Irrational Man

May 10, 2020 6:46pm

I started reading a book titled “Irrational Man” this evening while sitting out on the barn porch in the dream chair. This book is a history of Existentialism. What will the history of mankind look like 50,000 years from now? Suppose we make contact with other civilizations and find that the development of all cultures follow the same path? Superstition, theology, science, nihilism? Is this the path? Is it inevitable?

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The inescapable truth is that I feel like an alien in this life with no connection and no home. Everything I once believed has been reduced to rubble. How do you go on living with no anchor, no belief, no hope? It is somehow more pristine? With no illusions, is it somehow easier? I don’t know how to act. I never knew this.

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In 1962, two boys (one seven and one nine) played mumblety-peg on the summer lawn of a small white frame house on a hill in the farming community of Gravel Switch, KY. They played with knives they had purchased at a hardware store in Springfield, KY for $3.19 each. These knives came with a 5″blade and a leather sheath. The grandmother of these two boys watched while gossiping with the lady of the house. Across the road was the Baptist Church. The parents of the two cousins, a sister and a brother, attended church there as children and the boys would be there Sunday morning surrounded by relatives from both sides of each family who lived in that rural community and who sang in their high-pitched voices of being “washed in the blood.”

Fifty-eight years later, one of the boys would remember the mumblety-peg and the church, and he would consider with irony that a tombstone stood already in the church cemetery inscribed with his parents’ names. It waited only for its two mortals to return to the home of their childhood and for two dates to be carved.

(2/18/22) A few days ago, I re-read this entry and sent it to my cousin. He did not remember any of this. I still have the knife.