The massacre at Umpqua Community College marks the 45^th school shooting in 2015. I spent the weekend pondering the conundrum why is it always a school? Of course there are plenty of other examples: churches, military bases, movie theaters—but there are far too many schools to not ask why they are significant targets in the minds of the folks who target them.

It could be they are a target because we still feel that schools as institutions are relatively safe, that their specific place in society as havens of free thought and expression make them ideal places to attack—that it’s not just an attack on a specific group of random strangers, but an attack on an ideal. My mind wandered, regrettably, to the second day of October, 2006, when Charles Carl Roberts committed his atrocity on the Amish occupants of a one-room schoolhouse. Or in Sandy Hook, that awful Friday in December, 2012, the Sandy Hook shooting. What were these schools other than beacons of peace?

At the same time I’ve been ruminating on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, trying to find a thematic framework that would excite my students at a local high school. I thought first of looking at the play through the lens of sons and fathers—but realized that theme could carry about twenty minutes of interesting conversation. It wasn’t until Sunday when I was flooded in and running out of time, that I spotted a book on my bookshelf I hadn’t opened since I last read Hamlet, about ten years ago, in my junior year of college: The Birth of Tragedy by Frederich Nietzsche (B3312.E5 G48 1999).

In chapter three Nietzsche tells the story of King Midas, who tracks down Silenus, the elderly companion of Dionysus. What made Silenus notable among the followers of Dionysus is that he was the wisest, the oldest, and the drunkest among them. The greedy Midas wanted to know what is the most desirable thing among humankind? Silenus didn’t want to answer, but when implored, replied: “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this—to die soon.”

This pessimistic philosophy is borne out of enlightenment. Should we always have been nothing, not just insignificant but nonexistent, we would be spared the pain of knowing just what a raw deal we’ve entered into. I’ve witnessed the sublime beauty of a sunset on the Mayan ruins of Monte Alban, and I’ve held my infant nephew just an hour after he was born. Both of these were deeply profound experiences that left me with an overwhelming awe for the sheer beauty of the world around me, but at the same time these experiences bring with them a dreadful sense of temporality. I stare at my hands and I think to myself someday these hands will be mine no longer and I resent that fact.

There’s a futility in self-awareness, in consciousness, in the knowing of the truth. “Understanding kills action,” Nietzsche writes, “for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action.” It’s something akin to Pandora’s Box—we rationally know our fate, and knowing that our existence is utterly futile, we should be paralyzed, unable to act. If two roads diverge in a wood, and both wind up at the same place, what’s the point of making a decision?

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in the opening chapter of Studies in Pessimism that “We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us— sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason.”

So what do we do? We ignore it. We ignore our fate, the cruelty of mortality, just as we ignore the fact that our high school students wear clothes made by children half their age, or that two days later the same government that refuses to consider a reform in gun policy dropped a bomb on a hospital in Afghanistan.

With all of these thoughts swimming in my head my eyes and ears are awash with the talking heads claiming one fix or another. There’s guns don’t kill people, people kill people—that tired mantra of the real dumdums—and there’s those who think all guns should go, just as there’s those who scream that’s impossible! You can’t ‘get rid’ of 380 million guns! And then there are those who debate the mental health angle—who wonder if we shouldn’t have more programs and pills and places to put people who can’t hack it in society so they don’t get their hands on assault weapons and start killing us indiscriminately.

But no one wants to debate the real mental health issue, the insanity that lets us separate ourselves from this awful violence: the insanity of becoming numb to it, the insanity of doing nothing about it, the insanity of debating what is to be done. The insanity of a government willing to allow 45 separate school shootings in a mere nine months without doing anything about it. Maybe Nietzsche was right—maybe we’re aware of something sick within all of us—that we know there’s something we cannot change, so we don’t bother.

On October 1, 2015, Christopher Harper-Mercer entered the campus of Umpqua Community College with six weapons locked and loaded.

Recall Schopenhauer: How long until the butcher’s looking at you?

Labyrinths is a column about the library. Thomas can be reached at [email protected].