The Meaning of Life
Page 7
The good storyteller appreciates that a life can remain meaningful even when it contains long passages that might appear, at first glance, to be merely a waste of time. We may spend a decade not knowing what we want to do professionally, trying out different jobs and never settling in any of them, testing our parents and enduring the scepticism of our friends. We may go through a succession of failed relationships that leave us confused and hurt. But these experiences don’t have to be dismissed as meaningless. The wandering and the exploration may be intimately connected to our eventual development and growth. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. We cannot get anywhere important in one go. We must forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts.
The good storyteller recognises too, contrary to certain impressions, that there will always be a number of players responsible for negative events in a person’s life. We are never the sole authors of our triumphs or of our defeats. It is therefore as unwarranted (and as egocentric) to take all the blame as to assume all the credit. Sometimes, it really will be the fault of something or somebody else: the economy, our parents, the government, our enemies, or sheer bad luck. We should not take the entire burden of our difficulties upon our own shoulders.
Good narrators are compassionate. At many points, we simply could not have known. We were not exceptionally stupid, we were – like all humans – operating with limited information, trying to interpret the world with flawed and blinkered minds under the constant sway of emotion, damaged by our pasts and only selectively capable of reason and calm.
Finally, good narrators appreciate that events can count as meaningful even when they aren’t recognised as such by powerful authorities in the world at large. We may be holidaying in a tent rather than in the Presidential suite, hanging out with our grandmother rather than a pop group, teaching children to read rather than buying and selling companies, and nevertheless lay claim to a legitimately meaningful life. We should not let false notions of prestige interfere with our attempts to focus on the aspects of our life stories that actually satisfy us.
On our death beds, we will inevitably know that much didn’t work out; that there were dreams that didn’t come to pass and loves that were rejected; friendships that could never be repaired, and catastrophes and hurts we never overcame. But we will also know that there were threads of value that sustained us, that there was a higher logic we sometimes followed, that despite the agonies, our lives were not mere sound and fury; that in our own way, at select moments at least, we did properly draw benefit from, and understand, the meaning of life.
List of artworks
p.26 Titian, Pope Paul III and His Grandsons 1545–46. Oil on canvas, 210 × 176 cm. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
p.44 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, c.1887. Oil on canvas, 67 × 92 cm. Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
p.52 Pablo Picasso, Tête de taureau (Bull’s Head), 1942. Bicycle seat and handlebars, 33.5 × 43.5 x 19 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
p.86 Peter Blake, Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961. Oil paint on Board, 174.3 × 121.9 cm. Tate, London 2018
p.104 Roman bronze reproduction of Myron’s Discobolos, 2nd century CE. Glyptothek, Munich
Picture credits
44 Peter Barritt / Alamy Stock Photo; 47 Judy Bellah / Alamy Stock Photo; 52 © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018; 71 Dimboukas / CC BY-SA 3.0; 74 left © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London / © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018; 74 right © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 86 © Peter Blake. All rights reserved, DACS 2018; 104 MatthiasKabel / CC BY-SA 3.0
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