Where it Began

Nothing really matters.

In the novel Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, the main character Victor is a (not so) recovering sex addict who had to drop out of medical school in order to work at a Colonial Recreation Village to pay for his delusional mother's exorbitant care-clinic bills. Admittedly, he's a bit bitter. Especially since his mother was in and out of jail for his childhood, kidnapping him back from whatever foster parents he was with from time to time.

He's an anti-hero.

There are certainly nihilistic themes in the book - in all of Palahniuk's work. The concept that what we do is out of our control, that nothing we do or achieve will last or matter, there's no real, good reason to do anything.

Like Tyler Durden from Palahniuk's novel Fight Club says, "Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart." Nothing Gold can stay. For Victor, its the threat of never getting out of particular cycle. He's desperately needy, and this manifests itself in his side business - choking to death in restaurants. He learned from a very early age that people seem to love you, pay attention to you when you're choking to death. You have to go all the way to the edge to ever be saved. So he goes to restaurants and chokes, waiting until the hero of the night saves him again. From that point on, they send cards, money, etc. to make sure that he's still doing alright.

But they need him, too. He's a kind of savior for these people, a heroic story they can tell their kids, something that gives their life meaning. The night that they saved another persons life. By being saved, he saves them.

Most find his work to be too gloomy, too new age, too nihilistic, too dark, too visceral. But I find a certain hopefulness in his writing. Nihilism is one of those buzz words that gets people's heads shaking even if they don't understand what it means. It seems spooky, mysterious, and there's an air of death about it. People need reasons to live. They need to understand things they can't understand. Nihilism doesn't offer that.

I think the lesson is less about things meaning nothing, and more about returning to the magic of life. In Fight Club, the main character's life something to float through - going to work, getting Starbucks, eating out, living alone, collecting junk he won't need, becoming the anti-evolution of man. It's depressing, especially to see so much of it happening in real life. But the thing that most don't see is that while his life is numbed, there is still incredible beauty in it. In the details. How often do we think of breathing as beautiful? Or the way the human heart works? We do it several thousand times a day, so its standard. It's boring. It's a rerun. But when you concentrate on it - the sound of air rushing in through the echo cavern of your nose, the feeling of oxygen spreading through your body, the mini-melodrama being played out in each cell in your system. When you slow it down and pay attention, it's like a symphony.

I tend to find hope within nihilism, and within Palahniuk's work, although it's counter-intuitive. When nothing matters, can't we pretty much do anything? Aren't we free to describe something as beautiful just because we think it is? Aren't we free to look at life how we'd like to see it? Aren't we free?

At the end of Choke, Victor's life is reaching the end of a downward spiral. He's devastated, in ruin. Countering that, his friend Denny has been becoming more at peace with himself by collecting huge rocks and has started building them into a structure on a small plot of land he owns. The people of the neighborhood are furious. They want to know what it is. They have to know why he's building it. He doesn't have an answer. He explains that he won't know what it is until it's finished. That he's just building it to build. The process is more important than the outcome.

They destroy it.

Denny, with the help of Victor, simply starts rebuilding. The beauty of the entire book - the entire gut-wrenching life that Victor and his friend Denny live - is that on the last pages, they are standing atop a ruined structure, happy just to start building again even if they don't know what the structure is. And in the darkness of the night, with the rocks piled up reaching toward the sky, it could be anything.

Same goes for you.