In one of the wittier moments in Rob Doyle’s latest book—a sprawling account of one man’s quest for meaning in the pharmacological era—the narrator visits the world-renowned Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. There, among other things, he searches in vain for texts by Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski, and repositions copies of his own novel to cover the works of rival authors. Observing that the Parisian bookshop is as much a tourist attraction as a place in which to acquire books, he bemoans the many patrons who visit the store solely to be photographed, and who shuffle off with a book or two from ‘usual suspects’ such as ‘Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway, and Salinger.’[1]
While the narrator—also a writer called Rob Doyle—mentions these names with implicit disdain, the evocation of the first two is salient. For like Kerouac in his roman à clefs, or Bukowski in his proto-autofictions, Doyle draws on his life experience to assemble a blend of fictional memoir and memoirish fiction. Throughout his novel, there is no shortage of literary or philosophical allusions; yet where such references, in the hands of a lesser talent, might appear pretentious and superfluous, here they offer Doyle a springboard to compellingly reflect on life, philosophy, and narrative form—not to mention the drugs that best tickle his fancy, too.
Whether he’s conducting a Roberto Bolaño-themed walking tour in Costa Brava, failing to write an essay on Emil Cioran in Paris, or better appreciating Terence McKenna’s mystical theories of consciousness having smoked DMT, the narrator is continuously on the hunt for revelation or, failing that, the next chemical or botanical high.
But most fascinating about Threshold is not the extent to which Doyle fictionalises his life, or his opinions on millennial aimlessness, nihilism, and literary obsession. Rather, it’s the book’s philosophical arc, its structural backbone, which we ultimately learn to be, quite literally, a kind of existentialism on acid.
This claim comes not without qualification. One suspects that Doyle himself would rather identify as a nihilist. Indeed, if a single writer has haunted his slight but heady body of work to date, it’s Friedrich Nietzsche. The German’s ideas, phrases, and presence are as large here as they were in debut novel Here are the Young Men (2014) and first collection This is the Ritual (2016). And yet, a cursory glance at any primer on existentialism—a form of philosophical inquiry primarily associated with the twentieth century—will devote considerable attention to two nineteenth-century philosophers: the hyper-Christian Søren Kierkegaard, and the God-abjuring Nietzsche.
My point, then, is not to debate whether Doyle’s work lends itself more readily to nihilist or existentialist thought, but to examine what his book does narratively and philosophically within the space where these two branches of thinking meet. And just as Threshold occupies a liminal space between novel and memoir, so this piece will operate at a junction between essay and review. It will consider chiefly the type of book which Threshold claims to be and from which it derives much of its structure, all while keeping in mind the book’s philosophical spine.
To be sure, if a novel—as Doyle puts it—is merely ‘a long chunk of prose in which whatever is said to have happened may or may not have actually happened,’[2] then this piece is an exploration of the philosophies that may or may not have informed Doyle’s book, and, more importantly, how that of his narrator ultimately differs from them.
Before I turn to Threshold itself, I’d like to be more specific about the differences between existentialism and nihilism.
Where existentialism considers philosophical means by which to examine the problem of existence, nihilism concerns itself with the philosophical ramifications of meaninglessness. To iterate, existentialist thought has its roots in Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s work, both of which are interested in the role of the single individual in an increasingly crowd-oriented world.
In Fear and Trembling (1843), for example, Kierkegaard takes issue with the idea that blindly doing God’s will leads to fulfilment; he argues, instead, that this kind of crowd mentality leads only to a specious form of truth. In Either/Or (1843), on the other hand, hiding behind fictitious personae, he puts forward various conflicting philosophies without committing to any of them. On the one pole there is a philosophy of stasis, wherein an individual does nothing because all choices lead to despair; on the opposite, a worldview of personal development, in which an individual combines her aesthetic interests and ethical responsibilities in order to divulge her personality—or more simply, to live an authentic life.
Coming to a similar conclusion as Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) holds that the individual always belongs to a crowd due to his deeply-rooted sense of morality. Exploring the role of the single individual in more depth, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) saw Nietzsche write from the perspective of an isolated narrator so as to flesh out two key ideas: that of eternal recurrence, in which an individual is asked to love and live out again, ad infinitum, the life she chose for herself, irrespective of its highs and lows; and that of the will to power, an instinctive urge that governs one’s will to live, thrive, and survive in one’s surroundings.
In these snapshots of their complicated oeuvres, one may detect the key themes of existentialist enquiry: individuality, despair, anxiety, nothingness, responsibility, authenticity, personality, love of fate (amor fati), choice, freedom, and defiance. But it’s not until the 1940s and 1950s that the term becomes widely used and associated with French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.
Because a significant portion of Doyle’s book makes clear his understanding of nihilist philosophy, it’s worthwhile to consider the work of the above thinkers, however briefly, so that their link to Threshold does not appear tenuous or contrived.
Arguably the two most prominent, or memorable, branches of French existentialist thought were those of Sartre and Camus. Yet where Sartre was primarily interested in the philosophical Subject and its attendant Object, Camus located the absolute in the life of the individual herself.
Significantly, Sartre spent most of his career in conversation with Martin Heidegger, who, like other phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, believed that the only way to understand the problem of existence is through the body and its relation to things of the world. Sartre, however, was convinced that a better understanding is found through one’s relation not to other things, but to oneself. Hence, for him, governing the essence of existence are one’s ‘facticity’—that is, the physical, psychological, and historical facts that constitute an individual—and one’s ‘transcendence’, or how an individual ultimately interprets and acts upon her facticity. This we do through personal endeavours or what Sartre calls ‘projects’. Due to the agency carried within one’s transcendence, there is in Sartrean thought a strong emphasis on choice, and it is through one’s choices, he argues, that one unravels the problem of being, which is to say, the self and the world it inhabits. One’s being, therefore, is not only subjective, but also wholly dependent on the circumstances that make up one’s life and the actions one takes within it.
While Sartre, at times, is predominately bent on constructing a philosophical paradigm that runs counter to the Cartesian ego—one might reduce his argument to: ‘I act; therefore I am.’—Camus is more concerned with why, to begin with, existence might be a problem worth unravelling.
‘There is but one truly philosophical problem,’ he writes arrestingly in the opening sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), ‘and that is suicide.’[3] His themes, like Kierkegaard’s, are angst and despair, but he recognises the absurdity of man’s search for meaning in a life where the option to kill oneself is always there. Unlike Kierkegaard or other religious existentialists like Martin Buber or Lev Shestov, Camus finds no comfort in God. Instead, he contends that the absurd man’s truth, found in a day-to-day revolt against death, is defiance and courage. By the mere activity of consciousness, he insists, ‘I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.’[4] In this case, one ‘solves’ the problem of existence by accepting that, for it, there will never truly be a solution. And yet, there is a consolation—for Camus is adamant that in spite of this philosophical stalemate, the defiant individual will find happiness within it.
While these ideas share similarities with nihilist thought, it’s not my intention here to argue that nihilism is a subset of existentialism, or vice versa. Rather, it’s to look at how Doyle’s narrator moves beyond the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, in addition to those philosophers (Bataille, Cioran) whom he explicitly mentions throughout the book.
And the best place to begin such an examination is with the book’s form—a similarity it shares with Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, primarily for its ontological ambiguity, or how the narrator frequently calls into question whether his book is a novel, a memoir, a disguised work of philosophy, or some peculiar combination of the three.
Opening the book and concluding each chapter are a series of messages from the author to an unnamed woman. Email-like, they serve not as commentary on the chapters that precede them, but as reflection—on both the author’s current viewpoint and his plans for the novel he is writing. It becomes clear over time that his confidant is also Irish, also finishing a book, and more often than not their correspondence has the effect of plunging the narrator further into personal or cosmic deliberation than into anything else. To be sure, at times it sounds as if he’s talking to himself.
Nevertheless, following the book’s first chapter, the narrator provides us with three things: his definition of a novel, his life mission, and the aim of his book. Once we learn about his idea of the novel as a chunk of prose, his mission to record the world as though he were from another universe, and his aim here to delineate obsessions, fascinations, and places from which he can’t move on until he’s ‘written them out’ of his system[5], we comprehend that the book we are about to read is interested in blurring borders between fiction and reality. If there has not yet been any specific reference to philosophical inquiry, the epigraph from Gaspar Noé—‘Even if it’s often a question of getting high, it’s not a work about getting high’—subtly points us in that direction, while underscoring the centrality of consciousness to the text.
All of which adequately sets the stage for the novel’s remaining ten chapters—named pithily, like ‘Knife’, ‘Tent’, ‘Sicily’—and their episodic ruminations on the vagaries of human existence. In a non-linear fashion Doyle reconstructs and commentates over important events that occurred, roughly, between his early-twenties and mid-thirties. And while the degree to which he fictionalises these events would be too laborious to account here, his distinct blend of fabrication and fact produce scintillating results.
We follow him, initially, from Dublin to South East Asia, where his ascetic and well-intentioned pursuits culminate with a near-overdose in a New Delhi hotel. Later he travels to South America, teaching English and taking ayahuasca, and some time afterwards experiences a pivotal mushroom trip in Buena Vista Park, San Francisco. (The devastation of this trip, incidentally, echoes the psilocybin-induced worldview of a character in his Ritual story, ‘No Man’s Land’.) Elsewhere in Sicily, he grapples with sexual frustration, while in Berlin he finds himself participating in orgies and, as if re-enacting scenes from Gravity’s Rainbow, urinating on faces inside a BDSM nightclub.
If this all sounds structurally loose, that’s because it is. And yet, despite that each chapter could stand as a self-contained essay, they all stem from a certain observation that Doyle makes early on in the book—which is that for all he devoted himself to debauchery and nihilism in his youth, he is now filled with a newfound wonder for the ‘supreme unlikeliness at finding [himself] alive in an unaccountable universe’, so that the mere fact of being alive at all continually astonishes him.[6] The chapters therefore hurtle forth in a blur of bacchanalian excess in which the narrator’s prerogative is to get fucked up as much as it is to reflect on the absolute.
The resulting book points forwards and backwards in time. As far as literary tradition goes, it takes cues from the künstlerromans of James Joyce; Henry Miller’s genre-blending Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939); Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s dour Journey to the End of the Night (1932); the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson; the drug memoirs of William Burroughs; the ‘faction’ of Truman Capote. While it shares common ground with Lucy Sweeny Byrne’s collection Paris Syndrome (2019)—both writers are invested in autofiction, waywardness, substance abuse, and sexuality—Doyle’s novel also brings to mind other recent works of non-fiction by Irish writers, such as Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations (2019), Arnold Thomas Fanning’s Mind on Fire (2018), and Kevin Breathnach’s Tunnel Vision (2019).
Yet where Doyle separates himself from his precursors and contemporaries, as I’ve already put forward, is in the book’s form. At no point does Doyle self-consciously construct a philosophical argument. His objective, rather, is that of a novelist, which is to tell a story. However, if we look more closely at the revelations which Doyle’s narrator undergoes throughout the book, it’s possible to piece together a way of thinking about the world, about life, that seems to conflate what are, by now, the traditional or more conservative tenets of existential philosophy with the more radical or trippier insights into human consciousness that one might glean from smoking over sixty milligrams of DMT.
Until the book’s final chapter, the narrator’s philosophy is grounded in pessimism, and bears much similarity to the philosophical ideas of the thinkers mentioned earlier. Take, for instance, his Kierkegaardian insistence on the meaninglessness of choice.
When, sitting in a nineteenth-arrondissement café in Paris, Doyle procrastinates from writing his essay on Cioran, he registers a problem: that of having no energy for writing. ‘I wanted to get started’, he says, ‘but on the other hand I didn’t want to get started at all’.[7] On a pilgrimage to the grave of Georges Bataille, he expresses a similar discord, registering a kind of existential FOMO in which he wishes to explore all possibilities while not being content with the single pursuit of any of them: ‘I alternated between reading Georges Bataille while feeling I should be looking out the window and looking out the window while feeling I ought to get back to Bataille’.[8] This conflict continues further in ‘Nightclub’, where the narrator ‘quivers in the tension between wanting to be present in the moment and standing perpetually outside of it,’ projecting himself into a future where he writes about the moment he previously failed to savour.[9]
If the narrator of Kierkegaard’s ‘Diapsalmata’ in Either/Or is of the opinion that remorse is the foundation of our collective experiences—hang yourself and you’ll regret it, he writes, but don’t hang yourself and you’ll regret that too[10]—then Doyle is likewise under the impression that, in life, one has far too many options and none of them are any good.
Nonetheless, a Camusian sense of defiance intermittently rears its head. For just as the universe, for Camus, was absurd, so for Doyle’s narrator it becomes ‘utterly implausible’. Yet where Camus’s courage in the face of the absurd was total, Doyle’s is somewhat passive. Recognising the possibility that his suicide could have long-lasting interdimensional consequences, he concludes that it’s better to ‘slog it out and leave the world by natural causes, just in case’.[11] Before any change in his belief system takes place, this brand of jaded defiance almost entirely structures Doyle’s perception of the world.
However, complicating his philosophical commitment to pessimism, stoicism, responsibility, and choice are his tentative spiritual beliefs on the afterlife. For much of the book, the narrator expresses reservations about the idea of another realm or plane of consciousness, but frequently toys with their existence.
While a student of Buddhism, for example, he is sceptical about the concept of bardos—intermediate states experienced after death and before reincarnation—and chooses instead to see Buddhism as a ‘contemplative practice grounded in empirical experience’.[12] But during a summer in East Wall, Dublin, enmeshed in a haze of psychedelics and modafinil, he gives more thought—if not too much thought—to such ideas when he has a panic attack and questions the finality of death. Like Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he entertains the idea that we are ‘locked into existence, round after round of anguish and oblivion’, destined to live out our torments on repeat.[13] But unlike Nietzsche, he finds no solace in this thought.
Bridging these existential ruminations and those of the final chapter, in which there is a decided break in Doyle’s philosophy, there is a gradual shift. Truth loses its credibility. Paranoia asserts itself. Doyle begins to think that time, maybe, is non-linear, and that another plane of consciousness might exist.
He recalls a vivid dream wherein his girlfriend and he take the form of ‘shapeshifters’ who travel back in time from the 81st millennium to fight in a ‘cosmic war on terror’. And though he believes that his girlfriend, lying to his side, shared this momentous reverie with him, she verifies later that no such thing occurred.[14] Similarly, at a party in Paris, Doyle meets Charlotte, a novelist and palmist who is capable of lucid dreaming. Wishing to do the most extreme thing she could think of, she once arranged a dream in which to have sex with children, but didn’t follow through for fear that her actions could have consequences somewhere in the ‘multiverse’.[15]
Importantly, these more outlandish philosophical and spiritual concerns—centred around an alternative plane of consciousness, the afterlife, and interdimensional entities—vie with the book’s more traditional philosophical themes to reach their synthesised peak in the final, eponymous chapter. Here the narrator recounts his experiences with, and understanding of, the psychedelic DMT—or to him, ‘the most mysterious thing in the universe’.[16]
After we are given a brief history of the psychedelic, Doyle and his friend Matt smoke the drug for the first time. And while he doesn’t consume enough that day to experience ‘a breakthrough’, an experience so intense as to find himself in an entirely different world, Matt’s trips are potent enough for him to meet alien ‘jesters’ and ‘data-things’ who speak in code, probe him, and finally, before his trip leaves him in tears of gratitude, show him ‘everything’, whatever one takes phrase that to mean.
The initial description of their trips is intriguing, though confusing. We are led to believe that Matt enters ‘an utterly alien realm’ through a ‘wormhole’, and that this realm is populated with intricate machinery. There he can communicate telepathically with the other entities, whom he discovers to be neither good nor bad. Doyle’s first trip, on the other hand, is characterised by a hurtling sense of speed and an intricate display of geometric patterns; he smokes enough DMT to get to a ‘threshold’ where he feels like another consciousness is visible and within his reach, but not enough to pass beyond this liminal stage.
It’s here where Doyle unpacks the questions which, until now, he’s only tentatively broached. He invokes the philosophical psychonauts one would expect him to—Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna—and agrees, despite it being something of a counter-cultural cliché, that a psychedelic like DMT cast doubts on the validity of reality and opens one up to the idea ‘that everything you know is wrong’.[17]
Integral to this development in the narrator’s philosophy is not so much the presence of psychedelics as the presence of DMT itself. Indeed, perhaps most striking about the drug, and distinguishing it, say, from psilocybin or LSD, is that virtually everyone who experiences a breakthrough reports the same thing—which is an encounter with other ‘entities’ in another plane of consciousness. Even a quick skim through the online drug forum, Bluelight.org will reveal personal accounts from DMT users—ranging in their positive and earth-shatteringly negative tones—in which they attest to the existence of another dimension and/or lifeform.
Unsurprisingly, when Doyle smokes DMT for the second time, he finds himself before a being whose sublimity poses a stark threat not just to his personal way of thinking, but ‘to all my society believe[s] in, and [doesn’t] believe in.’ The one word he can find to describe this experience/entity is ‘behold’.[18]
Following this episode, he obsesses about the drug to such an extent that its memory fills his waking days. The bizarre philosophical ramifications of the drug continue to rebound in his head, as he can’t help but give serious consideration to the ‘most outré speculations’ inspired by DMT, namely:
that the drug allows us to perceive dark matter or parallel universes; that it is a technology, perhaps put on earth by extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings, or sent from the future, that causes hidden realms to become visible; that what we call reality is merely one small pocket of a much vaster, teeming multiverse that we will continue to inhabit after physical death.
Further, he becomes reinvested in the ‘cosmologies of Buddhism’, which a decade before was merely a contemplative practice grounded in empirical experience, but now has become charged with a new cosmological significance. Irrevocably changed, he admits that after one has peered behind the veil of DMT, it is ‘extremely difficult to maintain faith’ in the validity of the ‘scientific, materialistic paradigm that has prevailed in the Western world for three hundred years’.[19]
And yet, if Doyle seeks to reconcile these newfound possibilities with his previous philosophy, he does so only to encounter one that is simultaneously more pessimistic and optimistic than any strain of nihilism or existentialism he’s encountered to date.
In the book’s final pages, he meets Matt and two other friends, Fran and Paul, by a megalithic tomb in the Phoenix Park, where Paul’s presence throws the tone of psycho-cosmic discovery into sharp relief. A long-term mental-health patient at St Mary’s Hospital, Paul won’t be participating in that evening’s consumption of psychedelics.
Comic relief comes from Fran, whose first impression of DMT the week previously is witty as it is expected: ‘100% there is categorically another consciousness present AND they have better computers than we do’. He is the first to smoke that evening, and afterwards he is caught between smiling and frowning, talking volubly about: ‘negative space, Quetzalcóatl, tokamak machines,’ among other topics of discussion as disparate yet philosophical as Heidegger’s nightmares, game theory, and the eternal return.[20]
Matt’s trip, however, yields a worldview more defeatist than those of Nietzsche, Cioran, Schopenhauer, and Bataille combined. Referring to DMT as ‘the machine’, he concludes that our earthly reality is a kind of simulation, and that our deaths will deliver us to the machine in order to ‘learn what happen[s] next’.[21] When Fran reminds him that in our ‘minor realm’ there is real suffering and death, Matt agrees that no comfort can be found in this particular way of thinking—from which, furthermore, they admit they couldn’t extricate themselves even if they tried:
It was reassuring [Matt says] when I still believed that this material world was all there is, and we’re annihilated at death . . . It’s so much scarier to think that everything matters . . . Now there’s, yeah, responsibility, and no escape.[22]
Before, for the existentialist, humankind’s existence hung in a void: and either, following Kierkegaard, one made a leap of faith onto some higher plane of existence, that is, through God; or, following Nietzsche and Camus, one made peace within the void through various different means, whether through revolt, responsibility, authenticity, or something else. Now, there is even greater despair because, to steal a phrase from Sartre, there is no exit.
Naturally, when it comes to Doyle’s turn to smoke he is fearful. He wishes for everyone to try the drug so that a global conversation around it can ensue, after which all of science and religion, he believes, would be drastically revised. It’s not that Nietzsche, Sartre, and Descartes were wrong, he says, but that ‘they’d simply lacked the technology’ we have now.[23] Filling his bowl and hitting it deep, he lies on the ground and watches the sky fill with ‘something ancient and nameless’ as a sense of ‘imminent and awesome power’ comes on. He is pulled out beyond the sky, ‘into the unfathomable, with the sense, euphoric and terrifying, that everything [is] possible again’.[24] And on this note of transcendence, the book ends.
Where Matt’s insights suggest a more pessimistic combination of traditional nihilism and psychedelic conspiracy-philosophy, as it were, Doyle’s is more optimistic—yet surprisingly cyclical if not holistic. The closing line, moreover, with its emphasis on everything being possible again, re-opens the dialogue in which Camus engaged with Lev Shestov in The Myth of Sisyphus.
In Shestov’s All Things are Possible (1905), the Jewish existentialist argues (like Kierkegaard) that through God one may find liberation from the shackles of science and rationalist thought. In response, Camus was of the persuasion that we live in a ‘burning, frigid, transparent and limited universe’ in which ‘nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness’.[25]
At the end of Threshold, it’s as if Doyle has conflated these two opposing opinions neither through God nor through an absolute atheism, but through the alternative plane of consciousness that DMT offers. He admits that everything is possible again, but that it is not the traditional, Judeo-Christian God that, as Shestov would have it, has made everything possible. Rather, it is this other realm, this other plane of consciousness, this spiritual force whose raison d’être is inexplicable according to any extant religion, that makes nothing impossible once more.
The philosophy that the narrator puts forward by book’s end is therefore a greatest-hits of nihilism and existentialism—including the secularity and courage of Nietzsche, the despair of Bataille and Cioran, the religiosity of Shestov or Kierkegaard, the defiance of Camus, the insistence on action and choice of Sartre—combined with the cosmic-conspiracy insights that DMT plants in one’s mind.
It’s here where the reader, having come down, so to speak, from Doyle’s high, must reappraise his words and his work. We remember that a portion of the book is fabricated. Did this incident in Phoenix Park even take place? Does Doyle the author necessarily live by the precise philosophy he puts forward in the book? Does such a thing matter? Until now, I’ve been using ‘Doyle’ and ‘the narrator’ somewhat interchangeably—is there a need to separate them, to qualify them?
I would say that, this being a work of fiction—or memoirish fiction—there isn’t. What’s important to note is simply that, by the book’s end, the narrator stumbles across a way of thinking that threatens to undermine our current understanding of the world. This is the realm of science fiction, of J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut, despite that Threshold is a memoir or a work of philosophical fiction. It is a refreshing reminder that there is much room for discovery not only in the arena of philosophical inquiry, but also, and crucially, in literary form. Ultimately if the book, as he puts it to his unnamed correspondent, is a ‘celebration of elsewhere’,[26] a celebration of a prior, darker, more chaotic period in his life, it is also a celebration of innovations—past, present, and future alike—in what the novel can do.
And so long as Doyle remains in the business of writing books, no matter what kind, there should be plenty to celebrate.
Declan Toohey is an Irish writer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Visual Verse, The Stockholm Review of Literature and The Kleksograph. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
Twitter: @Somnambulastory
Bibliography
[1] Doyle, Rob. Threshold. Bloomsbury, 2020. p. 126.
[2] ibid. p. 27.
[3] Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Penguin, 2005. p. 1.
[4] ibid. p. 62.
[5] Threshold. p. 27.
[6] ibid. pp. 23-4.
[7] ibid. p. 78.
[8] ibid. p. 129.
[9] ibid. p. 212.
[10] Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Penguin, 1992. p. 57.
[11] Threshold. p. 181.
[12] ibid. p. 107.
[13] ibid. p. 90.
[14] Threshold. p. 229.
[15] ibid. pp. 264-5.
[16] ibid p. 287.
[17] ibid. p. 299.
[18] ibid. p. 305.
[19] ibid. p. 306.
[20] ibid. p. 310.
[21] ibid. p. 311.
[22] ibid. p. 312. Original italics.
[23] ibid. p. 312.
[24] ibid. p. 313.
[25] Sisyphus. p. 58.
[26] Threshold. p. 283.