Rhinoceros & Other Plays: The Leader, The Future Is in Eggs, It Takes All Kinds to Make a World Book

As many of you know, I believe that God is love in the form of pure being.

And that faith right at the outset of adulthood made me human-all-too-human, as Nietzsche says.

But now it has made me relax into the general peace of unvarnished simplicity, within the more jarringly complex, though still human-all-too-human affectivity I had previously known.

That too-human over-complex affectivity got me into loads of trouble in my life, like it did to the character Berenger. And Berenger is Ionesco's doppelgänger.

Robert Craft, in one of his memoirs of the sixties, describes Ionesco as an exceptionally maladroit intellectual who sometimes had to sit on his hands at dinner parties to avoid letting them give his feelings away.

I, too, being blessed (yes, blessed!) with Asperger's Syndrome from an early age, always hid my feelings to avoid being sucked into my interlocutors' garden paths.

At times, in compliance with more authoritative folks' draconian demands on me, I was compelled by law to allow them to force changes within myself.

Which never worked, Deo gratias.

Put it down to my elderly soporific sloth, lassitude, and pensiveness, which was the undoing of my conditioning, but they never worked.

One very good reason the rules never worked with me is my faith in a steadily loving God.

And that love has now more positively encouraged the insight in me that God doesn't much like rhinos.

For the rhinos are the Pharisees who brought charges against Him, and the crafty money changers whom He drove out the Temple - and our modern social conditioners.

I believe He forgives them, but that they must nonetheless pay for their deeply entrenched habits and their leading others onto their questionable garden paths.

But guys like the central character of the play, Berenger, believe in a nonresisting variety of love and forbearance, and will get off more lightly.

But even the concept of Hell, as Pope Francis has on occasion implied, may be only that - a concept. Who knows what dreams may come? Still, concepts kill.

And more to the point, hey, look - if God is love, maybe judgement itself is simply and very naturally implied as such in, for example the famous words in scripture, "they (obviously, being Rhinos) will (simply) not enter into My Rest."

Cause if a raging rhino would be forcibly excluded by dint of good taste from a pricey social event, it sure as heck won't be allowed near Heaven!

And will just be left eternally all alone in its smoking rage...

But, you know, we ALL have a raging rhino within us, dying to transform us into its own image. And own irrational impulses, given credence, can convict us. Salvation is a double-edged sword.

We have to be like Berenger and fill our lives with constant simplicity, candour and love.

Those three are the Best Available Rhino Repellents!

And God gives them to us for FREE.

Rhinoceros.

How can you pass up a title like that?

Ionesco, a man who spent his life in Romania and France, is an exceptional writer.

This collection was of his plays, but he writes prose and poety also.

There were three or four plays in this collection, but the most outrageous one was 'Rhinoceros.'

It can be understood on many levels.

We can find several sentiments that recur throughout these four plays.

His thought carriage contains; a disdain for material things, a lack of trust in the communication process, an agitated awareness of banality, a need for solitude at times, the absolute absurdity of the human disease, a distaste for ideological conformity, a lucid reduction of reality that is both frightening and fantastic, and much more.

Is 'Rhinoceros' an allegory or sorts about Nazism, which he lived through? Is it a declaration or a refutation of this system which must subvert free will to allow the killing machine to work? And how did the victims rationalize away their free thought and systematically allow themselves to take fatal showers and chose the suicidal paths created for them?

Remember Ceaușescu? Have you ever seen that crazy and ridiculous government building he created in Bucharest? The second largest edifice of its kind in the world, the Pentagon is first. I wondered how Ionesco perceived this while reading him and I am fairly sure I could surmise his impression.

Or are his plays just plain funny and witty and enjoyable?

They are both, and that is what may elevate this author to limited oxygenated heights.

A real treasure regardless of how you would like to interpret it.