Reflective Writing and Poetic Musing by Condemiang + Stories About the World

He’s one of the people I respect the most. Especially when it comes to the concept of the absurd —this man was in a league of his own. He hurled sharp, relentless critiques at the absurdities we constantly sense and suffer in everyday life. But what exactly is absurdity? It’s not some lofty philosophical abstraction you need a PhD to understand. Even people who live on mental cruise control can feel it when something just doesn’t make sense—when logic collapses, when cause and effect fall apart, when the world contradicts itself and no one seems to care. A lot of folks think absurdity is just about politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate corruption, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Absurdity is vast, familiar, and it shows up constantly. And what’s worse, when we’re caught in it, we tend to dress it up as “fate” or excuse it as something inevitable, trying to justify not only our own condition but the absurd society that produced it. Ironically, Camus died in the very kind of s...

Born in Prague, in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was mainly active in Germany and died in Switzerland. His full name was “René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke.” It sounds like one of those absurdly long, tongue-twisting names no one could possibly remember. With a name this long, there can’t possibly be another person on Earth with the same one. When his older sister Maria died at an early age, his mother, yearning for her daughter, shoved ‘Maria’ into Rilke’s name even though he was a boy. He fell head over heels for Lou Salomé, a Russian-born writer and psychoanalyst who was fourteen years older than him, and followed her around like a little duckling. Most likely a case of maternal love deficiency. Even when Lou Salomé entered a marriage that was marriage in name only, he went so far as to visit her home and begged to live with her—a pure-hearted romantic? A stalker? Mentally unstable? It’s said that Salomé was the one who told h...