The Meaning of Life

by The School Of Life

  Friends give us access to news of vulnerabilities we could never otherwise guess at – and thereby help us to feel less ashamed of, and lonely with, ourselves. We might glimpse the profound worries and sense of alarm of the CEO who is terrified of losing their job if they don’t meet their targets; we can hear the van driver with fifteen tattoos talking movingly about their parents and their child; a well-off friend can divulge their inner distress around being thought problem-free; a very beautiful friend can divulge their fear of being patronised and unappreciated. We can gain access to a true vision of normality: the weak are stronger than we suppose; the strong are weaker than we imagine. And our own inevitable failings and idiocies look less alarming against a broader backdrop of sympathetic others.

  v. Culture

  Home

  One of the most meaningful activities we ever engage in is the creation of a home. Over a number of years, typically with a lot of thought and considerable dedication, we assemble furniture, crockery, pictures, rugs, cushions, vases, sideboards, taps, door handles and so on into a distinctive constellation that we anoint with the word ‘home’. As we create our rooms, we engage passionately with culture in a way we seldom do in the supposedly higher realms of museums or galleries. We reflect profoundly on the atmosphere of a picture; we ponder the relationship between colours on a wall; we notice how consequential the angle of the back of a sofa can be and ask carefully what books truly deserve our ongoing attention.

  Our homes will not necessarily be the most attractive or sumptuous environments we could spend time in. There are always hotels or public spaces that would be a good deal more impressive. But after we have been travelling a long while, after too many nights in hotel rooms or on the beds of friends, we typically feel a powerful ache to return to our own furnishings – an ache that has little to do with material comfort per se. We need to get home to remember who we are.

  Our homes have a memorialising function, and what they help us to remember is, strangely enough, ourselves. We can see this need to anchor identity in matter in the history of religion. From the earliest days, humans have expended enormous care and creativity on building homes for their gods. They haven’t felt that their gods could live just anywhere, out in the wild or (as it were) in hotels; they have believed that they needed special places, temple-homes, where their specific characters could be stabilised through art and architecture.

  For the Ancient Greeks, Athena was the goddess of wisdom, rationality and harmony, and in 420 BCE, they completed a home for her on the slopes of the Acropolis. It wasn’t a large home, but it was an exceptionally apt and beautiful one. The temple felt dignified but approachable. It was rigorously balanced and logical, serene and poised. It was its inhabitant artfully sculpted in limestone.

  The temple of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens.

  The Greeks created Athena’s temple-home to represent in architecture what she represented as a deity: grace, balance, wisdom and harmony. We can create our own temple-homes to embody our own values and characteristics.

  The Greeks took such care over Athena’s temple-home because they understood the human mind. They knew that, without architecture, we struggle to remember what we care about – and more broadly who we are. To be told in words that Athena represented grace and balance was not enough on its own. There needed to be a house to bring the idea forcefully and continuously to consciousness.

  Without there being anything grandiose or supernatural in the idea, our homes are also temples; they are temples to us. We are not expecting to be worshipped, but we are trying to make a place that – like a temple – adequately embodies our spiritual values and merits.

  Creating a home is frequently such a demanding process because it requires us to find our way to objects that can correctly convey our identities. We may have to go to enormous efforts to track down what we deem to be the ‘right’ objects for particular functions, rejecting hundreds of alternatives that would in a material sense be perfectly serviceable, in the name of those we believe can faithfully communicate the right messages about who we are. We become fussy because objects are, in their own ways, all hugely eloquent. Two chairs that perform much the same physical role can articulate entirely different visions of life.

  One chair by the Swiss 20th-century architect Le Corbusier speaks of efficiency, excitement about the future, international spirit, impatience around nostalgia and devotion to reason. The other, by the English 19th-century designer William Morris, speaks of the superiority of the pre-industrial world, the beauty of tradition, the appeal of patience and the pull of the local. We may not play out such precise scripts in our heads when we see the chairs, but, just below the threshold of consciousness, we may be highly responsive to the messages that such objects beam out to the world.

  An object feels ‘right’ when it speaks attractively about qualities that we are drawn to, but don’t possess strong enough doses of in our day-to-day lives. The desirable object gives us a more secure hold on values that are present, yet fragile, in ourselves; it endorses and encourages important themes in us. The smallest things in our homes whisper to us; they offer us encouragement, reminders, consoling thoughts, warnings or correctives, as we make breakfast or do the accounts in the evening.

  The Le Corbusier chair expresses sleek modernism and rationality, whereas the William Morris chair speaks of the beauty of tradition and comfort.

  Because we all want and need to hear such different things, we will all be pulled towards very different kinds of objects. There is a deeply subjective side to the feeling of beauty. However, our conflicts about taste are not arbitrary or random: they are grounded in the fact that the kinds of messages we benefit from being exposed to will vary depending upon what is tentative and under threat in our own lives.

  The quest to build a home is connected to a need to stabilise and organise our complex selves. It is not enough to know who we are in our own minds; we need something more tangible, material and sensuous to pin down the diverse and intermittent aspects of our identities. We need to rely on certain kinds of cutlery, bookshelves, laundry cupboards and armchairs to align us with who we are and seek to be. We are not vaunting ourselves; we are trying to gather our identities in one receptacle, preserving ourselves from erosion and dispersal. Home means the place where our soul feels that it has found its proper physical container, where, every day, the objects we live among quietly remind us of our most authentic commitments and loves.

  Music

  Music is of central importance to most of us, but we are extremely picky not just about what music we listen to, but also when we do so. At a given point, we will really want to listen to a Bach cantata; at another it has to be The Supremes. One evening, a song by Fleetwood Mac keeps calling for us; on a second evening, we are impatient to hear a particular Mozart aria. Why do these different modulations and sequences of sound seem so important to us at specific moments, and not so much at others?

  To understand why, we need to focus on a peculiar but crucial fact about ourselves. We are highly emotional beings, but not all of our emotions make their way to the front of our conscious attention when they need to. They are there, but only in a latent, muted, undeveloped way. There is too much noise both externally and internally: we are under pressure at work; there’s a lot to be done at home; the news is on, we’re catching up with friends.

  Yet in the background, we may be storing up the ingredients for a range of profound and potentially very important emotions: the raw matter for grief, sorrow, a sense of tender generosity towards humanity in general, a quiet sense of the beauty of modesty or pity for ourselves – for all the errors we didn’t mean to make, all the ways we’ve wasted our own best potential and didn’t properly return love when it was offered…. These feelings and many others are the emotional containers of profound wisdom. But they may not have the sway they ideally should in our lives because they don’t receive sustained attention and an opportunity to develop. They exist as confused, weak sign
als in us – hardly noticeable, easily disregarded blips of sensation; raw matter that has not been catalysed. And so the beauty, goodness, consolation and strength they could bring us never quite emerge; we bear within us a legacy of unfelt feelings.

  This is why music matters: it offers amplification and encouragement. Specific pieces of music give strength and support to valuable but tentative emotional dispositions. A euphoric song amplifies the faint but ecstatic feeling that we could love everyone and find true delight in being alive. Day to day, these feelings exist, but are buried by the pressure to be limited, cautious and reserved. Now the song pushes them forward and gives them confidence; it provides the space in which they can grow and, given this encouragement, we can accord them a bigger place in our lives.

  A sombre, tender piece may coax to the surface our submerged sadness. Under its encouraging tutelage, we can more easily feel sorry for the ways in which we have hurt others; we can pay greater attention to our own inner pain, and hence be more appreciative of small acts of gentleness from friends; we become more alive to universal suffering: that everyone loses the things they love; that everyone is burdened with regrets. With the help of particular chords, a compassionate side of ourselves, which is normally hard to access, becomes more prominent.

  A different kind of music might take up our low-key impulses to action and self-transformation: it rouses us; it quickens our pace. We want to stride to its beat and make the best use of our energies while there is still time. Other songs could boost our fragile sense that certain things don’t matter all that much: the meeting didn’t go very well, but so what? In the end, it’s not that important. The kitchen was a bit messy, but it’s not a big deal in the cosmic scheme. Our reserves of perspective are activated; we are fortified in our capacity to cope with the petty irritations that would otherwise undermine us.

  Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there and makes it louder. One might worry that boosting an emotion might at points be risky. After all, not everything we feel is worthy of encouragement. It is possible to use music to magnify feelings of hatred or to inflate violent impulses – and the culture ministries of fascist dictatorships have been fatefully skilled at doing just this. But almost always, we face a very different issue around music: we are not building up our courage to lay waste to civilisation; we just want to strengthen our capacities for calm, forgiveness, love and appreciation.

  In our relationship to music we are seeking the right soundtrack for our lives. A soundtrack in a film helps accord the due emotional resonance to a specific scene. It helps us register the pathos of a situation that might be missed if we relied on words and images alone; it helps us fully recognise the identity of a moment.

  Exactly the same is true in our lives: we are constantly faced with situations where something significant is going on; at the back of our minds the helpful emotional reaction is there, but it’s subdued and drowned out by the ambient noise of existence. Music is the opposite of noise: it is the cure for noise. By finding the right piece of music at the right time, we are adding an accompanying score that highlights the emotions we should be feeling more strongly, and allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We live according to what we actually need to feel.

  Books

  Around 130 million books have been published in the history of humanity; a heavy reader will at best get through 6,000 in a lifetime. Most of them won’t be much fun or very memorable. Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only thirty books will ever truly mark us. They will be different for each of us, but the way in which they affect us will be similar.

  The core, and perhaps unexpected, thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify them.

  Centrally, by telling a story, a book is radically simpler than lived experience. The writer omits a huge amount of detail that could have been included. In the plot, we move from one important moment directly to the next, whereas in life there are endless sub-plots that distract and confuse us. In a story, the key events of a marriage unfold across a few dozen pages. In life, they are spread over many years and interleaved with hundreds of business meetings, holidays, hours spent watching television, chats with one’s parents, shopping trips and dentist’s appointments. The compressed logic of a plot corrects the chaos of existence: the links between events can be made much more obvious. We finally understand what is going on.

  Writers often do a lot of explaining along the way. They frequently shed light on why a character is acting as they do; they reveal people’s secret thoughts and motives. The characters are much more clearly defined than the acquaintances we encounter. On the page, we meet purer villains, braver and more resourceful heroes, people whose suffering is more obvious or whose virtues are more striking than would ever be the case normally. They and their actions provide us with simplified targets for our emotional lives. We can love or revile them, pity them or condemn them more neatly than the humans around us.

  We need simplification because our minds become checkmated by the complexity of our lives. The writer, on rare but hugely significant occasions, puts into words feelings that have long eluded us; they know us better than we know ourselves. They seem to be narrating our own stories, but with more clarity than we could ever achieve.

  Literature corrects our native inarticulacy. So often we feel lost for words. We are impressed by the sight of a bird wheeling in the dusk sky; we are aware of a particular atmosphere at dawn; we love someone’s slightly wild but sympathetic manner. Yet, we struggle to verbalise our feelings; we may end up remarking: ‘that’s so nice’. Our feelings seem too complex, subtle, vague and elusive for us to be able to spell out. The ideal writer homes in on a few striking things: the angle of the wing; the slow movement of the largest branch of a tree; the angle of the mouth in a smile. Simplification does not betray the nuance of life: it renders life more visible.

  The great writers build bridges to people we might otherwise have dismissed as unfeasibly strange or unsympathetic. They cut through to the common core of experience. By selection and emphasis, they reveal the important things we share. They show us where to look.

  They also help us to feel. Often we want to be good, we want to care, we want to feel warmly and tenderly, but can’t. It seems there is no suitable receptacle in our ordinary lives into which our emotions can vent themselves. Our relationships are too compromised and fraught. It can feel too risky to be very nice to someone who might not reciprocate. So we don’t do much feeling; we freeze over. But then, in the pages of a story, we meet someone. Perhaps she is very beautiful, tender, sensitive, young and dying; we weep for her and all the cruelty and injustice of the world. And we come away, not devastated, but refreshed. Our emotional muscles have been exercised and their strength rendered newly available for our lives.

  Not all books contain the simplifications we happen to need. We are often not in the right place to make use of the knowledge a book has to offer. The task of linking the right book to the right person at the right time hasn’t yet received the attention it deserves. Newspapers and friends recommend books to us because they work for them, without thinking through why they might also work for us. But when we come across the ideal book for us, we are presented with a clearer, more lucid, better-organised account of our own concerns and experiences. For a time at least, our minds become less clouded and our hearts more accurately sensitive. Through books’ benign simplification, we become a little better at being who we truly are.

  Clothes

  Once, we were all dressed by someone else. Parents picked out a pair of trousers; the school dictated what colour our shirts should be. But at some point, we were granted the opportunity to discover who we might be in the world of clothes. We had to decide for
ourselves about collars and necklines, fit, colours, patterns, textures and what goes with what. We learnt to speak about ourselves in the language of garments. Despite the potential silliness and exaggeration of sections of the fashion industry, assembling a wardrobe is a serious and meaningful exercise.

  PETER BLAKE, Self-Portrait, 1961.

  Blake’s clothes here are expressing the humbler, more down-to-earth aspects of his personality, when many contemporaries regarded him as aloof, high-brow and intellectual. Our clothing, too, can offer a fuller portrait of our inner selves.

  Based on our looks, background, job or tendencies in our behaviour, others are liable to come to quick and not very rounded decisions about who we are. Only too often, their judgement doesn’t quite get us right. They might assume that, because of where we come from, we must be snobbish or resentful; based on our work, we might get typecast as dour or superficial; the fact that we’re sporty might lead people to see us as not terribly cerebral; an attachment to a particular political outlook might be associated with being earnest or cruel.

  Clothes provide us with an opportunity to correct some of these assumptions. When we get dressed, we are, in effect, operating as a tour guide, offering to show people around ourselves. We highlight interesting or attractive things about who we are – and, in the process, we clear up misconceptions. We act like artists painting a self-portrait: deliberately guiding the viewer’s perception of who we might be.

  In 1961, the English painter Peter Blake portrayed himself wearing a denim jacket, jeans and trainers. He was deliberately nuancing the view that most of his contemporaries would have had of him, knowing that he was a successful and rather intellectual painter. He might have been thought of as aloof and refined – detached from, and censorious of, ordinary life. But his clothes speak about very different aspects of his personality: they tell us that he’s quite modest; he’s interested in pop music; he sees his art as a kind of manual labour. His clothes – like ours – give us a crucial introduction to the self.