On November 25, 2025, in a small cafe in my hometown of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, I decided to stop being crazy. It was a long time coming, but it was in that moment of relative calm that I realized I had gotten off the path toward disaster.
An exhaustive explanation of that path—which is to say, of my neurosis—would be difficult, embarrassing, and, worst of all, boring. So I’ll skim over the medical diagnosis and give you my own interpretation: I suffered from an excess of GUILT. I felt a sense of existential debt, that I had to accomplish something to “pay up” for my existence, which manifested as obsessive goal setting. Early in life, I obsessed over my social life, my schoolwork, over my capacity to meet the goals set for me as an individual within society. When applying to colleges, I ruminated endlessly over this debt. But my eventual acceptance into UChicago would weigh on me like another debt. I obsessed over papers and preparations for college. Once I got there, I obsessed over socializing and relationships: a never-ending progression of frustration. I had guilted myself into a mental prison but I was also the debt collector that held the keys.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality deals with guilt and inveighs against the crushing weight of self-denial and self-harm. Nietzsche explains that the internalized guilt of Western man as a result of ruthless juridical and commercial power imposed on conquered ancient peoples. He argues that conquered humanity’s “instinct of freedom forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself.” He continues: “that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings.” This subjugation by the conquerors becomes an ascetic sense of “the burden of unpaid debts and the longing for them to be settled,” first to one’s social betters, then to one’s ancestors, and finally to the Christian God Himself. Thus, man “emits every ‘no’ which he says to himself… as a ‘yes,’ as existing… as the holiness of God, as God-the-Judge, as God-the-Hangman, as the beyond, as eternity, as torture without end, as hell, as immeasurable punishment and guilt.” Nietzsche sees this guilt as the core of Christianity, calling its doctrine of sin and sacrificial redemption “the greatest feeling of indebtedness on earth,” which would persist into the secular Enlightenment and beyond.
Nietzsche saw within Christianity something he called “the will to truth,” a tendency originating in the obsessive confession of sins and over centuries sublimated into scientific rigor. He predicted the end result of the Western will to truth, writing that “from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, questionable drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope.”
During the twentieth century, Nietzsche’s chickens came home to roost. But at the center of those burning years of human self-annihilation lay a million-degree core of degraded morality, one that no history book can capture. As such, we do what all scholars do best and worst; we turn to art.
Gravity’s Rainbow, by the enigmatic Thomas Pynchon, is about the Nazi German V-2 rocket—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile—and the pursuit of rocket technology by the victorious Allies in occupied Germany. It is also about technocratic control over society, self-destructive impulses, the meaning of the mystical beyond, and the fate of rationalist Western civilization itself.
You could select a single word and mine Gravity’s Rainbow for a thesis-worth of content. As such, I’ll stick with a single term: albatross. After Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s monumental poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was published, the albatross has become a symbol of guilt. At the end of the novel, as the ragtag group of ex-bureaucrats and veterans fresh out of Berlin struggle to take their lives back from the controlling influence of the technocracy (the ‘Rocket-state,’ as it’s called) we are told: “The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit.” This is essentially a groovy rewording of Freud’s claim in Civilization and Its Discontents that “tension between the strict super-ego and the subordinate ego we call the sense of guilt … manifests itself as the need for punishment.” Freud then argues that “civilization, therefore, obtains the mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”
Coleridge wrote in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that “Instead of the cross the Albatross / About my neck was hung.” Just like that instrument of state-inflicted torture and humiliation that has become the symbol of the world’s largest religion, the albatross that Western man hangs around his neck is a statement of universal human guilt. It is the mark of “the greatest feeling of indebtedness on Earth,” representing that humanity, because of its sinful impulses or blasphemous desires, requires a debt to be paid. Even after the mariner loses his crew as a result of his crime, even after he starves and thirsts for days and days, completely alone at sea, he is still hounded by guilt, compulsively retelling the story of his crime: “And till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns.” The Mariner frightening a wedding guest with his cautionary tale of woe is, in some ways, like the “ascetic priests” Nietzsche describes in the Genealogy, who teach the repressed masses self-denial to assuage their guilt in order to keep them alive: “it is the [self-inflicted] wound itself that forces him to live…” But while the Mariner is a lone storyteller, Nietzsche’s ascetic priests run the show: “the ascetic priest … had obviously won, his kingdom had come: already people were no longer making complaints against pain, they thirsted for it.” This kingdom, the “Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented,” is what the maniacal SS Captain Blicero speaks of in Gravity’s Rainbow, the kingdom of the rocket and the war that the novel travels through.
There was something in Pynchon’s chaotic vision of a world brought to its knees at the height of its technological power, the gyre widening and widening, that struck a nerve with my neurosis. My desire for results, my quest for untouchable immortality, my refusal to be sublimated into an amorphous, stagnant collective, had led me down the tortured path of internalized aggression, all goals collapsing into a chasm of self-annihilation, a flailing doom brought about by ambition and guilt.
While The Genealogy of Morality is a roughly straightforward philosophical text, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is a sprawling, seething mass of aphorisms, containing a few that can point us beyond the dread history of guilt. Regarding causality, he writes, “The ‘un-free will’ is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.” Instead of a claim, Nietzsche here offers the ultimate provocation and call to action. It is, perhaps, possible to decide one’s existence, if only one has the guts to not be dragged along by it.
In orienting myself, I am brought back, time and again, to Nietzsche’s will and Pynchon’s artistry. Were I not a neurotic, I could internalize a Buddha-like peace with the world and nature as it is. But I am a symbolic animal, committed and constrained to seek out relief through the hermeneutic and the subliminal, fighting for gratification against the gravity of my condition and fate, substituting symbols for reality. So I remain contentedly chained to metaphors.
In Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Prophet Zarathustra speaks of his living amongst the intellectual mountain peaks, writing in aphorism and blood. He says of his approach, “I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along.” Zarathustra does not dig ditches with the devil, hammering the establishment with a spade: to be trapped in rage is akin to being trapped by guilt, for in both you are weighed down. Zarathustra follows the common wisdom of “it’s not that deep”; in other words, he flies, gravity be damned.
From Gravity’s Rainbow, as Lyle Bland begins to mystically detach from technological hegemony and his own body, he finds
that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody . . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side [i.e., industrial chemists], the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics.
The endless recombinations of dead chemicals crushed by gravity, those which produced plastic, DDT, napalm, and so on, are but extrasensory, abstract, to the life processes of the Earth, to its true life, one that Bland abandons his ordinary, commercial life to join, “his skin and eyes [having] a clarity which is seldom encountered, except on certain spring days, at certain latitudes, just before sunrise.”
I’ve found that clarity in rare moments: November 25, for instance. In these times, I see a vast expanse of history lying under the mires of guilt, self-criticism, and hopelessness. A historical explanation of my guilt is not quite enough to keep me going, but the fight contained within, the sheer courage to challenge gravity in rhetoric and prose, is certainly a good first step. The simple thought “I am weightless,” one that I carry with me in my back pocket now, is the first sign of my human volition, of a budding courage, hope, and willpower, one that I must now act out, in word and deed. What form that takes really depends on the day-to-day, but how else could we live our lives?
For too long we have imagined the universe as something with set, defined laws that cannot be broken, a void to be measured with a compass. While this is useful for building coffee machines, college application websites, and hydrogen bombs, it cannot lead to the good life. We fall so often into the darkness of our habituated desires that we feel ourselves forced to attribute them to a dark inner nature, one we must atone for, the very atonement that reinforces our guilt. But, just like the old adage “you’re only as old as you feel” you are only as indebted as you feel. The force of gravity, the never-ending acceleration, the hidden variable making that albatross around your neck heavier and heavier, is not the master of your fate. Thus, kill gravity!
Image: William Blake, The Lovers’ Whirlwind, pen, ink, and watercolor, 1824–27 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England).