On (The Absence of) Meaning

I was kind of frustrated when I couldn't grasp the meaning of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The story itself was enjoyable. I literally had to force myself to stop reading or else I wouldn't sleep at all--I had that much fun. Perhaps because the story was so full of weird stuff about "flow", Toru Okada's world vs Noboru Wataya's, Manchukuo, a bird winding up the world's spring, etc, I felt that it must mean something. It was way too amazing of a narrative to be a mere story.

Of course, one can always ask if it really is the case. It's possible that the opposite is true. Just because the story is good, it doesn't necessarily mean that Murakami-sensei wrote it to say grand, albeit vague, things like "Follow the path that you believe in" or "Opposite forces are at constant war in our world". Maybe he simply woke up one day with this plot in his head, which he wrote down eventually. That's it.

This way of thinking can be applied to whatever subject we wish to scrutinize. Take human existence, for instance. A particular person's existence. Say, mine.

Because my existence as I've realized it now has been so full of wonderful experience, and because I see myself as a one-of-a-kind individual, I incline to believe that my existence is special and meaningful. But is it really? To think that I'm just one of zillion of people that have walked the earth since the beginning of time, and to think that the majority of these zillion had long since dead and forgotten, it dawned on me how unimportant I am. Even if I was never born into this world, nobody would ever miss me. The people who were supposed to be my family and friends would not miss me since they never knew me in the first place (because I've never been born). My parents would probably have a child anyway; it's just that he/she would not be me.

In the Islamic tradition with which I was brought up, the supreme purpose of one's life is to serve God. It can be said that it is the meaning of one's life. But the fact is that God Almighty doesn't need us exalting His name. For Him, one's individual existence means nothing at all. One might live without acknowledging His existence and still it would cost Him nothing--the fact that a particular person doesn't believe in Him doesn't undermine His power. I mean, He might've never created me at all and it wouldn't make any difference to Him.

To put it bluntly, my existence as an individual means nothing to anyone. Neither to God, to the people I know, to the human race, nor to the universe. I am merely a replaceable sentient being.

So. It seems that the only one for whom my existence means something is myself. But is that valid? Am I not just talking in circles here? The analogy is this. If Murakami-sensei's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle exists for the sake of itself, can we still say that the book is meaningful, since whenever we say "meaning", we refer to something an object has in connection to other things outside it? (Replace "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and "the book" with "I"s if you will.) Is it possible that the so-called "meaning" presents independently within an object? Because if it's not it's very likely that my existence is indeed meaningless.