Neither Sigmund nor Adam ever visited Israel, but Sigmund certainly considered himself a Zionist fellow traveler, and that conviction could not help but color the idealistic spectrum of Adams adolescent rebellion against the ideas and ideals of his parents. Although that rebellious phase was in the past by the time of his marriage to Sylvia Ruskin (a gentile), its legacy must have played some small part in Adams decision to try to perfect his German with the aid of a philosopher of whom his father would definitely not have approved.
Perhaps that same awareness assisted, if it did not actually provoke, Adams powerful reaction to Heideggers argument. On the other hand, it might have been the fact that he set out to wrestle with the text purely as an exercise in linguistics that left him psychologically naked to its deeper implications. Then again, it does not seem to have been at all unusual for males of his era and cultural background to hold themselves sternly aloof from schmaltz while being extravagantly self-indulgent in the matter of angst .
For whatever reason, Adam was ready-made for the strange sanctification of self-pity that was the primitive existentialists red badge of courage. While he read Heidegger, a couple of chapters at a time, on those nights when he elected not to claim his conjugal rights, Adam felt that he was gradually bringing to consciousness precious items of knowledge that had always lain within him, covert and unapprehended. He did not need to be persuaded that angst is the fundamental mood of mortal existence, because that knowledge had always nested in his soul, waiting only to be recognised and greeted with all due deference.
Heidegger explained to Adam that human awareness of inevitable death, though unfathomably awful, was normally repressed to a subliminal level in order that the threat of nothingness could be held at bay, but that individuals who found such dishonesty impalatable were perennially catching fugitive glimpses of the appalling truth. Adam felt a surge of tremendous relief when he realized that he must be one of the honest few, and that this was the explanation of his inability to relate meaningfully to the insensitive majority of his fellows. It was as if a truth that had long been captive in some dark cranny of his convoluted brain had been suddenly set free.
When Adam laid the book down on his bedside table for the last time, the silken caress of his expensive sheets seemed to be infused with a new meaning. For twenty-five years he had been a stranger to himself, but now he felt that he had been properly introduced.
He woke Sylvia, his bride of eight weeks, and said: Were going to die, Syl.
We must presume that although she may have been mildly distressed by being hauled back from gentle sleep in this rude manner, Sylvia would have adopted a tone of loving sympathy.
No were not, Adam, she would have said. Were both perfectly healthy.
Perhaps that was the crucial moment of disconnection which sealed the eventual doom of their marriage.
Death is the one constant of our existence, Adam told her, calmly. The awareness that we might be snuffed out of existence at any moment haunts us during every bright moment of our waking lives. Although we try with all our might not to see the specter at the feast of life, its always there, always seeking us out with eyes whose hollowness insists that we too will one day forsake our being in the world . No matter how hard we strive for mental comfort and stability, that fundamental insecurity undermines and weakens the foundations of the human psyche, spoiling its fabric long before
the anticipated moment of destruction actually arrives.
We all try, in our myriad ways, to suppress and defeat it, but we all fail. We invent myths of the immortality of the soul; we hide in the routines of the everyday; we try to dissolve our terror in the acid baths of love and adoration but none of it works, Syl. It cant work. If I read him aright, Heidegger thinks that if we could only face up to the specter wed be able to exorcise it, liberating ourselves from our servitude to the ordinary and achieving authentic existence, but thats like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; its nothing but another philosophical word game. The issue cant be dodged not, at any rate, by any cheap trick of that kind. The angst will always win.
In the course of a year-long courtship and eight weeks of happy marriage Sylvia Zimmerman must already have had abundant opportunity to study her loved ones slight penchant for pomposity, but she was prepared to forgive its occasional excesses. She loved Adam. She did not understand him, but she did love him.
Go to sleep, Adam, she advised. Things wont seem half so bad in the morning.
As it happened, though, the sheer enormity of Adams realization denied him escape into the arms of Morpheus. He turned out the bedside lamp and sat in the dark, appalled by the vision of nothingness that had been conjured up before him, languishing in the sensation of having no hope. And when morning came, it found him in exactly the same condition. It is useless to speculate now as to whether sleep might have saved him from further anguish; if he could have slept in such circumstances, he would not have needed saving. In fact, because he was the person he was, Adam Zimmerman became in the course of that insomniac night a man obsessed. Those few roughhewn sentences which had poured out of him as he tried to explain himself to the sleepy Sylvia became the axioms of his continuing life.