All (or, nothing): reading Marlen Haushofer's The Wall with Meister Eckhart

The essay asks a question of Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall that is as theological as it is ecological: how might a human life oriented around both the care of other (non-human) lives and a dependency upon nature itself—in brief, an orientation around “somethingness”—be reinforced rather than contradicted by an equally full orientation toward the existential sense of immanent, and potentially also imminent, nothingness? This question's mystic undertones prompt a comparison with Meister Eckhart's thinking of detachment in pursuit of a clearer understanding of how Haushofer's protagonist develops and enacts a rule of life radically structured around solicitude that is as ancient as it is (post)apocalyptic. That life's radicality is due not just to its rootedness in place, but also to how it reconfigures a relation between nature, the soul, and the Absolute as intimated in Eckhart's mysticism.