The Meaning of Life Page 5

  This explains the curious phenomenon whereby, if we’re staying with good friends, we can spend a lot less time thinking about our clothes, compared with the anxiety about what to wear that can grip us at other points. We might sit around in a dressing gown or just slip on any old jumper. They know who we are already; they are not relying on our clothes for clues.

  It is a strange but profound fact that certain items of clothing can excite us. When we put them on or see others wearing them, we’re turned on. A particular style of jacket, the right kind of shoes or the perfect shirt might prove so erotic we could almost do without a person wearing them. It is tempting to see this kind of fetishism as deluded, but it alerts us in an exaggerated way to a very normal idea: that certain clothes make us really happy. They capture values that we’re drawn to. The erotic component is just an extension of a more general and understandable sympathy. The French novelist Stendhal (1783–1842) wrote: ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness,’ and every item of clothing we’re drawn to contains an allusion to a different sort of happiness. We might see a desirable kind of confidence in a particular pair of boots; we might meet generosity in a woollen coat or a touching kind of innocence in a hemline; a given watch strap may sum up dignity; the way a specific collar encases the neck could strike us as charmingly commanding and authoritative.

  The classic fetishist might be pushing their particular attachments to a maximum and be rather restricted in the choice of items they favour, but they are latching onto a general theme: clothes embody values that enchant and beguile us. By choosing particular sorts of clothes, we are shoring up our more fragile or tentative characteristics. We are communicating to others who we are while strategically reminding ourselves. Our wardrobes contain some of our most carefully written lines of autobiography.

  Travel

  When approached in the right way, travel can play a critical role in helping us to evolve; it can correct the imbalances and immaturities of our nature, open our eyes, restore perspective and function as the most meaningful agent of maturation.

  Yet in order to work its therapeutic effect, we may need to change how we travel, starting with how we go about choosing our destinations. We are usually badly served by the travel industry, which cuts up the world into material categories unattuned to the needs of our inner selves or, to put it more grandly, our souls. The industry lays before us options like ‘outdoor fun’, ‘family adventure’, ‘culture weekends’ or ‘island hideaways’, but leaves unexplored what the point of these destinations might be when considered from the point of view of our psyches.

  Without anything mystical being meant by this, all of us are involved in what could be termed ‘an inner journey’: that is, we are trying to develop in particular ways. We might be searching for how to be calmer or to find a way to rethink our goals; we might long for a greater sense of confidence or an escape from debilitating feelings of envy. Ideally, where we go should help us with our attempts at these longed-for pieces of psychological evolution. The outer journey should assist us with the inner one.

  This idea comes from an unusual source: the history of religious pilgrimage. Religions have traditionally shown a surprising degree of sympathy for our impulse to travel. They have accepted that we cannot develop our souls just by staying at home. They have insisted – with what can now seem like an alien intensity – on the gravity of going on a trip. They have channelled the raw impulse to take off into a myriad of traditions and rituals, whose examination could prompt us to reflect on our own habits.

  In the Middle Ages, Catholicism believed that every ailment of the mind or body could be cured by going off on a long journey to touch a part of the body of a long-dead saint. The church had to hand a dictionary of pilgrimage destinations, which in every case matched problems with solutions. For example, if you were having trouble breast-feeding, France alone offered mothers a choice of 46 pilgrimages to sanctuaries of Mary’s Holy Breast Milk (‘Had the Virgin been a cow,’ observed the 16th-century Protestant John Calvin unkindly, ‘she scarcely could have produced such a quantity’).

  Believers with a painful molar were advised to travel to Rome to the Basilica of San Lorenzo, where they would touch the arm bones of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of teeth. If such a trip were awkward, they might go and find pieces of her jaw in the Jesuit church at Antwerp, some of her hair at Saint Augustine’s in Brussels, or her toes at disparate sites around Cologne. Unhappily married women were directed to travel to Umbria to touch the shrine of Saint Rita of Cascia, patron saint of marital problems (and lost causes). Soldiers looking to embolden themselves before a battle could commune with the bones of Sainte Foy in a gold-plated reliquary in the abbey-church in Conques in southwestern France. People who worried excessively about lightning could gain relief by travelling to the Jesuit church in Bad Münstereifel in Germany and lay hands on the relics of Saint Donatus, believed to offer help against fires and explosions of all kinds.

  Although most of us no longer believe in the divine power of journeys to cure toothache or gallstones, we can still retain the idea that certain parts of the world possess a power to address complaints of our psyches and bring about change in us in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we stayed at home. There are places that, by virtue of their remoteness, vastness, climate, chaotic energy, haunting melancholy or sheer difference from our homelands can salve the wounded parts of us. These sites, valuable rather than holy, help us to recover perspective, reorder our ambitions, quell our paranoias and remind us of the interest and obliging unexpectedness of life.

  Although we might agree with this at a general level, we still lack a tradition of approaching travel from a properly therapeutic perspective and so of analysing landscapes according to their inner benefits. We lack atlases of destinations with which to treat ourselves. There are as yet no psychotherapeutic travel agencies; no experts in both neurotic disorders and tourism; in the psyche and in the nature trails, museums, hot springs and bird sanctuaries of six continents.

  For this to happen, we need to be clearer both about what we’re searching for inside and what the outer world could conceivably deliver for us. In part, this requires us to look at the globe in a new way. Every destination we might alight upon contains within it qualities that could conceivably support some move or other on an inner journey. There are places that could help with shyness and others with anxiety. Some places might be good at reducing egoism and others might be good for helping us think more clearly about our careers.

  In a meaningful life, we would ideally be more conscious travellers – aware that we were on a search for places that can deliver psychological virtues like ‘calm’ or ‘perspective’, ‘sensuality’ or ‘rigour’. A visitor to Monument Valley wouldn’t just be there for the sake of undefined ‘adventure’; something to enjoy and then gradually forget about. Travelling to the place would be an occasion fundamentally to reorient their personality. It would be the call to arms to become a different person; a secular pilgrimage properly anchored around a stage of character development.

  Travel should not be allowed to escape the underlying seriousness of the area of life with which it deals. We should aim for locations in the outer world that can push us towards the places we need to go to within.

  vi. Politics

  We live in societies in which it is difficult to count as a good and intelligent adult without seeming to take a deep and fairly constant interest in politics. There is a neverending stream of reliable and penetrating bulletins about the latest events in parliament, law courts, bureaucracies, battlefields and markets. It is not really a viable option to fail to know, or to care, about ‘what is happening’.

  And yet, in the privacy of our hearts, some of us don’t care – or not as much as we feel we should. We may follow the constant political fights closely enough. We may even understand the characters; we have some feelings about the key players; we know the tussles between the left and the right, and yet, much of the time, politics may all fee
l remote and far from anything we would recognise as meaningful. We suppose (perhaps a touch guiltily) that, for whatever reason, the political gene has passed us by.

  This may be an unfair conclusion. Almost all of us are intensely political; we just don’t recognise ourselves as such because we have been equipped with the wrong definition of politics. We have been taught that ‘being political’ means having a position on the left–right axis and a daily fascination for those events defined as political by the news industry. But this captures only a small part of what truly constitutes the ‘political’, when properly understood.

  Being political doesn’t only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers. Of course, supporters of a given party or economic doctrine will count as political under this title – they want to win or to push forward tax changes for the good of others, although this motive can get lost in the noise. However, there are plenty of ways in which one may be involved in the task of promoting the happiness of strangers, and therefore immersed in politics as the field should be properly understood.

  At a sombre moment in the Peloponnesian war, the ancient Athenian statesman Pericles (d. 429 BCE) made a speech, known as the Funeral Oration, in which he attempted to define what made Athenian society so admirable and so worth fighting and dying for. He covered territory that might sound unfamiliar today. He praised his fellow citizens for their attitudes to beauty, for the way they approached exercise, for the manner in which they entertained each other at home, for their sensitivity to their natural surroundings and for the open, polite manner they had in public places. In Pericles’s eyes, all of these were profoundly political topics because they helped define the character of collective life: a political cause might not sound political and yet still be worthy of the name.

  With a more Periclean definition of politics in mind, we can see that it could be possible to count as a political person while principally interested in woodland flowers, psychotherapy, street lamp design, self-knowledge, correct punctuation, politeness, dental hygiene, self-understanding, hiking, humour, architecture, meditation, birdsong, cycle helmets, local history, and a good many other topics besides. We should not let politics be kidnapped by people with an impoverished sense of what the collective good might be.

  Part of the reason why being interested in politics has traditionally had high prestige is that it seems a selfless act, a noble prioritising of communal over personal interests. But this too may be an unhelpful starting point, because it privileges a sacrificial impulse that few of us reliably experience. In reality, being political need have nothing to do with self-renunciation. Making strangers happy is deeply enjoyable, and a great deal easier than trying to make oneself or one’s immediate loved ones content.

  Living in our own minds, we have a constant experience of impotence and failure. Much the same may hold true of our relationships with those close to us. We know how often our initiatives go nowhere, our plans are rebuffed, our intentions are ground down. Politics is a refuge from the problems of trying to make oneself and one’s loved ones smile. It is the best possible kind of selfishness.

  Acting politically, we can bring our most competent, purposeful selves to bear on a relatively limited set of issues in the lives of strangers, and therefore have a chance of succeeding. We are not trying to solve all the problems of others; we are merely working on one or two targeted areas and so are granted a precious encounter with ourselves as people with the will, imagination and intelligence to get things done. We are taken out of the morass of our own minds. We have the joy of trying to change the world, rather than wrestling with the far thornier task of wondering how to be happy.

  vii. Nature

  Otherness

  We are back from work unusually late. It has been a tricky day: a threatened resignation, an enraged supplier, a lost document, two delayed trains… . But none of the mayhem is of any concern to one friend waiting by the door, uncomplicatedly pleased to see us: Pippi, a two-year-old border terrier with an appetite for catching a deflated football in her jaws. She wants to play in the usual way, even if it’s past nine o’clock now, with us in the chair and her sliding around the kitchen, and, unexpectedly, so do we. We are not offended by her lack of overall interest in us. It is at the root of our delight. Here, at last, is someone wholly indifferent to almost everything about us except for our dexterity at ball throwing; someone who doesn’t care about the Brussels meeting, who will forgive us for not warning the finance department in time about the tax rebates, and for whom the Singapore conference is beyond imagining.

  One of the most consoling aspects of natural phenomena – whether a dog, a sheep, a tree or a valley – is that their meanings have nothing to do with our own perilous and tortured priorities. They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want. They implicitly mock our self-importance and absorption and so return us to a fairer, more modest, sense of our role on the planet.

  A sheep knows nothing about our feelings of jealousy; it has no interest in our humiliation and bitterness around a colleague; it has never emailed. On a walk in the hills, it simply ambles towards the path we’re on and looks curiously at us, then takes a lazy mouthful of grass, chewing from the side of its mouth as though it were gum. One of its companions approaches and sits next to it, wool to wool, and for a second, they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.

  Beyond the sheep are a couple of oak trees. They are of especially noble bearing. They gather their lower branches tightly under themselves while their upper branches grow in small, orderly steps, producing rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle. It doesn’t matter what the election results are, or what happens to the stock market or in the final exams. The same things would have been going on when Napoleon was leading his armies across Europe or when the first nomads made their way towards the Appalachian hills.

  Our encounter with nature calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes has any relevance to it. Everything that happens to us, or that we do, is of no consequence whatever from the point of view of the dog, the sheep, the trees, the clouds or the stars; they are important representatives of a different perspective within which our own concerns are mercifully irrelevant.

  Sport

  For long stretches of our lives, our bodies steadfastly refuse to obey our commands. As babies, the spoon drops straight out of our hand. Our legs can’t hold us up. Our head can’t support itself. A little later, as small children, it’s pretty hard to do up our shoelaces, and we feel as if we are drowning during our first length down the pool. Then, with age, new failures of coordination begin to dog us: we can’t touch our toes; there is a permanent pain in our backs; we can’t open a jam jar; we start falling over in the shower.

  Myron, Discobolus (Discus Thrower), c. 5th century BCE.

  This sculpture captures a moment of perfect physical coordination and potential energy. Training the body in an athletic pursuit can give us a glorious sense of physical mastery and momentary perfection.

  But in the middle years, we can – in specific contexts – achieve an awe-inspiring degree of mastery over our physical selves. In relation to some closely regulated challenges, we can train our bodies to follow our will entirely. Sport embodies a grand metaphysical struggle of the human spirit against the unruly and entropic forces of the material world. It is the most sophisticated and impressive form of revenge against the humiliations of having a body.

  All sports, however outwardly different, have as their goal the masterful subjugation of the body to the will. The discobolus (discus thrower) fashioned by the Greek sculptor Myron in the 5th century BCE shows a man in total command of his body: his thighs, shoulders, turn of the neck, ankles and fingers are all harmonised in the service of throwing the discus as far as possible to the other end of a field.

  We see a similar underlying idea of perfect coordination and control in all athletic poses: the run
ner at the starting blocks, the swimmer in mid-stroke or the golfer at the end of a swing. It is a strange and poignant moment to experience ourselves in this masterful way. In an act of scarcely believable precision, on a golf course, a tiny white ball that might have gone pretty much anywhere – into the pond, into the trees, towards a salesman in the clubhouse – can be made to fly four hundred yards through the air to come cleanly to rest inside a small, barely visible hole on a highly manicured lawn on the opposite side of a hill.

  So often we are clumsy and weak: our own legs won’t obey us, our fingers drop glasses, we slip on patches of black ice. But at the high points of our sporting lives, we have the opposite experience: the tennis smash does land exactly in the backhand corner as we’d intended. In mid-stride, we take instantaneous aim and the long kick does float beautifully, as we’d planned, past the goalkeeper and into the top of the net.

  Being a spectator of sport also offers us correctives to some of the entrenched, powerful problems of our lives. For example, it compresses action so as to give us a result within a time frame in tune with our native impatience and need for resolutions. So often, beyond sport, events move in irritatingly diffuse, chaotic and multiple ways. We lose the thread and therefore the capacity to care. A project may come right in three years’ time. If we’re lucky, our business may take a decision next April. There are 2,000 people on our team in five time zones. But sport speeds up and edits drama: the results appear precisely on schedule: after ten seconds in the one hundred metres; after ninety minutes in a game of football.