Understand existentialism

I’m reading ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’, starting on some Hegel and then I’ll attempt to tackle some Satre along side introductory existentialism books. Hooray.

From what little information Wikipedia provides, Existentialism sounds like the appropriate name for my philosophy towards life. Obviously, Wiki shouldn’t be the ultimate reference to decide on such an important thing, and I’ve thus decided to read all the works I can get my hands on and study it to see if it really works for me. I’ve already picked up Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”, and I aim to first finish those.

I recently purchased Basic Writings in Existentialism (or something like that) by Murano. I’m reading Kierkegard now, and I have to say, the guy’s a nutjob. I honestly don’t see how anyone can think that the passages I’m reading (from Fear and Trembling, currently) follow logically from one thought to another. It’s absurd logic. I have to read it out loud (to my dog) just to get through the chapters. I hope it gets better.

Until I reached high school, my big thrill of the week was when my mom would drive me to our little county library. I would check out the maximum number of books my mom would allow (i.e. how many she could afford to pay late fees on, since I rarely got them turned in on time) and I’d spend the rest of the week holed-up in my room as much as possible, reading my latest stash. And one week I found this book at the library with the word existential in the title. It sounded so smart. I just wanted to be able to work the word into a sentence, honestly. But I felt a vague moral obligation to be able to at least use it basically correctly. I don’t think I got very far in figuring out what “basically correct” would be for the use of existential. And I haven’t progressed much in the past 20 years. It’s probably about time. And I still think it sounds pretty smart. It has lots of snarky-comment potential, don’t you think?

the jury is still out on whether i believe this or not but i do understand the basic tenants