Sylvia must have tried other arguments in the days that followed, but none fared any better than her first shallow riposte. This was not her fault; if Martin Heidegger could not succeed in persuading Adam that there was a satisfactory answer to the problem of angst , Sylvia Zimmerman had no chance. She was not an unintelligent woman by any means her academic qualifications were superior to Adams and she certainly had a broader mind but she did not have Adams capacity for obsession. Her cleverness was diffuse and highly adaptable, while his was tightly focused and direly difficult to shift once it had selected an objective.
Sylvia was adept at moving on, and that was the way she coped with all lifes intractable problems; if one proved too difficult she simply put it away and redirected her attention to more comfortable and more productive fields of thought and action. However ironic or paradoxical it may seem to us, in the light of subsequent events, moving on was the one thing that Adam Zimmerman could not do. Once the crucial fragment of philosophical ice had penetrated the profoundest depths of his conscious mind, his life could no longer flow as the lives of other men and women flowed; from that moment on his inner self was cold, crystalline, and hard as adamant.
For some years, Adam let his wife follow her own advice while he continued to brood privately, but his preoccupation was not a secret that he could keep from her, even if that had been his desire. It could not help but surface repeatedly, each time more insistent than the last. Heideggers analysis of the human predicament that all human life is underlaid, limited, subverted, and irredeemably devalued by its own precariousness in the face of death gnawed at Adams guts like some monstrous hookworm, and he could not help coughing up the argumentative flux whenever it threatened to overwhelm him.
He consulted many other philosophers in the hope of finding a solution to his predicament, but all the cures they suggested seemed to him to be no more than shifty conjurations based in dishonest sleight-of-mind. He even went so far as to consult the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, but Nausea only confirmed his long-held prejudice against the fallaciousness of fiction. Try as he might, he could attain no age of reason, obtain no reprieve, and discover no iron in the soul. He could not believe that anyone with a clear mind could draw an atom of satisfaction from the prospect of living on after death in the pages of authored books, the strokes of a paint-brush, or the notes of a musical composition. Nor could he consider the remembrance of children or the extrapolation of a dynasty to be of the slightest palliative value. The prospect
of being a born-again optimist could not tempt him even when everyone alongside whom he worked waxed lyrical about the power of positive thinking, the rewards of proactivity, and the vital necessity of a can do attitude. He needed something far more solid than the gospel of self-help in which to invest his commitment.
Adam was tempted for a while to abandon his job as a consultant in corporate finance, on the grounds that there was something absurdly meaningless about the ceaseless juggling of figures. He was a very accomplished saltimbanque, to be sure, and he prided himself on the fact that no one could walk the tightrope that separated tax avoidance from tax evasion more surefootedly than he, but even the most creative exercises in bookkeeping seemed to exemplify the desperate absorption in the trivial that was one of the most obviously hollow of all the false solutions to the problem of being.
Although he had no talent at all for composition, Adam did play the guitar quite well it was one of the few activities capable of relaxing him and for a while he contemplated beginning a new career as a spaced-out folksinger. He imagined for a while that he might grow his hair long, wear a beard, and change his name to Adam X in order to symbolize the falseness of family as a conduit of intergenerational continuity. He decided soon enough, however, that such a career would be no less absurd than a career in corporate finance, and a good deal less profitable.
Sylvia applauded this particular decision heartily, but Adams angst became, in Sylvias eyes, a marital misdemeanor. She was eventually to divorce him on the grounds that he could not provide her with essential emotional support. The trouble with you, she said, on the day she finally left him, is that youre incapable of enjoying yourself.
Sylvia never remarried and remained permanently childless, living comfortably on the alimony which Adam paid her until she died in 2019, but whether she escaped the ravages of her own angst remains unclear. Adam always claimed, with a hint of residual vindictiveness, that she died an alcohol-sodden wreck; although he was an unusually honest and serious man, all other surviving documents suggest that she lived a rich life, within the constraints of her time, and died as happily as anyone can who accepts the necessity.