A Mole’s Progress

Setting out for the store, traipsing down my own street, I remembered Kate’s literalism and how that felt to me. I actually loved it because it was so simple. No abstruse doctrines, no nothing, really. Just the immediate stuff around me and the asphalt under my feet. Do we say that such an existence is amoral? If not, then Dostoevsky’s “everything is permitted” is incorrect. Maybe human rules don’t depend on metaphysics. Maybe the rules are just human. The Absolute was chiefly a nineteenth century philosophical notion. After the turn of the twentieth century, the concept declined with the rise of analytic philosophy, which was the tradition Kate followed. Existentialism survived into the next century, and it was this tradition I gravitated to when our friendship neared the end. I recall rereading Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez in February 2017. To be honest I was tunneling my way like a mole in the direction of recovery. I was contemplating it, but consciously didn’t know what I was doing. Now I’ve come up on the green earth and can look back at the maze I left. Four months after Unamuno I attended my first church service. And three months from there I stopped drinking, starting my longest term of sobriety ever. The mole knew exactly what it was doing, and still does.

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