waltondammerung

Stranger in a Strange Land

I listened to an "All Songs Considered" podcast today (great song by DJ Tilly and the Wall, by the way, called "Bad Education". Think Flamenco rock with an accordian. The rest of the album is nothing to write home about), and the band members were discussing songs that are meaningful to them. One band member mentioned "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which I think was a formative song for about half the people in this country who are now between 25 and 35 years old. It's interesting to think about works that have influenced artists, but I know that even people who aren't musicians feel the same way about some song or other (and by "some song", I mean, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"). I never really got into pop or rock all that much, though, so it made me think about whether there is something in my life that served a similar function. Not a favorite, since I have trouble identifying my favorite color or even my favorite food (shrimp?) Something I could point to that marks a sea change in my life from innocence to adulthood.

I think I've decided on The Stranger by Albert Camus. It's not really a book I even like any more, although I did like it a lot at the time. It doesn't have the subtlety that I've come to associate with good literature. I find most of the tenets of Camus' philosphy repugnant. I could go on about what I don't like about it, but liking it is not the matter at hand. It is the first novel I read in French. That in and of itself speaks volumes about its influence on my life, since I went on to study French literature in college and graduate school. More than that, however, it matters to me because it's the book that pitched me into the adult world. It marks my first real encounter with ideas that I would capitalize if I were Victorian--existence, philosophy, sex, death, the value and meaning of life, God, free will. Of course, these are all circumstances and ideas that I encountered at a younger age, but, like the main character in The Stranger, I absorbed them as part of the workings of Life controlled by someone else rather than mentally engaging with them and their meaning. For instance, when my family lived in Guatemala, kidnappings and muggings targeting Americans were not uncommon, but I have no recollection of being afraid. While the Stranger would think of them and say, "It's all the same to me," my childish outlook was, "So that is what is happening? It must be a part of how things happen, like food being put on the table, all of which are controlled by my parents or some other adult. " The Stranger pushed me into engaging with the world as an agent in it instead of a learning observer. The Stranger lost his mother and was confronted by the consequences of his own actions in a world about which he did not care. I think my identification with his sort of disengaged approach to his surroundings and my confrontation with his responsibilities as a human adult as a result of his circumstances in the book really helped illuminate the problems and questions of adulthood to me at a point in my life when I was ready to see them. Thank God there were other forces in the world that helped form my means of engagement with the adult world after that awakening.