I Am a Rock
I AM A ROCK
My first taste of existential angst did not occur during the tumultuous years of my adolescence. The horrifying awareness of being alone in a vast and indifferent universe, that nihilistic nightmare which descends upon one like a dark bird of prey, did not catch me by surprise during my college years. It should have, but it didn’t.
It should have occurred after reading Sartre and Camus, when I was old enough to drink café au lait and smoke long cigarettes and don a black beret. It should have waited until I half understood Existentialism, when I was educated and pretentious enough to expound upon it with my bad French and air of tragic ennui. It should have, but it didn’t.
Instead my Cartesian crisis, my desperate need to prove my existence, define it, ground it in reality, assuage my ontological insecurity by shouting cogito ergo sum to the world, occurred when I was seven years old.
The book responsible for my sudden and traumatic awakening was not a work of philosophy. I was, after all, only seven years old. It was a little book by William Steig, a book called Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a book filled with colorful illustrations of talking animals, a book for children aged four to eight. I still shudder at the thought of it.
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is about a young donkey named Sylvester Duncan. One rainy day Sylvester discovered a shiny red pebble that had the power to grant wishes. On his way home with the pebble he encountered a lion. He panicked, and in that moment of fear and confusion he wished he were a rock. Of course, once the danger passed Sylvester had no way to pick up the magic pebble and wish he were himself again. He was literally petrified. He was a rock.
The horror of Sylvester’s predicament was not lost on me. Even though he was physically a rock, he was fully conscious. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t see. Yet his mind was unimpaired. His sense of himself was intact.
If Sylvester’s self-awareness had not survived his transformation into a rock, then one could simply say that Sylvester had ceased to be Sylvester, that he was, in fact, dead. This would be merely unfortunate. However, Sylvester did retain his self-awareness and that is what makes his fate so appalling.
I imagined Sylvester wanting to shout, to declare his existence, to scream “I am here.” I felt his terror and despair. Here was Sylvester, but no one knew it. And that was only the beginning. What would happen to a mind trapped in an inanimate object, a mind left entirely to itself, without any stimuli from the outside world? Steig’s answer is merciful: It would sleep.
“Night followed day and day followed night over and over again. Sylvester on the hill woke up less and less often. When he was awake, he was only hopeless and unhappy. He felt he would be a rock forever and he tried to get used to it. He went into an endless sleep.”
Sylvester spent a year in this comatose state, but it was not the sleeping that disturbed me. It was the thought of his occasional waking up that chilled me to the bone. Sylvester thought he would be a rock forever and he very nearly was. It would have been a ghastly immortality, a grotesque and ironic parody of the human desire for eternal life. Of course he wouldn’t really live forever. He would only last as long as a rock lasts, but how long does a rock last?
My seven year old imagination could not bear to contemplate the number of years, of centuries, of millennia, it takes for a rock to erode, the millions of years it would take for Sylvester to be freed from this wretched existence. And what would the passage of time mean to Sylvester?
Life would go on all round him: Night would follow day, winter would follow autumn, year would follow year. Everything would change, everything except Sylvester. He alone would remain the same. Would the eons of boredom and isolation produce some type of solipsistic madness, some private hell created by a mind condemned to cannibalizing itself?
At the end of the story, through a series of highly improbable coincidences, Sylvester was restored to equine form, but my peace of mind was not so easily restored. Instead of rejoicing along with the reunited Duncan family, I was troubled by metaphysical conundrums which were all the more tormenting because I could not verbalize them. I did not have the theoretical framework or the vocabulary to express such abstract thoughts, so my ontological insecurity remained a vague feeling of disquiet.
Rereading Sylvester and the Magic Pebble as an adult, I can better understand Sylvester’s panic-stricken cry: “I wish I were a rock.” Sartre would call it bad faith, the attempt of being-for-itself to become being-in-itself, to escape the burdensome freedom and responsibility of creating a meaningful life in an otherwise meaningless universe.
Sylvester, as a conscious and self-aware donkey, is being-for-itself. His life, like the lives of all conscious and self-aware beings, is fraught with hungry lions, with rainy days, with difficult decisions and choices. Uncertainty and anxiety are his lot.
Sylvester is not unique in his attempt to become a thing. However, being-for-itself can never become being-in-itself. It is impossible. Sylvester learned this the hard way. He tried to become a thing, a rock, yet he remained self-aware. Bad faith is an act of self-deception. It is pretending to be a thing. It is going through life asleep. The crisis comes when one suddenly wakes up.
There is an alternative to living in bad faith and that is living in revolt. To live in revolt one must first become aware of the absurdity of life. One must then abandon hope, for hope is merely another form of escape, another act of bad faith. This hopelessness is not the hopelessness of despair, as Sylvester’s was. It is the conscious acceptance of absurdity.
The opposite of Sylvester is Sisyphus. Camus calls Sisyphus the absurd hero because he suffers without hope, without despair, and with full awareness of the futility of his endless labor. Sisyphus knows he will never succeed. He knows the rock he struggles to push up the mountain will roll back down every time. It is his awareness of his fate which is his punishment, his own private hell, but it is also his triumph over that fate. Sisyphus never ceases to be Sisyphus. He never wishes to change places with his rock.
When Sylvester finally woke up he wished he were himself again. Sylvester was lucky. Some people never wake up. Some people never become themselves again. The desire to be a rock is hard to overcome, yet life as a rock is an ontological nightmare. As a child, I knew this intuitively. But the vicissitudes of life, the lions and inescapable choices and rainy days, can wear away at one’s sense of self.
There are moments of panic when it seems better to be a rock and I have had my share of panic. I am no stranger to bad faith. I have also woken up, like Sylvester, and wanted to be myself again, wanted to accept the absurdity of life and the burdensome freedom that is the torture and the triumph of being-for-itself.
But I am no Sisyphus yet. And this is no storybook ending. Sometimes I still hope and sometimes I despair, yet when push comes to shove, I would rather be an ass than a rock.