Why Baking is Dangerous for Philosophers

I made pumpkin custard for breakfast today. Last week, I bought a good-sized whole pumpkin at the grocery for only 99 cents. At the time, I didn't know what I was going to do with it exactly, but since then, it has become a lovely yeast bread and savory soup. Today, with a couple of cups of cooked pulp still left over, I decided to make custard. It was easy - I had everything already and only took a few minutes courtesy of my handy dandy immersion blender. After mixing everything, I poured the silky pumpkin cream into cups, about 3/4 full.

After about an hour in the oven, this is what I got.

Look at them. Eggs and heat made them rise far above the edge of of their rims into things of true beauty, giving me more out of the oven than I put into it. Intellectually, I know at least part of why this happened. Eggs are leaveners and help baked stuff rise and I also whipped air into the mix, so it becomes a kind of pumpkin souffle. 

 

But I've also been reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Dangerous territory for almost any activity because it's Camus' stage for explaining the absurd - the state in which nothing makes sense after a certain point. The natural world will eventually extend beyond our ability to explain it. Our own reason will collapse when it reaches a certain threshold. When we reach those points, we are suspended over an abyss and have to figure out what to do next.

There are ways out of this, of course. God or magic, for instance. In those places, the absurd doesn't matter so much any more. Of course, there's another way to look at the unexplainable, and that's to start with allowing for it. If we assume from the get-go that we won't be able to figure everything out, that reason only takes us so far so we might as well not depend so heavily on it in the first place, that maybe the Enlightenment didn't do us so big a favor after all, well, life gets a lot more interesting. 

So, this morning, looking at my little pumpkin souffle-custards and in spite of knowing at least some of the science that spawned them, I've decided to yield to the inevitable absurd, to allow the beauty of my custards to be magically granted or God-graced miracles. That way, I avoid all looming contradictions. 

But then again, maybe allowing for the beautifully unexplained just makes me feel special.