In her latest collection of stories, called Mouthful of Birds, Samanta Schweblin gives us some distinctly heart rending accounts of human mystery and longing.  Most are too bizarre to share here.  Oddly enough, however, if Schweblin's vision of a world of meaningless random events is anywhere close to being true, we have no hope.  We move beyond Camus's picture of absurdity--we live, we look, we die--to an even darker vision of existence:  we live, we have nowhere to look, we die.  It is a world of utter abandonment, a world lost to even itself.

     

     But maybe that's Schweblin's point.  If we are indeed the only sentience in the universe, and if we indeed have no idea why we are the only sentience in the universe, well, yes, life really does seem bizarre.  It seems bizarre in a way that reminds me of the old character Bizarro in the original Superman comic books:  precisely the opposite of what we think it ought to be.
     Yet we live it anyway.