Chelsea's Response to Howie's Response to Aurelius

Having fully accustomed myself to Baker's style by page 120 of The Mezzanine, I remember that I read the quote from Aurelius quickly, expecting the meaning to soak in easily.  I continued reading before taking the minute amount of time necessary to actually understand Aurelius's point, but I was stopped at the first "Wrong, wrong, wrong!" (120) because I did not expect such sudden criticism.  To me, it seemed a bit harsh for Howie to clobber Aurelius's philosophical theory so roughly, presumably without even reading the supporting arguments for the theory.

My interpretation of Aurelius's argument is that mortal life (versus what?  immortal life??) is unimportant in the scheme of things because it passes by so quickly.  This point of view is completely against the idea of the novel in general, because the seeming purpose of The Mezzanine is to only focus on the extreme of the everyday, the mundane, even maybe the OCD.  Thus Baker's philosophical argument is that it is worth glorifying human life (I choose "human" instead of "mortal" because it is much more specific) as well as human error into something that makes us feel like we need to open our eyes to the immediate real world we live in and to stop looking at the past and future.

Howie, probably a partial figment of Baker's imagination, would have reacted exactly as Baker would have to Aurelius's argument.  Howie is so repelled by the passage because Baker was so repelled by the passage.  In writing this book, Baker could have chosen any quote, out of any book, to include.  Yet he chose this particular one, a choice that must be significant.  Baker is extolling his love of the commonplace by utilizing Howie's revulsion towards a sentence that argues hatred of the commonplace.  It is possible that the physical existence of The Mezzanine shows that Baker may have written his entire novel simply to try and crack open and let bleed philosophies such as Aurelius's.