If Mao Ch’i Ling (1627–1716) were alive today, would he reach the same pessimistic conclusion, despite being supported by all the advances of medicine and technology, the service society, the entertainment industry and the welfare state? Would therapists and counsellors have purged him of his melancholy? Would insurance salesmen have convinced him that his troubles were trivial compared to the disasters he had so far avoided, and from which they could protect him? Would his computer have opened his mind to international opportunities, and would spam emails have encouraged him to try to restore his libido? Would he have cleared his conscience by writing a cheque to alleviate the suffering of distant lands too uncomfortable to visit? Would he have rejoiced at being able to cast a vote every four years so that professional politicians could make the world a better place, which philosophers like him had so signally failed to do? Or would he have been satisfied with attaining a different kind of immortality, as a statistic in the database of a marketing company, commemorating every purchase he had made?
It may be that, despite all the achievements of modernity, there are more people than ever before feeling they have wasted their life. However, they have been learning to talk about their deepest concerns, instead of saying what those in power demanded that they should say. Mao Ch’i Ling’s self-portrait obituary was as courageous an act as the Charge of the Light Brigade or any other military assault that could only end in death. It was, for him, the suicide of his reputation. With some remarkable exceptions, most biographies written before him were hagiography, raising humans to the status of heroes and saints, presenting them as specimens of virtue and models to be imitated, while ignoring their human defects. Or else they were turgid recitals of career advancement, presenting life as a string of events embellished with anecdotes. By contrast, Mao Ch’i Ling was one of a small number of writers who appeared almost simultaneously in China and Europe around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, producing a different kind of autobiography, searching their idiosyncrasies for meaning, and reflecting on their weaknesses with merciless frankness, instead of holding themselves up as holy models. They were explorers of the significance and difficulties of individuality. They made it possible to get a glimpse of what individuals were thinking privately, what went on in their heads when they were not playing the role society expected. They offered only a glimpse of a part of the truth, and it is never certain what the whole truth might be. But to discover what ambitions are worth cultivating, it is useful to hear the evidence of those who have had ambitions and have tried to describe them.
It is not easy to find records of the deep feelings of ordinary people, and of thoughts too dangerous or painful to reveal. Autobiographies are a rare cactus that flowers spasmodically in the desert of pretence, appearing briefly and then disappearing, in the same way that epochs of promiscuity and puritanism come and go. Autobiography remained a very minor form of literature so long as tribes, clans and armies commanded all loyalties, while most individuals were regarded as insignificant elements in them. It took a long time for the singular life to be seen as an independent force, just as it took centuries for the atom to emerge as a prime source of energy.
Soon after Mao Ch’i Ling’s death, China’s political climate changed and autobiographies almost stopped being written for two centuries, not reviving until the student uprising of 4 May, 1919, one of the most important revolutions in Chinese history, foreshadowing the Western world’s May Days of 1968. Suddenly, autobiographies became a widespread passion. A new form of writing was introduced based on the way the language was spoken, abandoning classical conventions, so it became possible to say things that had not been said before, and to be more easily understood. The tyranny of ancient forms of expression was suddenly broken by the manifesto of Hu Shi (1891–1962), the intellectual leader of China’s renaissance. Speak what you want to say, speak your own thoughts, do not imitate the ancients, eliminate cliché, reject melancholy, express your immediate emotions. Hu Shi urged his contemporaries to write autobiographies, and he set a personal example. In the 1920s and 1930s almost all Chinese writers, famous or not, wrote some form of autobiography.
One woman, significantly, took the lead. Chen Hengzhe (1890–1976), who had studied at Vassar and Chicago and was the first woman professor at Beijing University, published an autobiographical short story in the new vernacular, in the first person, presenting students talking to one another freely, without revealing what class, place or family they came from, liberating them from the tradition of being categorised as daughters, mothers or wives. The only way her characters could be identified was by what they said. Her aim was ‘to capture the human sentiments that arise in the course of human interactions’. She went far beyond anything attempted in the past. For long she resisted the pressure to marry, and when she finally did at thirty, publicly questioned whether it was a good idea. Writing about oneself became an instrument of rebellion. But this only lasted two decades, until the government, worried that people were thinking for themselves, once again imposed silence.
Exceptional conditions were needed to allow people to speak openly and imagine a different kind of life for themselves. That had already happened briefly in tenth-century Japan, when for a time aristocratic women enjoyed economic independence, living separately from their husbands in their own homes, able to use their ample leisure to reflect on the inadequacies of men. In A.D. 905 Japanese women began writing the language they spoke instead of Chinese – the official language – and they put what they felt into diaries and autobiographies. One of the most remarkable of these women, known only as Michisuna’s Mother, believed, as Mao Ch’i Ling was to believe after her, that she had lived ‘a vain existence’, doing nothing significant, just ‘living, lying down, getting up, dawn to dusk’. She decided it might be worth describing what it is like to be ‘a nobody . . . a woman married to a highly placed man’. She did so with brilliant literary and poetic skill, deliberately producing a dazzling alternative to fictional romances, which she despised as ‘fantasy’. Her book was about sorrow and suffering, the equivalent of the blues. Of her husband she wrote: ‘Our hearts did not melt towards one another, so we drew further apart.’ Her husband, on one of his ever-rarer visits – because he had, according to accepted custom, other wives and concubines – exclaimed: ‘Have I done anything wrong?’ She wrote: ‘I was so upset I could not say anything at all.’ Nor could she do anything but write about it. But she was mistaken to think of herself as a nobody; her book showed she was not a nobody. And yet it took another ten centuries for the relationships between men and women to be reshaped, and the reshaping continues.
Sometimes investigators of their own inner feelings were blinded not by modesty but by vanity. During the middle ages the personal voice made itself heard mainly in the Middle East, where over a thousand Arabic autobiographies were written (as has only recently been discovered). A sentence in the Quran was reinterpreted to encourage people to write them. ‘And as for the bounty of your Lord, speak’ was taken to mean that it is desirable to thank God, even for painful misadventures which always contain a lesson. Apologies, theories, ideals, emotional and intellectual conflicts and memories poured out in extraordinary variety, contrasting strongly with the lives of saints that nourished European tastes. One author stands out for being totally obsessed with himself and paying the penalty of arrogance. The Egyptian Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (1445–1505) boldly asserted his right to judge his own life, publicly challenging the opinions of all authority, even his father’s. ‘I have no equal, no-one else living has mastered the number of disciplines which I have.’ He published some 600 books and articles on every possible subject (except mathematics, which he dismissed as ‘disagreeable to his nature’). His learning, he believed, qualified him to exercise ijtihad, meaning the right to express an independent opinion, to personally clarify the teachings of religion, and he demanded recognition as a mujaddid, a Renewer of the Faith. People flocked to him seeking fatwas to decide upon disputed matters
of religious law, but he infuriated his colleagues by condemning them as ignorant and stupid when they disagreed with him. Chapter 17 of his autobiography was entitled: ‘How God blessed me by setting enemies against me and tested me with the false accusations of an ignoramus’ (meaning a rival scholar). In the end, his enemies got so cross they threw him fully clothed into a pond, nearly killing him. So he retired and wrote his memoirs, unable to see himself as others saw him, but bequeathing a dramatic black-and-white Dürer-like picture of academic bitterness and megalomania, protesting, even then, at falling educational standards. Egypt had to wait till the twentieth century for autobiography to be revived and a new model to be set by the blind novelist, historian and minister of education Taha Hussayn (1889–1973), whose masterpiece, An Egyptian Childhood, not only became a landmark in literature and a compulsory text in all schools, but encouraged a flood of personal reflections by both women and men.
Autobiographies can of course be written to wipe out painful memories. Banarasidas, a seventeenth-century Indian playboy, the son of an Agra merchant, gave the outward impression that he was speaking frankly. He said he knew he was wasting his life, and he was not worried by that: ‘I hovered between earth and heaven befouling the air like a camel’s fart.’ He describes his failings without contrition, saying of himself: ‘He cannot desist from falsehood . . . and he avidly studies indecent literature.’ Of his ‘meagre qualities . . . none are excellent or free from blemish’. Deep emotion wells up in him, however, when he remembers that all his nine children have died, and ‘the parents, like trees at leaf-fall, remain as stumps.’ That little phrase reveals that his bravado concealed despair. Without his children, he truly felt that he was a nobody.
In modern times, the novel has become the main outlet for personal but indirect revelation of desire and disappointment. But why is it said that everybody has a novel rather than an autobiography in them? Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) was perhaps the first to show how much is gained by telling both her life story and the story of a different existence she would like to have lived. ‘Why hath this lady writ her life?’ she asks. Because ‘I am as ambitious as any of my sex was or can be, which makes that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First, and though I have neither power nor time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander the Great and Caesar did, yet rather than not to be the Mistress of One, since Fortune and the fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own for which nobody I hope will blame me, since it is in everyone’s power.’ So she supplemented her autobiography by inventing an imaginary life, The Description of the New World, called the Blazing World, a sort of utopia where she can do anything she pleases. And to that she added Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, which gave her a scientific reputation and got her invited to the Royal Society. At the same time, she says she is really quite ‘bashful’. She fears oblivion. She says she writes for pleasure, but she is desperate to become famous. She does not want to live in vain. What would Mao Ch’i Ling think about living in vain if he could listen to all these many brave people worrying about living in vain?
In South Africa during apartheid, Dugmore Boetie (1926–1966) showed how autobiography could provide a sort of answer to despair. He became almost a celebrity when he described how he had murdered his mother, lost a leg during his military service and been jailed seventeen times for crimes of every kind that he joyfully recounted. He said he was proud to be a confidence trickster who ‘gets his stimulants from the vitamins of an empty stomach. Why stand in judgement on yourself?’ But it turned out that his adventures were fantasies. He claimed he had no family, but numerous relatives came to see him in hospital when he was dying of lung cancer. They revealed that he had lost his leg from an infection at the age of eight, that he had never been in the army and only briefly in prison. His autobiography, he finally admitted, expressed his ‘wrath against a police-infested’ country. It served to blot out his suffering by replacing it with delight in his own ingenuity: his imaginary escapades were as effective a method as any to enable penniless people like himself to survive. Only his poverty was real. At the end he said, ‘lying to yourself is the biggest sin of all.’ Perhaps it is the most widespread sin too.
Nothing has been more difficult than judging one’s own life. How differently would Mao Ch’i Ling have looked on his life if he had known there were people in other countries who shared his ideas? He lived at a time when pedantry was an admired sign of distinction in China, and he hated that. He felt powerless against it. He despised the bureaucrats who memorised the classics and showed off their knowledge writing ‘eight-legged essays’. He needed encouragement, and it was available but he could not obtain it, as he might today. Inspiration from foreigners has repeatedly sustained dissenters who would otherwise have been led to despair by their isolation. Mao Ch’i Ling would have been heartened if he had been able to read what, five years before his death, was being said in a popular London magazine, the Spectator, which was shooting at the same target as he was. The pedant, wrote its editor Addison (1672–1719), was a person who is able to talk of nothing else but the books he has read, and ‘does not know to think out of his profession and particular way of life’. Mao Ch’i Ling may even have been tempted to revise his opinion of himself if he had been able to converse with the optimistic German mathematician, philosopher and diplomat Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), passionately interested in China, who insisted that Europe had a great deal to learn from Confucian civilisation. A life may seem futile in one’s own country, but appear in a quite different light abroad.
Mao Ch’i Ling was one of those who, disenchanted with the chaos and corruption of government, was searching for ways of introducing more imagination and passion into daily existence, advancing beyond self-serving ambition, empty rituals and sterile controversies. But he did not know that England was waging a Civil War and questioning almost everything in politics and religion at about the same time as China’s Society for Renewal (Fu-she) was bringing together adventurous minds to invent new priorities. Nor could he sense that the European Enlightenment would soon be questioning age-old dogmas, and opening up new scientific perspectives, at the same time as China’s movement for Evidential Learning would be demanding more rigorous historical evidence in all branches of knowledge, replacing metaphysical speculation by the pursuit of novel solutions to ethical, social and practical issues. Above all, he could not imagine that his brave reflections on his experiences, which were more varied than most people’s, might be valued by succeeding generations, who would disagree that he had lived in vain.
A wasted life talks only to itself and ruminates only on its own doubts. But there is no longer any need to remain trapped in one’s own time and space. Placing different lives side by side transforms one’s understanding of them. I want more than to hear people telling their own story, taking the traditional path of confession on which autobiography, oral history and various forms of therapy continue to tread. I am more interested by how people affect each other by what they say, and also how they resist being changed by what they hear. The more profound the conversations between them, the more likely they are to reach destinations they believed to be beyond them. For the first time in history, they can hear each other speak from a great distance, which means they can find allies where they once imagined there were only strangers, and when that happens, the temptation to see themselves as victims is no longer so overwhelming. If relationships between different lives generate the surprises out of which the future is made, the gloomy prophecy that ‘clinical depression’ will be the great epidemic of the coming century may not be fulfilled.
‘Read no history, only biography, for that is life without theory.’ So said Disraeli (1804–1881), a novelist as well as a prime minister, but he must have known how much fiction there is in biography as well as in history, deliberately or unwittingly. Biography is meaningless without history, which is a painting of the landscape that surrounds
every life, and biography is worthless without autobiography, which is the mirror that reveals what a person imagines himself or herself to be. Critics point out what is wrong and flatterers what is fashionable, but every individual remains to some extent an enigma. Innumerable autobiographies are never revealed or written down, and exist only in the imagination; others are so simplified that they are misleading. A popular magazine specialising in the cult of minor celebrities, for example, advises its readers that they are ‘spiritual’ because they ‘look into their inner self’, ‘authentic’ because ‘they do not worry about what other people think or say about them’, ‘sensual’ because they know what ‘makes them hot and go for it’, and ‘sensational’ because they pay themselves compliments and ‘make a declaration of love to themselves’. This is the doctrine that has been evolved for the solitary self, who is justified in not needing any input from anyone or anything else, and can remain unchanged for ever.
However, it is also possible to see every life as an experiment, which has questions to ask and something interesting to say to those who have not yet shut down their sense of wonder at the variety and unpredictability of human waywardness. In this perspective, a life is wasted if what it discovers is never pondered over, never shared, and remains ignorant of how it appears in contrast to the lives of others, in different places and different centuries. This book is my way of reflecting on the gaps in my life and on what else I could be doing. If as a result anyone is stimulated to reflect on their experience in ways that lead to thoughts that would not otherwise have been born, then my own life may not be totally wasted. A large part of the art of being a couple revolves around discovering what to give to others and cultivating the sensitivities that enable one to receive from others.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 3