Why Not?: Fifteen Reasons to Live
Ray Robertson
Language: English
Pages: 175
ISBN: 1926845277
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
Longlisted for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
"Clear-eyed ... Robertson is no stranger to confronting unsavoury truths."—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"Many of us sense that the world has too many moving parts and can become utterly defeated. Ray Robertson found a 'road back' in this splendid and intriguing book." —Jim Harrison
Shortly after completing his sixth novel, Ray Robertson suffered a depression of suicidal intensity. Soon after his recover, he decided to try and answer two of the biggest questions we can ask. What makes humans happy? And what makes a life worth living?
His answers aren’t what you might expect from a mental illness memoir—but they’re exactly what you’d expect from Ray Robertson. With the vitality of Nick Hornby and a brashness all his own, Robertson runs his hands over life, death, intoxication, and art. Unashamedly working-class and unabashedly literary, Why Not? is a rolling, rocking, anti-Sisyphean odyssey.
Ray Robertson is the celebrated author of eight books and six novels, including What Happened Later, about Jack Kerouac's last years. He lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario.
other words, how can it possibly be worth doing? Except, as Montaigne asked, “Is it not an error to consider some actions less worthy because they are necessary?” Maybe desires like the sexual impulse are creditable precisely because they aren’t a decision. Perhaps obeying the dictates of nature is more of a virtue than complying with human-concocted imperatives. “What must first be proved is worth little,” Nietzsche maintained. No one ever had to be convinced to be lustful. Lust commands,
apathy and a naïve trust in authority have impeded knowledge and progress. Equipped with just the right amount of motivating fear and the information-spewing power of the World Wide Web, I played doctor for the first time since I was six years old. What I discovered was almost as revelatory. What I discovered was that OCD casualties suffer from a lack of serotonin, a chemical manufactured in the brain. That the inability of serotonin to reach the brain’s receptor sites, or a shortage in
full of other items that you did recycle. So the eggs you eat at the greasy spoon you like so much because the portions are big and the prices are low aren’t free range – the ones you eat at home always are. So some of the films you gushed over as an undergraduate for their iconoclastic quirkiness and bold experimentalism you now recognize for the pretentious puffery they clearly are – at least you were willing to pay your money to sit and listen and watch and try to learn and grow. Seneca was
divide your existence into two parts: live like a bourgeois, and think like a demigod.” It’s difficult to write a novel about the tumult of love when you’re simultaneously engaged in a tumultuous love affair. Without in any way diminishing the transforming power of passionate flesh-on-flesh love — “The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and prayer,” Marcus Aurelius observed — lust is pale ale compared to the full-bodied buzz of love. “Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,/”
what Simone Weil meant when she wrote, “Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.” It’s tempting — and, given our basic, probably unchangeable egocentric nature, perhaps even unavoidable — to treat other human beings as a means to an end: specifically, our own ends. But to have someone thank you for helping them be happier in their life – however they define happiness — is the highest interpersonal compliment one can receive. I wouldn’t be a novelist if it wasn’t for my wife