Chapter Twelve: The Philosophical Breakdown in

Chapter Twelve: The Philosophical Breakdown in

Room 14 The hotel room in Karbala was small and clean and had the particular impersonality of places that exist to be passed through rather than inhabited. A bed. A window with a view of an interior courtyard. A desk with a lamp that had a slightly too-yellow light, the kind of light that makes everything look slightly more serious than it is. I sat at the desk at two in the morning and tried to have a thought. This is not as simple as it sounds. The capacity for having a clean thought — one thought, complete, with a beginning and an end — had been unreliable for months. Thoughts would start and then branch and the branches would branch and the whole thing would become a thicket, and in the middle of the thicket, somewhere, the original thought would be lost. The thought I was trying to have was this: who is Hur when he is not being any of the Hurs he performs. There is the Hur who is good at school. There is the Hur who is good with people. There is the Hur who feels things he can't show. There is the Hur who shows things he can't feel. There is the Hur who is named for freedom. There is the Hur who is imprisoned by the name. Nietzsche: become who you are. Which one. Which one is the one I am supposed to become.

All of them. None of them. The one underneath. Is there one underneath.

I sat with the question for a long time. The room had the quality Kafka gives to rooms in which his characters are trapped — not physically confined, but somehow impossible to leave, the exit always visible and always slightly further away than it appeared. I was not physically confined. I could have opened the door and walked out and gone back to the courtyard, back to the ritual, back to the collective grief that had been so briefly clarifying. But I did not. I sat with the question. And the question became something slightly different. It became: what am I doing. Not the moral question — though the moral question was also there, nearby, in the room with me. The prior question. The question before the question. What am I doing with the days. What am I doing with the name. What am I doing with the freedom that has been my operating principle and my alibi and my north star for as long as I can remember. Am I free. Or am I simply unattached, which is not the same thing, which is actually almost the opposite, in the way that the absence of chains is not the same as the presence of somewhere to go. Camus's Meursault is free. He refuses to perform. He looks at the world with its arbitrariness and its violence and its demand for appropriate emotional response and he simply... does not comply. He is, in some reading, the most free person in

the novel. He is also standing in a prison cell awaiting execution. His freedom has produced this. His freedom has produced the specific circumstances in which his freedom is most visibly and permanently curtailed. This is not a cautionary tale about freedom. I want to be careful. Camus is not saying: be less free. He is saying: look clearly at what freedom is and is not, look at what the world does with it, look at the absurdity of the whole arrangement without flinching and without the consolation of pretending the absurdity resolves. I looked. In room 14, at two in the morning, with the yellow lamp, I looked. What I saw was not a monster. What I saw was a person of limited self-knowledge who had been using freedom as a way of avoiding the harder work of selfconstruction. A person for whom freedom had been primarily freedom from — from obligation, from settling, from the specific vulnerability of choosing one thing and therefore not choosing everything else. A person who had mistaken the avoidance of vulnerability for the exercise of will. I sat with this for a long time. Then I picked up my phone and called Layla.