I know. A lot of them used to use this ferry. But along gallops Chmielnicki; there were so many corpses floating in the Vistual the river stank. That's what their God did for them. (Singer 258)

Jacob tells him "the evildoers will be punished", and Waclaw has an answer for him right out of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

Where? There was a brute of a count in Parchev who flogged I don't know how many hundreds of peasants to death but he lived to be ninety-eight. His serfs set his castle on fire, and down came the rain and saved it. He died peacefully sipping a glass of wine. I say: the worms get everyone, good and bad. (Singer 258)

In the end, Jacob dies like everyone else. None of his sacrifices, laws, wives, friends, children, or respect can put off its inevitable embrace. This might not be the ultimate message Singer is trying to convey, but to me, it's just as important. Even the most pious, good, men die.

Like Jacob, we also focus on getting places, pointless goals, and the stress of the day. These things are, in the end, not important. Jacob lived this way and was miserable. He focused on goals and systems he believed would some day make him happy, but they didn't. He found the same old pain he had always had and was living in the way that Koheleth would call "vanity", pointless endeavors that distract us from our eventual death. Alan Watts offers a similar comparison to today's modern educational system. In kindergarten, children are prepared for First Grade, and the kindergartner rests his entire mind on the progression forward. When the child gets to First Grade, it's the same thing, but First Grade is now replaced with Second. And it continues with Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, middle school, college, and then into the job world with promotions. However, when it's over and the person reach as far as he or she can go, there will be a huge disappointment. He or she will realize they have forgotten to enjoy life, and instead, wasted their lives away on "vanity". Like most old men and women on their death beds, they will wish they would have focused on "important" things, and not the "trivial" ones. We are all like Jacob, slaves to our "vanities", distractions, and other such things. It is critical to step back from the madness. Sometimes we get so into the game, the "vanity", that we forget that it is just "vanity". This form of thinking will lead to a similar fate that Jacob fell.

I said earlier I felt Koheleth was having a mid-life crisis, and if he was alive today he would be driving around town in a fancy car with a goofy comb-over. However, Frye respectfully disagrees. Instead, what he suggests is that Koheleth knew exactly what he was doing and stumbled on something far more profound. I agree with his assessment, and take back my erroneous ways. If we instead realize that most of our activities are "trivial" and that in the future it will all end, then we can "relax and our real energies being to flow into the soul" (Frye 124). Frye says, "the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal" (Frye 123). Life is ultimately a series of hardships, sorrows, hang-ups, break-ups, happy drunk nights, sad drunk nights, weddings, deaths, children, friends, old men and women, first kisses, last kisses, drunk kisses, kisses that are huge mistakes, weeping because you are so happy, weeping because you are so sad, disaster after disaster, and love after love. Some days you will hate it, some days you will love it, and hopefully in your heart you will never want it to end, but you know it will. The Book of Ecclesiastes seems to be telling us to enjoy it while we are still here, but also don't get too attached. Your mother will die, your father will die, everyone you love will die, and you won't be remembered. Realize these facts today and your soul will be at peace, but if you forget sorrow will follow your every step. Finally, how would I respond to Peter in "Office Space" who simply wants to do nothing and flee from life? Frye reminds us, "All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them" (Frye 123). It is impossible to run away from our distractions like Waclaw tries. It will always catch up to us (like Jonah found). Life is too beautiful a thing to pass up.