The Joy of Absurd Humanism

It was December 15th or so, 1979. I was in an examining room at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit NJ. talking with Mark Gold, a handsome young doctor in his white smock with an easygoing manner. He was cool and "hip" -- both Janet and I liked him.


      "You might get a kick out of what I'm going to tell you," he stated.

"Really, Doc? Is it good news or bad?"

      "Funny you should say that because, actually, it's good news."

"Okay, hit me," I said.

      "Rodney, you have Bipolar Affective Disorder," Dr. Gold told me. 

He had diagnosed me as -- BAD! 

      "You're manic-depressive," he said.

When he said that, I joked, “Yeah, I’m BAD all right! Badder than you, Doc!” I wasn't happy or sad. It was just information. Information I had never heard and knew nothing about. "BAD" would have been a fair moniker in my troubled youth, but now I thought, Hell, I’m respectable! Happily married with a beautiful wife and son, great extended family, lots of friends, and a secure career with the State of New Jersey in computer Technical Resources and Development.

       Dr. Gold finished by saying "We're starting you on the drug Lithium, which should help prevent this from happening again. Are you alright with that?"

"Whatever you say Doc, whatever you say." I hadn't ever heard of lithium, but I never had a fear of drugs, good or bad, and had complete confidence he knew what he was doing. I had always trusted my doctors, even the failures like my unsuccessful surgeries to remove the ugly polynoidal cyst on the base of my spine. The third one had been the charm.

 
 I wasn't happy or sad upon hearing this "BAD" news. It was just information. I felt a little like Meursault in The Stranger. To me Mearsault's story epitomized absurd humanism, wherein we have no control of the events in our lives. I would later write a college paper on the novel for my professor in English Lit at Mercer County Community College (MCCC). I'll never forget that paper: the library research and reading, Mom typing it at home on onion skin paper with carbon copy on her Royal typewriter, and Mr. Cowan giving me an A+. It had become a favorite book of mine because of the high grade. That A+ helped me pass that class.

Absurd Humanism, Camus, Albert (7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960)
"His three major works are The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). [He was a Nobel Prize winner.] The first [book], with its famous opening lines (“Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.”), showed humans as being outsiders trying to obtain self-awareness in a world they do not understand. It is the story of a thoughtless killer, one whose major wish upon the day of his execution was that he would be greeted by “an enormous crowd who would call out to him in hatred.” How tragic, Camus is saying in the novel, that man is a stranger to his environment, a stranger to the humanism of which he is a natural part.  Although, like Jean Paul Sartre, Camus wrote of “the absurd,” he did so in a distinctly different and more constructively humanistic fashion."

"Camus recognized life’s injustices. He knew that man must be positively dedicated to life, must develop a moral responsibility, and must be anti-nihilist."  (Source: Wikipedia -- and there's much more)

He was the existentialist's existentialist, and he and Jean Paul Sartre had "spirited" disagreements.

There's much more to Camus' atheistic philosophy than I can recount, but to me at that moment in Dr Gold's exam room, I felt life was absurd. I was just caught in its ebb and flow.

I don't remember Dr. Gold explaining to me what bipolar meant, but I'm sure he did. And I know Janet understood, thank God. In other words, I was mentally ill. I was 29 years old, and had probably been experiencing mild mania since my teens. That was an easy way to explain away how wild I was with stints in Mercer County Jail and Juvenile Hall (a youth prison), to prove it. From age 14 until I had met my future redheaded wife Janet in high school, she a senior and me a junior, I had tried and done everything you can imagine in the late '60s. Except physical violence other than an occasional fistfight. 

So I didn't have any feelings one way or the other when told I was crazy, afflicted with a mental disease I had never heard of. In fact, very few people had at the time. It hadn't been recognized by medical professionals and the AMA until the early '70s. Now the National Institute of Mental Health estimates 5.7 million U.S. sufferers. The National Alliance on the Mental Illness estimates 10 million Americans. Thirty percent of those who go untreated commit suicide.

I don't believe life is absurd, but it can certainly seem that way at times. There is greater purpose -- as I eventually learned from great humans like Camus, my wife and many others.

By Rodney Richards, NJ