“Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: ‘My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death.’ And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.”
— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
Mine too, of course.
To enjoy that absurdity rather than worry about it, I recommend any novel by Tom Sharpe.
Sounds like a plan. Also, a bowl of pho.
Tom Sharpe is certainly addictive, Patrick. He manages to turn the ‘everything will be all right in the end’ philosophy on it’s head. ‘Normal’ people (like college lecturers ~) come across something unexpected in their routine life (like an inflatable doll) and trying to return to ‘normal’ they compound abnormality until in the end the world around them explodes as a logical result (in the funniest way that defies the reader to keep a straight face). Sharpe was (of course) one of those Cambridge deviants (Monty Python, Guy Burgess etc). I don’t think he ever had ‘pho’ for breakfast, so perhaps he was not all that deviant.
For the non Lao-ised reader ‘pho’ is the Vietnamese rendering of noodles in soup, pronounced ‘fur’.