The Floating Opera and the art of treading water
The morning of June 21st (or 22nd), 1937, Todd Andrews wakes with a solution. He is going to kill himself. He continues the idle routine of his day with the quiet resolve that this day will be his last.
Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.
John Barth’s The Floating Opera
Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.
The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.
The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.
John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers of the period. This search for the solution to living is evident in the ‘life hack’ blogs of young writers Clay Collins and Scott H Young. Both bloggers are attempting to master the methods of living.
This is how existential angst has surfaced and thrived in the electronica era. It has dissolved into some sort of quest to modify habits so that people can become more productive. If you’re not flapping your arms about filling up space then you’re failing to live. This would have been the fourth phase of Todd Andrews had he been able to log on to Wordpress and register a blog.
Merlin Mann, who was right there at the beginning blogging about productivity hacks, has recently redefined the purpose of his site 43 folders. It is now a site about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. It is a step out of the bleak black hole of life hacking in that it suggests that you should focus your attention more on what you are producing rather than the the act of producing itself. Swimming somewhere rather than attempting to perfect the art of treading water.
This is the failure of the life-hacking community. A young intelligentsia skipping over existential crises so focused on finding the easiest way to do something that they forget to question what really should be done.
Todd Andrews worked on his Inquiry. A never-ending project, much like a blog, that attempted to uncover ‘why things are’. There should be more blogs answering this Inquiry of Todd Andrews.