There are times when certain books fall into your hands at the perfect moment. Before the angelic nosedive of this book from the skies (or rather, the Waterstones’ shelves), my hands were then covered in an atrocious blue ink, and that perfect moment was a quick break between two of my supervisions.

The title: simple, almost childish. The cover: less sophisticated than a two-dimensional cartoon series. But after looking at the author’s name more carefully, something struck home. Little did I know that Rhinocéros, by Romanian-born French dramatist Eugène Ionesco, would become glued to the bottom of my daily tote bag, sitting among my gnawed pencils and the interminable calculations waiting to be proofread.

Somehow the book encompassed multiple versions of myself, which, throughout Lent term, were trying to battle against one another. Being written in French by a Romanian writer who embraced the French culture so dearly that he altered his own name to sound bohemian, the text also embodied my favourite philosophical theory: absurdism. Together with the renowned La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) by the same author, Rhinocéros led to the inauguration of the Theatre of the Absurd. And what better moment to succumb to it than during these painfully absurd times we are all living in right now?

“Somehow the book itself encompassed multiple versions of myself”

With this in mind, I embarked on a journey to dissect the anatomy of this work. At the time of its publication, it was thought to be a metaphor for the fascist movement. It shed light upon how a seemingly weak representative of an idea could germinate into a majority of blind followers. Slowly but surely, this new ideology would become the normality, while the untransformed individuals, the ones who maintained their humanity, would be merely seen as ugly specimens.

However, the work can be analysed from different perspectives and its universal truths become even more relevant in today’s context. By reading the playtext, each line of the drunken Bérenger sounds more genuine and reflective when viewed as our own desperate efforts to understand what is happening to the world right now. It felt as if the text was filtering our daily lives into bits of painful but necessary internal monologues. And in a distracted world, where one tries to stifle their own thoughts and sorrows through cheap entertainment, the writing reassured me once more that it is still worth it to stand up, to question everything, because otherwise we end up as Jean: “Comment peuvent peser des choses qui n’existent pas?” (“How can things which do not exist matter?“).

“And in a distracted world, where one tries to stifle their own thoughts and sorrows through cheap entertainment, the writing reassured me”

In spite of the writing revealing these uneasy feelings and bordering on existential crisis, there was a bit of a contrasting effect, where the ugliness of the truth was counterbalanced by the final revolt against the world: “Je me défendrai contre tout le monde!” (“I will defend myself against the entire world”). And here I was, cramming all my work, staining my lecture notes with coffee and dark chocolate, so that, at the end of the day, I could grab the book and plunge into this frightening war between humans and rhinos, between drunkards who analyse and comment on the world with unsullied clarity, and ascetics who mould their religion in order to match the unicorn or bicorn creatures’ ideology.

I would sometimes sit in a coffee shop with my regular chrysanthemum tea, the book open on the table in front of me, and just look around. Nowadays, one might say that slowing down and not automatically grabbing your laptop to get some work done or your phone to drown in the endless hysteria of scrolling is a waste of time. But this cannot be further from the truth! The main character’s final soliloquy made me regain my courage to defy norms and not feel pressured to tick another deadline off my list.

Especially as a STEM student myself, I feel that it is becoming more and more important for us to pause, to sit in silence for 30 minutes, without any guilt of wasting time. Take a tea break or indulge in Marcel Proust’s buttery madeleines and start questioning yourselves and others. It becomes a form of actively understanding what we are doing with our lives and why.

Sometimes it is truly harrowing to come back home from a lecture and realise that all you could hear around you were the same predictable discussions about internships or post-graduation plans. As in Rhinocéros, we slowly lose our ability to communicate in a meaningful way and, like any character in an absurdist play, we repeat the same lines over and over again till they become devoid of any significance. But we have not turned into rhinoceros yet. We are still fighting, still checking our foreheads out of fear to discover a newly grown corn, the first sign of the mutation. After all, we are continuously trying to find meaning in everything, trying to find reasons to enjoy our morning coffee even in the most traumatic circumstances. I am sure this is the type of revolt against the Absurd being hinted at, so why not embrace it?