Where do you turn when you’re wrestling with an existential question? You know the kind: Am I on the right path? Am I capable of love? Is there an order to things? Is it a therapist, a life coach, an astrologer, a self-help book, a trusted friend, or a psychic? Maybe it’s all of the above. Or, if you’re like me, you might be tempted by something even more immediate, like the TikTok tarot readers who forecast that an ex will be coming back into your life within the next three days. (They have yet to be right about anything in my life, yet I watch and watch.) Sometimes existential questions turn into medical or bodily ones, like when we find ourselves with no motivation and seek out advice from a doctor. There’s seemingly no end to the appeals we make to others when we want an explanation for our situation.
“Where do you turn when you’re wrestling with an existential question?”
Usually when we seek help like this, we’re looking for a clear answer — and the more immediate, the better. These answers might come in the form of advice from a well-meaning therapist or friend, or in the form of maxims perfected by a self-help author. In any case, they are little bits of knowledge usually passed off with conviction. A truth that someone else has discerned. I recently got this funny feeling while scrolling through social, sifting through videos of influencers. Each one of them was offering their take on their topic of choice — dating, interiors, wellbeing — with such conviction. But wait, I thought. Do any of them know what they are talking about? Why are they so sure of themselves?
Of course, the transmission of hard-won lessons is an important piece of life. (What am I doing here, if not trying to share something of what I’ve learned?) These bits of knowledge can give us something to hang on to in our difficult and searching moments, when life has ceased making sense and we’re not sure what happens next. But ultimately, can they do much more than stabilize us for a moment, however brief? The moment we assume there is an answer, find it in another person, and then live by it as a code, we lose the connection to the question we’re asking — and it might just be in the question that we find our humanity. 🤲
Why novels?
I was recently taken by a clip of Ken Burns that I encountered while scrolling. History doesn’t repeat itself, he claims, but human nature remains the same. The novel has a way of allowing us to feel towards these underlying impulses — longing, confusion, desire, fear — without being attached to a determinate outcome. For each novel, as for each life, the circumstances and the characters are different. So when we pick up a novel, we’re not just following a plot; we’re slipping into a lineage of people trying to make sense of the world.
“Novels give us the time and space to see how a question unfolds into a life, to watch a single choice reverberate across years or generations.”
Even better, novels give us the time and space to see how a question unfolds into a life, to watch a single choice reverberate across years or generations. They slow us down. They elongate the moment between cause and effect, and in that stretch, they invite us to see ourselves more clearly. Unlike advice, which moves quickly to condense experience into a takeaway, novels open up the space of experience. They allow contradictions to sit side by side, to remain unresolved, to feel real. And in doing so, they sustain our own questioning. So long as we’re reading, we’re attentive to the motion of life and feeling our way through it. There’s ultimately no playbook for that.
“So long as we’re reading, we’re attentive to the motion of life and feeling our way through it.”
It’s amazing what can come into view while one’s reading a novel: How the texture of ordinary life feels amplified, or how your mood shifts to match the emotional weather of the book. As anyone who has been immersed in a story can tell you, stepping outside in the morning feels very different if you’re reading “The Secret History” or “Don Quixote.” The world isn’t only tinted, it also gets lit up. Details of life that might never strike you otherwise start to come into view. The significance of the postal service was never so clear to me as when I was reading “The Crying of Lot 49.” If you pick up a novel with your question in mind, you’re likely to be surprised by all the threads attached to it. It might lead you to examine new aspects of a conundrum that you hadn’t yet considered.
A while back, I picked up Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” after it was mentioned in a course as demonstrating something about the nature of love. It’s led me to write this piece — and to realize, after the fact, that Goethe’s work was taken as a bastion of how to live by Victorian intellectuals. As I read it, I’m trying to leave behind my impulse to take it on as some kind of advice, and instead accompany characters, their predicaments, and the sense that the challenges of my so-modern life are not entirely so. At least, fiction has this way of making you feel less singular in your confusion. Someone else, at some other moment in time, has stood in the same bewildering place. That alone can feel like an answer.
In an era when every problem seems to send us straight to therapy, a podcast, or a friend’s DMs, turning to a novel might feel strange. I’m constantly tempted to consult the endless storehouse of online wisdom, hoping it will help me make the right decision and move on. But lately, I’ve found myself reaching for novels instead — not for answers, but for the chance to linger inside the questions. Fiction lets me stretch out my uncertainties, see their stakes more clearly, imagine their possible outcomes, and feel connected to the long line of people before me who have wrestled with the very same dilemmas.
Maybe the point isn’t to resolve our questions as quickly as possible, but to stay with the ones that compel us. When we do, we don’t just gather knowledge, we come to know ourselves.
Ashley D’Arcy is the Senior Editor at The Good Trade. She holds an MA in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research and has contributed to esteemed outlets such as The Nation, 032c, and Yale School of Management’s Insights where she’s leveraged her expertise in making complex ideas accessible to a broad audience. In addition to her editorial work, she is training as a psychoanalytic mental health professional and provides care to patients in New York City. Ashley also explores sustainable fashion, clean beauty, and wellness trends, combining thoughtful cultural critiques with a commitment to mindful living.
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