Against Everything

by Mark Greif

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  The problem is experience; specifically, a concept of experience that gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.

  Our acceptable philosophy is eudaemonistic hedonism. It says: we act, and choose, and react, by an insatiable hunger for pleasure, and this is to be adjusted, very reasonably, by an educated taste for happiness.

  Happiness is a vague bliss. Sunny and sociable, it considers the well-being of family and friends, while ordinary pleasure is immediate and private. If you say, “I live for happiness,” no one will challenge you, since everyone is assured of the crumbs from your meal. The flaw of this philosophy, however, is that neither happiness nor pleasure can be put into reality directly. The pursuit of happiness has to enter occurrence, and raw occurrence can’t be saved or savored. Pleasure, like pain, will be unmemorable if it exists only as immediate sensation. Neither an orgasm nor the pains of childbirth can be recalled as feeling when you’re not undergoing them. So we learn to ask ourselves what it was like when the encounter or shock of sensation took place. You monitor the inward influence of occurrences as you undergo them, ruminating an interior object, something that can be brought up, later, to release a musty whiff of pleasure; or chewed again, to test if it’s “the real thing,” life; or digested some more to see if it will yield some elusive nutriment of happiness.

  The new object is called “experience,” in the word’s most modern sense. Experience is directly attainable. It is definite and cumulative, where happiness is ambiguous and pleasure evanescent.

  Any question of “the meaning of life” is usually raised as a joke. But some urge compels us to answer. “What am I living for?” The mistake commonly in our answers is that they project only a what and don’t spell out a how. A monk said, “I live for God”; a modern says, “for happiness.” But the meaning of life always comes down to a method of life. Sometimes the method follows from the goal, as religious obedience followed a God who paid attention. Often we don’t know how we are living.

  Face-to-face with the shortcomings of more respectable goals, we have turned large tracts of our method of life over to experience—unwittingly. Even where life appears to be lived for happiness, it is lived by and through experience. We see our lives as a collection of experiences: “the day I met those people at that party”; “the night I lost my virginity”; “the feeling I had as a tourist in Paris” or “when I stood at the lake in the woods.” These snow globes and beach rocks can be held on to, compared, and appraised for quality. You put them on the shelf, and take them down; or lie awake at night, just wondering at them. They come with stories, and you put forward your experiences as rivals to the experiences others can tell. We become lifelong collectors, and count on fixed mementos to provide the substance of whatever other aims we may declare, when asked, are our real goals or reasons to live.

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  Give experience your energy and like any living process it divides and grows. The deliberate wish to “live” takes over from the day-to-day accident formerly called life. Experience, pursued, creates certain paradoxes.

  The most memorable experiences need spontaneity, so you act “spontaneously” knowing full well that you are making memories for future time. They require surprise, so you launch yourself into situations in which surprises are likely to occur. They thrive on immediacy, so you hold yourself deliberately suspended in the most colorful and intense instants, proving immediacy by a special interruption and distance. Accident is precipitated; immediacy is studied; fate is forced.

  The concept of experience attains its full dominion when it makes its own standard, dependent on sheer quantity—on filling up, or using up, a life. Less and less of experience can any longer be really bad or good. It can only be had or missed, life only used or wasted. Even the bad things, you become reluctant to wish undone.

  All these developments together give a self-defeating quality to the concept of experience. In filling a cabinet with treasures, you feel, for the first time, your true poverty. You amass experiences, and inevitably learn they’re not enough, and never will be enough. You dwell on the album of your past, and are dissatisfied. You are like the traveler, back from any trip, who has to ask, “Why didn’t I take more pictures?”

  You can wish your experiences had been more plentiful, or longer lasting. You can wish they had made you someone else—or that you could retell them to anyone who’d understand. But you do not wish you hadn’t had them. The need to retell experiences becomes your last means to try to redeem experience from aimless, pure accumulation—and either you cannot find a listener or you realize that you are mute, unfit to communicate the colors of this distant realm of experience in any way adequate to the wonders you found there. Thus everyone longs to tell his story today, but not as literature.

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  Meanwhile, the permanent conditions of human life always remain in force, and the concept of experience recasts them in its own image—chiseling all statues with the face of the new emperor. Experience reconstructs the eternal limitations of human life to make us responsible for them. Instead of fate and finitude, we think of failure and waste. And only deliberately sought experience puts itself forward as life’s avenger and redeemer.

  “Youth is wasted on the young,” we say—but even children know their obligations. In the nursery they learn the imperative not to lose a moment of life. The adult obsession with brevity, capturing soon-to-be-lost instants of childhood in photographs, baby books, mementos, and home movies, teaches them to take a mental snapshot of a moment, so as not to lose it to time. This is the first practical lesson in the concept of experience. Kids receive the inoculation against wasting precious moments alongside the other needles that teach them fear. But consciously sought, active experience begins in the years of adolescence.

  Sex and intoxication are the most famous techniques the young use to create experience. Both activities are fundamental because they exist to find out what a person feels like while doing them. If friends ask any of us about the major experiences of those years, even into the twenties, these encounters still come to mind, whether or not they can be spoken: flirtations, romances, sex casual or deliberate—the learning of what it was like to come in contact.

  “Hooking up” is a means to knowledge. The blurred floating face behind a fringe of hair reveals a mystery, and the difference of a face seen close up, possessing qualities of the monumental and the intimate, makes a lesson without words. You would like to know how somebody particular will kiss, what a particular body looks like, what you, personally, are capable of, what the postures of bliss will be. You learn how people differ in details where they might be most the same.

  In intoxication, falling into chairs, against walls, and onto friends, a person enters a realm of free experience. Liquor unlocks the innocent belief that the way you feel about anyone else should be the way he feels about you. Drugs make perception the subject of experience, by slight derangement, tuning you to the colors, outlines, and movements we take for granted. So sex and intoxication become forms of philosophy available to mindlessness. This shouldn’t diminish either one. As activities, they create experiences that push past the little you can learn about other people from social interactions and conversation, into immediacies it seems you couldn’t know in any other way. They point to a world a lot looser and more liberal than this one.

  You could also easily say, how pointless—how uncomfortable I was, how much I disliked that person, how rotten I felt; how disappointed I was by what I learned in sex and intoxication, how ashamed of what I revealed. You can suffer hangovers in more shades of misery than the merely physical, and vow never to touch the stuff, or person, again. But somehow the experience seems definitive, for better and for worse. What was learned is not unlearned. Once you discover these earliest means to experience, of course, the question becomes how often you have to, or even can, discover them again, rather than repeating them with diminishing returns. So
these two forms of experience may or may not have a time limit to them, associated with the feeling of youth.

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  One could argue that isolation is overcome in these experiences. I’ve said your life has to be your own: no one else can live it for you, as you can’t enter anyone else’s life to know how it feels. And it’s true that the earliest experiences that make you say, “I’m really living,” also suggest another person may be living along with you—in physical passion, by reciprocated touch, or in altered perception, when you take the same drugs and share effects.

  The more serious problem of isolation in human life isn’t physical or immediate in the way sex and intoxication suggest. It is general, in the frustration that no one will feel the way I do in the many various moments that affect me most deeply. No one knows “what it is like for me” by any direct chemical transaction, and I find I can’t tell it in words. So experience comes to lend us a hand in being with one another, closing the gap of the inner “how it feels” by a sort of delay and exchange. You can hear it reflected in practically any intimate conversation you care to eavesdrop on: “Ah, I can’t say something exactly like that happened to me, but it does remind me of the time that I…” Two commiserators use each other as transponders of their own experiences, in their best shot at empathy. Your own experiences open a door into the inside feeling of somebody else’s life.

  We really wish to be multiple. Because of the mobile and vicarious character of so many promised happinesses, our era tempts us to push against the boundaries of any single destiny. From middle-class hopefulness, we think we have freedom of career. From the modern hiatus of college, we think life could be a thing of play and experiment. From the narrow and desperate occupational specialization that follows, we are left to suspect that we could have done, or should have done, something else. More different lifestyles are represented to us daily, televisually, than to any previous group of people, and actual jobs are more specialized. So it’s easy to feel dissatisfaction with doing any one thing.

  Sought-after experience lets you multiply your possible existences; getting a piece, or a taste, of many lives, as you tell yourself you know what it would have been like. Travel becomes the main new experience people remember when sex and intoxication stop being the sole authoritative ones. What did you do last year? “Well, I took a trip to Washington”—or London, or Katmandu. While traveling somewhere else, you can simulate to yourself: “If I were another, this is how I would feel.” If I had been born to royalty, I would have filled a throne in a palace like this. If I had been a peasant, my prayers would have risen in a little church like this one. If I had no job—if I had become an “artist”—I could sit all day in a café, as I’m doing now. The water-cooler conversation in which job holders have the best relief from work revolves around the places they’re going or have been. Even dispatched someplace by the company, you gather the experiences that will last, for amusement, and knowledge, and the taste of another existence, through many ordinary days. Most travel is local: not only is there a Japan, but a Japanese restaurant, or Japantown in a big city. Each moment that you say to yourself, “This is how they do it,” you feel another life, and the phantom extension of experience.

  But the only-onceness of your life, mortality, may be the undercondition of all your other troubles. Old-style mortality reminded us that death lay around every corner, by disease, accident, or violence. Contemporary mortality expects a solid life span, not a premature ending, thanks to medicine; but it resents the completeness of the ending of life, a life that preserves nothing, and leaves no soul, and can never be repeated.

  Sometimes the concept of experience answers mortality by encouraging a spirit of recklessness. “You only live once” is the ironic verbal preface to actions that help kill you early. Or the concept of experience pushes you to pile up new experiences even in old age, refusing an earlier meaning of “experience” as the apprenticeship or tutelage needed to reach adult knowledge. A desire for quantity, facing mortality, leads to the same perverse consequence that occurs with physical goods: if you know something will be taken away prematurely, in this case “life,” the impulse is to use it up, or, sometimes, to use it roughly, and risk breaking it.

  Other forms of sought experience confront mortality very differently, when you try to align yourself with immortal things and, in the presence of quick passing objects, assimilate the perception of mortality as a sort of strength. Nature is usually what we need to experience to make the trick work. The sights of trees, or mountaintops, or the sea, possess their intrinsic delights by diversity of colors, and motion, and the millions of objects in a single scene. But nature takes on its occult power for redeeming experience when it puts the human being at a middle point between the perishable and the eternal. You watch nature’s decline in autumn and rebirth in spring, while you stay just as you were; half the objects in a forest clearing will die before you do, the leaves and birds and mushrooms, and yet you stay the same. Nature’s beauty seems to have been made for you, since only a human being can appreciate it; but you know nature is not created for you, and this melancholy indifference of nature to your appreciation adds its own gratifying experience of superior knowledge. It’s easier, finally, to have a mountain outlive you than another human being—especially when you know the mountain as it doesn’t know you, and everything smaller submits to you, as the squirrels run away in fright and the leaves fall at your feet.

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  The downside of sought-after experiences is usually that they end.

  If they don’t end, it brings worse trouble. Some people never stop following the same early experiences without limit. The sex seeker evolves from an innocent voyager in uncharted seas to a bored and cynical conquistador. The drunk finds that the fun is no longer shared as his circle of drinking buddies dwindles. The traveler goes from learning to mere categorizing: he has seen so much of the world that every town is reminiscent of another.

  Youthful experiences are complicated by the pressure of new people, adding to the crowd that advances at your back. Contemporary perma-adolescence—the repetition of the experiences of youth ad infinitum—far from expressing solidarity with the young, becomes an act of hostility toward them. The concept of experience makes you fear you didn’t grab enough in the short time you were in the candy store. So you refuse to leave, and thereby prove that life won’t be ceded to those who come after you.

  Most of us just have simple dissatisfaction. The sense that each or any moment might be won for experience, but is lost to time instead, leaves a residue of perpetual loss. We find out that every situation is withdrawn from us finally, and we didn’t have the will to take it far enough when we still could. When a cloud hangs over me, I think: “I was never the Casanova I meant to be: I was too slow. I was never the traveler I meant to be: I liked my comforts too much at home. I never built a cabin in the woods: I’m no carpenter. I never took the drugs I planned to take: I thought I’d lose my mind.” But I am bored by Casanovas, inveterate travelers, nature lovers, and the drug-obsessed, as they speak from the narrowness of their exhaustive experience of one thing. Nor can I make anyone feel what I did do. Trying to get a taste of everything, besides, gave me a depth of understanding of no one thing—I missed the experience of insight for a diffuse ambition.

  Truly dissatisfied persons, maybe more than anybody else, take a large proportion of their experience from books. Or they find they can double their own little experience, and make a second pass at the day-to-day, by writing it down. Poor scribblers! Such people are closest to a solution, and yet to everyone else they seem to be using up time, wasting life, as they spend fewer hours “living” than anyone, and gain less direct experience. Serious reading often starts from a deep frustration with living. Keeping a journal is a sure sign of the attempt to preserve experience by desperate measures. These poor dissatisfied people take photographs, make albums, keep souvenirs and scrapbooks. And still they always ask: “What have I done?”

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  Build peaks, and former highlands become flatlands—ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste. The concept of experience turns us into dwellers in a plateau village who hold on to a myth of the happier race of people who live on the peaks. We climb up occasionally, but only with preparation, for short expeditions. We can’t stay there, and everyone is restless and unsatisfied at home.

  Therefore, desperate measures are required. Experience could be rejected or nullified—which would lead back to a set of solutions from Stoicism and Epicureanism, which people most often discover today in American Buddhist, meditative, and yogic practice, and in aspects of Christianity. One gets out of the lust for experience by denying and controlling it.

  But a different set of solutions tries to radicalize experience, making it so total that its internal distinctions of use and waste, special and mundane, ultimately disappear.

  The radical methods expand particular kinds of experience to use them against the concept of experience, overcoming the desperate search for quantity by a new guarantee of endlessness and voluntary initiation. These methods find ways to free experience from the accidental arrival of special occurrences. They seek to make experience occur wherever you are, and at every moment that you live; to make “life” happen at your bidding, and not at its.

  The modern era bequeathed us a pair of radical methods that work: aestheticism and perfectionism.

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  These solutions appeared first, I think, in the 1850s. The full syndrome of the concept of experience had emerged by then, following shortly after—perhaps just by fifty or a hundred years—the rise of happiness as an acceptable answer to the question of the goal of life.