"I felt my life was without purpose," she says.
The runner and the retiree alike are experiencing life without the purpose that once drove them.
Life without passion, purpose or a connection to something bigger than us can be painful, no matter how good our life may look to others.
He appears worn out: a languid participant in sex, a bored observer of life, a man without purpose who perceives no meaning beyond making or spending money in "a system that is out of control".
"Life-under-God", he says, "seems a pointlessness posing as a purpose life-without-God seems to me also a pointlessness posing as a purpose (jobs, family, sex and so on all the usual distractions)." That dismissive parenthesis is odd in a critic of the novel, for at some level, "jobs, family, and sex and so on" are exactly what novels are about.
Or in the case of the artist like Proust of his realizing that it is the only thing worth life but seeing it without purpose, accidental, and unsatisfying after desire has been fulfilled.
Knowing right from wrong, Williams made a few bad decisions that earned him jail time and an eventual reason to not want to live a life behind bars or without purpose.
Kant defined art as "purposiveness without purpose".
These two objects, Grendel's desk and the Catch-22 couch, became a daily reminder of everything occupying space in my life without serving its alleged purpose: the toaster in the kitchen that barely toasts; socks whose partners ran off years ago yet still insist on waiting, patient Penelopes, for their sock Ulysses.
It's also worth noting that life without religion can have purpose.
