“Life: a mystery to be lived.”

“Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.”
                                                             
                                                             Gabriel Marcel

"For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts."
                                                             Thomas Mann

Why is acknowledging that the source of existence is a mystery such a dilemma? The answer: fear of death. Sadly death is the sovereign in our lives.  

The omnipresence of death as the sovereign diminishes the fullness of our being.  If only we would embrace the mystery of existence and the awe it can inspire then, and only then, will we be free to discover authentic meaning in the limited time we have to live.  


Words of Sartre are instructive. Sartre believed that you create your own essence through the choices you make and the consequent actions you take. He held since “being” has no preordained meaning then existence is the stage on which the individual is totally free to create meaning.  Sartre believed that if the individual does not acknowledge and exercise this responsibility she / he lives in “bad faith.”

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s the “Moviegoer,” introduces the reader to the “the search.”  He says, “What is the nature of the search?  You ask.  Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me, so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” 

The following Onetti passage captures the fundamentals of Existentialism and ironically the words are uttered by a character who is a clerical Bishop. What he calls the “laws of the game” represent the conditions of existence; “eternity is now” represents the temporal grounds for action by the individual, and, most importantly, the “strive to be himself” represents the commitment to the authentic self that is so significant and that must be in effect “at all times and against all opposition.”  His words represent how each human being should confront life and confront death.

“I will kiss the feet of he who may comprehend that eternity is now, that he himself is the only end, that he must accept and strive to be himself, simply that, without need of reasons, at all times and against all opposition . . . I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of the game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play (198).”