Writings on the Meaning of Life, and Existential 'Angst'

Anyway, I am currently having problems finding the 'ideal' texts which to use for my work. If [/i]anyone[/i] has any suggestions I would be extremely grateful. (By texts I literally mean anything made out of words- poems/prose/newspaper articles/prayers/crisp packets).

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Snow in the Suburbs
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes.

And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin.
And we take him in.



This is not a complex poem to understand. Hardy's point is that only human beings are capable of feeling (and exercising) compassion in the face of Nature's blind neutrality. He does not suggest that we have a moral duty to show compassion - there is no ought here. In fact the final line is matter-of-fact understatement.

The first stanza shows an interesting use of language: 'Every branch big with it,/Bent every twig with it'. Said aloud, the lines have a sense of weight (almost oppression), conveying the heaviness of the snow:sound and sense are well combined. 'Every fork like a white web-foot' is an image of the branches, glued together by the snow just as are the palings, but the image may also remind us of a bird's footprints in the snow - and indeed a bird is about to arrive.

When the sparrow enters the tree - and the poem - we are reminded of the New Testament lines about 'not a sparrow falling' without the eye of God seeing it. Hardy's atheistical philosophy has no time for this; the sparrow must take his chance with the rest of Darwin's creatures.

Only in the final stanza does Hardy see a way out of Nature's carelessness: human compassion.

a man's total reaction upon life

the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

If you manage to marry Monty Python to Mahler's Second, you deserve a straight A, missus.

3. Situations where someone may feel an 'existential angst', in general or maybe towards a particular situation- The despair at not knowing why we exist, the deep sense of longing, the sense of confusion.