For Howie, the "trivial" things in his life enable him to manipulate his flow of time and give a sense of permanence to passing events. The juxtaposition of his deep analysis of his milk and cookies into his analysis of Aurelius's passage further emphasizes this idea. In Howie's life, the most important things are the "trivial" and the things he longs for and remembers the most deeply are the "transient". Aurelius's "definition" of life completely contradicts this belief, which causes this reaction.
Thursday, September 3, 2020
Aurelius and Howie
Arguably the most violent reaction the reader witnesses from Howie in The Mezzanine is the one that occurs after he reads a passage from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. As a bit of background, Meditations is a collection of 12 books that Aurelius wrote to himself about the "importance of analyzing one's judgment of self and others and the development of a cosmic perspective" (Wikipedia). The specific passage that Howie reads discusses the triviality and the transience of life and during our discussion in class, we spoke a lot about the the aspect of the trivial. Another general consensus our class came to is that Howie inherently disagrees with Aurelius and his beliefs. However, when I reread the passage in The Mezzanine I noticed that the narrative of Howie was very similar to Aurelius's Meditations in the sense that both are very private, "intimate" narrations of each own's life. The only difference is that Howie seems to separate trivial and transient as two separate things.
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I like that you bring up some background about Marcus Aurelius. I didn't really have much more context besides the words that Howie read which had disgusted him and caused, as you said, a "violent" reaction from Howie. Howie's reaction shows a lot about his character and backs up the way that the looks at everything in life. I found it interesting that you compared the two stories. I could have probably made the assumption that the two stories had some similarities, but not to the degree of your description. I think this context adds more meaning to this passage from The Mezzanine. Great post!
ReplyDeleteInteresting thoughts Collin. I think discussing the fragility of life is a very interesting thing to focus on, as one of the major topics we see in the book is a very existential look at the existence of life and being as a whole. And generally, if one can extract a crude and general message from the book, it's that nothing is totally trivial. Whether its a cream cheese sandwich or an elevator ride, Howie certainly doesn't want to see anything as trivial. Rather, he approaches everything with such interest and passion.
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