Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Another day of near total pointlessness. Another day of existential angst and ennui. Another day when I didn't write up the minutes for a meeting held two months ago, even though the next meeting is tomorrow and I'm going to have to sacrifice one of my morning coffees to attend; to attend and to sit there contemptuously writing single word summaries of five minute tirades.

Maybe tomorrow, while I'm sitting around in my meeting failing to take proper notes, wondering where my life went wrong, wondering what I did that caused me to end up in this purgatorial wasteland, a living Ship of Fools, burning the best years of my life in censer of pointless bureaucracy, I'll be able to take ease and comfort in the soothing words of Houellebecq:

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make puke. My entire work as computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross referencing, the criteria of rational decision making. It has no meaning.

God knows, there's nothing more meaningless than taking minutes.

The poetry mood matcher has detected that I'm experiencing an existential crisis and suggested that the following might grant solace:

I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body's tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; 'tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth, to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blessed the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

I suspect that my crisis stems from my inability to remember anything about La Peste when someone asked me about it, other than that it involves a disease and a doctor as an allegory for something else. I think I'm going to have to troll down to the library tomorrow to see if I can correct the situation.

Now, if only I'd been asked what I remembered about La Nausee, they'd have been in luck: I remember reading it at a very wet conference in the Netherlands. I also remembering reading The Bell at the same conference - the sessions can't have been up to much if I managed to read two heavy duty philosophical novels within a week. I seem to remember enjoying The Bell rather more, but then it did have Dora Greenfield and her abominable husband Paul, a schizophrenic religious nut and an aquatic nun. If only Sartre had included more nuns - preferably nuns with 50m life saving badges - then he might have won me round.