Still recovering from a mild concussion. As the brain fog clears, I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett, one of the great philosophical novelists of the early twentieth century. In an introduction to a collection of Hammett’s stories, Steven Marcus discusses the famous “Flitcraft parable,” contained in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man named Flitcraft is almost killed by a falling beam. His narrow escape from death causes Flitcraft to completely abandon his old life, but within five years he has settled down to almost exactly the same life, just in another city with another wife. Marcus writes:
“[The parable] is about among other things is the ethical irrationality of existence, the ethical unintelligibility of the world. For Flitcraft the falling beam ‘had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.’ The works are that life is inscrutable, opaque, irresponsible, and arbitrary — that human existence does not correspond in its actuality to the way we live it. For most of us live as if existence itself were ordered, ethical, and rational. As a direct result of his realization in experience that it is not, Flitcraft leaves his wife4 and children and goes off. He acts irrationally and at random, in accordance with the nature of existence. When after a couple of years of wandering aimlessly about he decides to establish a new life, he simply reproduces the old one he had supposedly repudiated and abandoned; that is, he behaves again as if life were orderly, meaningful, and rational, and ‘adjusts’ to it…. Here we come upon the unfathomable and most mysteriously irrational part of it all — how despite everything we have learned and everything we know, [humans] will persist in behaving and trying to behave sanely, rationally, sensibly, and responsibly. And we will continue to persist even when we know that there is no logical or metaphysical, no discoverable or demonstrable reason for doing so…. The contradiction is not ethical alone; it is metaphysical as well….”
So, what’s the meaning of life according to Hammett? There isn’t any, except what you make.