Becoming an existentialist is not something you choose. It happens. In my case, it happened when a tree fell on my head and cracked my skull – with my head open for a moment, the universe looked in at me and I looked out at the universe.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Hell Is Other People
I was 14, a Boy Scout with an armful of badges and my greatest pleasure was being tasked to carry the Union Jack down the aisle to the altar at Sunday Church Parade. I wasn’t sure that I was a believer, but I liked the ritual.
One weekend in the early summer I went camping in Epping Forest with my friend Ian Macauley. He wasn’t a Scout but had all the survival skills I had learned in theory and Ian seemed to know intuitively.
We pitched a tent on the lee of an incline protected by mature trees, collected dry wood and built a fire pit. We had brought cocoa, eggs and beans, and billy cans to cook them in. We talked as the fire slowly quelled, about what I can’t recall and, as the moon rose, we tucked up back to back in our sleeping bags. It was the 1960s, no smartphones and you could camp out without fear or asking anyone’s permission to do so.
There was a storm in the night and the rain drummed on the canvas sides of the tent. In the morning, it was too wet to make a fire. We went for a walk. Spears of sunlight piercing the overhead canopy and gave the whole world a luminous glow. A tree must have been struck by lightning and our footfall was sufficient for it to topple over. We both ran as it fell and I was struck on the right side of my head by one of the branches.
Blood gushed from the wound and I had an excruciating pain in my left hand. My fingers had clenched up in a fist and I screamed in agony trying to unlock them. Ian placed his bush hat over my head to stem the flow of blood. He then straightened my fingers and placed his boot firmly on my hand. The pain instantly receded.
I wasn’t unconscious but slipping in and out of consciousness. My left hand was still tingling with pins and needles. Ian lifted me in a fireman’s carry and shouldered me through the forest. When he was too tired to go any further with me on his back, he pulled me slowly and carefully from under my armpits. Had he ran off seeking help and left me in the middle of the forest, it would have been a mammoth task to find me again.
Eventually, Ian reached the road and waved down the traffic. A car stopped straight away. The driver lifted me into the back seat and took us to the cottage hospital in Epping. My parents were called and I was sedated in a deep sleep by the time they arrived at the hospital. My father was allowed to see me, but the doctor told my mother that he would not permit her to do so. This was the 1960s. They did things differently then.
What is an Existentialist?
There is no treatment for a cracked skull, only rest and time. I spent several weeks in the same individual ward and healed quickly with almost no pain at all. My entire face was bruised black. The colour slowly faded over 12 months and went through shades of green, purple and yellow before it was back to normal.
As I recovered, my mother was allowed to visit and came every day, often with Ian Macauley. His survival skills and sharp thinking had saved my life. His bush hat was dyed a muddy shade of red and he wore it proudly as I had worn my Scout uniform with the sleeves covered in badges.
There was nothing to do in hospital while I was recovering except read. I turned 15 in July and my dad on my birthday said it was time for me to start reading George Orwell, his favourite author. He had bought two hardbacks ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and ‘1984,’ costing 17s 6p each; less than £1 each today.
The two books combined with the rare view of the universe from the crack in my head had a profound effect on me. After Orwell, I read Camus, Milan Kundera and Jean-Paul Sartre. I had become an accidental existentialist and bought my first pack of Gauloises the week I left hospital. I had lost my taste for carrying flags, flags of any kind, and never wore my Boy Scout uniform again.
What is an existentialist? An existentialist believes that there is no inherent meaning or purpose in life. Everything is random and it is up to us to create our own meaning. When I looked out from inside my head into the universe, I lost my fear of the need to fit in, to follow the crowd. I was free.
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Good story! I owe quite a bit of my existentialist phase to Kundera’s book “Life is Elsewhere”. Might be very disappointed if I reread it now!
It’s always a strange experience re-reading a book after a lengthy time. I re-read 1984 recently and found it to be even better – and more terrifying – than I recall.
I really enjoyed this story, I was in the scouts in the 90’s and remember having such fun of camping out with them and also separately with my father on different adventures with my brother as well. I think that maybe I am also an existentialist after it just being explained to me. I also lack respect and like to kick up dust to organisations of authority and have always questioned their place for the well being of society. Great read.
Interesting story and I am glad you survived. My movement to existentialism came from my movement from being a member of faith that thinks everything in the Bible is true and drafted by God to being first an agnostic and now an atheist.
Once I had eliminated gods as being a man made and realised there is no such thing as magic, then logically all that is left is existentialism.
People ask is there a meaning to life and my response is yes choose your own.
Love the story. How fortunate you had a friend who took decisive action, and didn’t panic.
These accidents and near-death experiences are strangely liberating, even as a boy. And long periods of recuperation give us time to try different things, reflect deeply. Quietly transformative.
When I was about 14, my best friend had a thing for old glass bottles used for medicines. Funny thing to collect, but that was what he was into. One day he too me off to a dump where we started digging for these things. We went deeper and deeper and deeper, until we’d almost made a small cave.
But then the rain came. We carried on, heedless, committed diggers. My friend led the way, I stood back, feeling a little uneasy. Which was just as well, because at some point the earth gave way. I just had the presence of mind to act, and I lunged forward to grab my friend under the arms, and I pulled him out from under the ‘roof’ he was under, maybe three seconds before the earth came down on us. As it was we were buried up to the waist. He would have been buried alive. We laughed about it, as boys do. But it sure was a close one.
Hmmmm … that explains a lot !
Also -seriously – you refused to be defined any more -as a boyscout or whatever – classic existentialist move
Such a harrowing story with an improbable happy ending. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say ending, as you continue to write the story of your life with every step you make … and every breath you take.
As Clifford points out, you don’t choose existentialism, it chooses you
The very thought might bring on a crisis – why me, what have I done?
It’s a calling, if you’re up to it, count yourself lucky
You’re on the road less travelled
A spiritual journey to self-knowledge is about to begin.
See where it takes you and the wonders along the way
To far flung places and the far from conventional
What’s more you may well become a writer, a musician or even a philosopher
But beware, it can be a perilous quest
Don Quixote will remind you, make no delusions about it
In some cases like Anthony Bourdain, the travelling TV chef
it all become too much to bear – he’d seen and done enough
And there’s always the 27 club to go out in a blaze of glory
Death is never far away for an existentialist
Watch out, the existential nightmare is not just other people
It can also be yourself, living out the miseries of nihilism and addiction
your own neurotic anxieties and tendencies barely containable
under the thin veil of respectable society
Ask Kafka – he awoke as a beetle in “Metamorphosis” that explored themes
of alienation absurdity and the dehumanising effects of modern life
He was dead at 40 – Oscar Wilde at 46 – Byron at 36
Their lives like so many, were cut short early
Yes, you have to deal with the dread of other people
and all the rubbish that fill their head’s – the lies conceits and nonsense
What you do with the void, between when you are born and die?
Once you have shrugged off your parents and childhood conditioning
its up to you what you choose – just make it worthwhile
For most, all they want is to live a normal peaceful existence
to be in harmony with their surroundings
And for some, there is a happy ending
Existentialism came about in the early 20th Century
although it had its roots in the Romantic period
The world was in deep crisis, like the pains of birth
a new modernity was unfolding between two world wars
It seemed people didn’t like each other and couldn’t get on
the existential nightmare was born
People were left in a meaningless state of ruin
The old world of Empire and colonial rule had crumbled
Like Rodin’s “The Thinker” the mood was heavy with doubt
A state of melancholic depression couldn’t be shrugged
With Freud and the discovery of modern day psychoanalysis
there could be no denial – there was such a thing as mental illness
Pharmaceutical companies jumped in to sedate us
Consumerism was the new drug of choice
Democracy, capitalism and the new world came with a heavy price
Europe had to make way for America to take the helm
Existentialism became another “ism” – a fad for left-wing artists
but more than just an art movement, it was a philosophy too
A way to look at life without dogmas institutions or being told
what is what – a free world was now beckoning
The question was, what to do with it…
Existentialism still has its relevance – why
because the question has been there all along
at the forefront of our forefather’s mind’s were the nagging questions,
“What’s it all about, why are we here and what can I do about it?”
They just hadn’t come up with a word for it back then – or weren’t allowed
for in the day, if you questioned anything let alone religion or society
they would lock you up or worse, kill you for your beliefs
At least Clifford was free to choose
The question usually comes in the teenage years
over discussions with your parents about what befits you
not an easy conversation in many cases
but for the lucky ones, the answer already awaits them
they go with the flow and follow the well trodden path
They will never have to ask those questions
other than become what they were destined to be
We all have to find a way to fit in, but some don’t
I wanted to see the world and wherever I went
Writer’s were there to keep me company
Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on the beaches of Goa
DH Lawrence’s Kangaroo in Sydney
Catcher In The Rye and Satre in New York
Fear And Loathing and the Beats in LA
JG Ballard’s Crash in London as Princess Diana crashed in Paris
Two destinations still remain
Kafka in Prague and Camus in Algeria – Russia and Dostoevsky can wait
I was a traveller seeking enlightenment and a God if there was one
Like Orwell, I ended up in a kitchen scraping a living together
It might as well read in my passport Occupation: Seeker
For even if I hadn’t been looking, existentialism found me
I was already on the path and there’s no turning back
I’d stepped out of society and society is nothing if not unforgiving
In the end it comes down to the realisation life must be lived with a religious intensity to explore and keep doing, lest our lives become living deaths
Suffering is not a bad thing – it is to be embraced
For Buddhists, life is suffering but no one should suffer needlessly
Money can cushion you but too much corrupts the soul
Existentialism is a construct belonging to the 20th Century
like an alternative lifestyle, it offered a way out
and for many gave meaning to something they’d only ever felt
but I suspect millennials and Gen Z will leave it at the door
and adopt other ideas about how they embrace the big questions
It is already under threat and being replaced by none other
than AI technology – an alternative where we don’t even have to think
we live in a time where the threat is not from within
but at the hands of what we’ve made
a digital recourse that sounds as good as real
the imitator imitating the imitated
Existentialism is dying a death
It will live on in the use of language
Like a rockstar maybe it will have a comeback
Clifford had a lucky escape, he knows only too well
the fight is where its at – the meaning is everything in an often meaningless world we must not lose hope but look around and express suffering
Today’s existentialists are more likely protestors and activists
The real crisis we face is the climate and use of fossil fuels
We must never settle for corrupt politicians or capitalistic warlords
and always stand for what our mind’s and heart’s say is intuitively right
Reality is always a lot more than the individual
We must be prepared to suffer gladly against what is plainly wrong
In Trump Putin and Netanyahu we’re seeing the last vestibules of the 20th Century being fought by desperados clinging onto whatever power they can
They will soon be discarded with their outdated modes of thinking
Love will save us – love is all we need
Maybe AI can teach us this one thing for all to share
Believe in a better future and like those before us
Stand for freedom democracy and a just, peaceful world
It should never be taken for granted
I’m very grateful to Ian too! X