As an English major, I learned how to write impressively about books I hadn’t read and I knew I could always improve my grade by quoting Kafka, who believed the purpose of great literature is to cause pain. Franz and Søren and Henry led solitary lives, accepted alienation as the norm, and each of them tried to turn his own private misery and social awkwardness into a philosophy. Each of them died in his forties, an incomplete life. And together, they gave the 20th century a whole truckload of grievous philosophy, which now, a quarter into the 21st, we need to finally dispel.
The Three Noodges didn’t have the analgesics we have today or the neurology know-how or the dental care. The tuberculosis that killed two of them can be cured. And what is most significant, none of them had a lasting loving relationship with a woman. Thoreau said, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” The poor man was missing a necessity of life as important as oxygen, namely someone to say, “Darling, let’s go out tonight and have fun. Enough sitting on your butt. Let’s go dancing.”
