There’s this image I have of a coffee shop in Germany or France in the early twentieth century-poets hunch over tables and scrawl in the yellow pages of their notebooks; a chemical-green winks from the bottom of absinthe cups; pipe smoke hangs like fog from the rafters. It’s a place those Baudelaire degenerates can come and find solitude among others who, like them, have so righteously cast themselves aside from the tedious pace of their industry lives and created their own staccato with new philosophies and art.

I like to romanticize that era; it was a time of change an innovation, one not dissimilar to where we are now. The war had ripped away the nice curtain of civility that hung over Europe, and suddenly life seemed vast, untidy, incomprehensible. The work of those coffee-shop poets arose from the ashes of the old linear, Victorian forms and echoed that new deep sense of bewilderment they all felt. There was a living, breathing existential agony among them, fueled by a rejection of God and objectivity and thus any kind of moral code.

Sartre and Camus were the ones who helped achieve this, who showed that the work of culture was not divinely inspired, but our own human creation; from then on, our purposes became cloudy. There was no inherent path for humans; we roamed, pulled by listless aims, creating our own order because that was simply how we survived socially. Only now, we were conscious of the fact; our world was man-made, not heavenly.

Yet from what felt like a bleak beginning, the absurdity of the human condition was translated by the existentialists into the ultimate freedom. Life was inherently meaningless, but we could create what we wanted from it. The ethical people lived their lives to the fullest, well aware of its ultimate futility. They were full of sound and fury, despite it all.

I feel we are in the middle of a similar upset and coming to similar realizations. Globalization has shown us the faces of so many different people and cultures that it is impossible to know where we stand among them all. The new knowledge of all the astoundingly different ways there are for humans to live in the world begs us to realize that all of these ways can’t be right, and thus none of them are. There is no mandate, no model for how to live.

We are back where we were in those tiny cafes-completely uprooted, pondering the expanse of the world while we twiddle our absinthe spoons, wishing there were something solid to stand on.

Yet I hope we can learn to dwell loudly in the abstractions. Decades ago, Picasso made beautiful the skewed cubist faces of humanity, Gertrude Stein played with words and language, Matisse played with dissonant color and emotion. All of these new concepts and art arose from that feeling of harsh insecurity.
Today, cultures are our palettes and our inspirations; we dress up in different ones from moment to moment, mixing a Rasta hat with a business jacket or Taoist worldviews with Jewish ritual. Our art is the creation of ourselves and our philosophies from the quaking landscape of a multiethnic world.

In this ultimate postmodernism, we can choose to see our own self-creation as a Dionysian act of delight. We can embrace the ridiculous amount of differences, and the ridiculous amount of similarities, and in the end, we can embrace the fact it means absolutely nothing.

Roberta Singer is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.