“I’m afraid our efforts to help the children may prove even trickier than we imagine,” I confessed, sipping my coconut ale.

“I don't want to hear this,” Henry said.

“Martin Heidegger,” I said.

“Heidegger was a Nazi,” Brock said.

“A Nazi, a nitpicker, and the worst sort of pedant, but I still have to respect his concept of Geworfenheit,” I said.

“Sounds like a character our of the Brothers Grimm,” Henry said, sampling his mango lager. “'Geworfenheit and the Enchanted Lederhosen.'”

“Geworfenheit, thrownness, the Paramount fact of the human condition,” I said. “Every person is hurled into a world, a culture, a set of immediate circumstances not of his own choosing. The authentic life is a guesr to comprehend one's status as a mortal Dasein, a self-conscious subject, an entity for whom the riddle of situated existence — being there, inhabiting the given - is a central problem, if not the central problem.”

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” Henry said irritably, an attitude I attributed to his enthusiastic beer consumption.

“But if the average person is thrown into the world,” I continued, “then Edwina's offspring have been shot into the world, like a circus performer getting blasted out of a cannon. For most of us, pondering the mystery of Dasein leads to anxiety. For Londa and Donya and Yolly... well, I shudder to imagine what they might be facing down the road. Exponential despair. Angst to the nth. But there's reason for hope. According to Heidegger, a Dasein can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by adopting a nurturing attitude toward other beings.”

“And according to me, a Dasein can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by not reading Heidegger,” Henry said.

Pp. 101-2

¶ 6:04 AM