Cultivation and the small life

 When I was a teenager, my mom sang in our parish choir. One night each week they practiced. I think I remember that it was Wednesday after the evening mass. I would go to mass and then stay in church reading or doing homework during their practice—sometimes, I would take a long walk around town. As much as I sing, I have never been much good, so there was little temptation for me to join in.

When practice was over, a small group of choir members, mostly somewhere in age between my parents and grandparents, would go to the local Dairy Queen for burgers or ice cream and an hour or two of gossip. I usually went along. I was a strange child and adolescent.

The Dairy Queen was usually pretty busy on those nights, mostly with people who had been at other weeknight meetings at other churches around my small hometown. 

There was one couple I remember almost always being there when we’d arrive. They were almost always there when we left, too. They were an older married couple, in their fifties or sixties. That is, they seemed older to me then. I really can’t remember whether they were formally married, but they had been together for decades, so it was as good as if they were. He was part of the custodial staff at the junior high I’d attended. I don’t know whether she worked or not. They were both a little “slow”, as people said at the time. They were probably a little poorer than we were: being an assistant janitor for decades didn’t pay all that well. Like my grandmother’s family, they were Appalachian. 

They would sit in a booth across from each other, each with a cup of coffee. It seems to me that they rarely had much else (but memories fade and reformulate over more than three decades). They were always dressed up, though not well. He would always wear a tie and often a jacket. She would be in a long skirt or a dress, her hair in two braids on the side. Their clothes were old and worn, but they clearly made an effort on their appearance. They’d almost certainly come from some church or other. 

Between them, they would have a stack of several piano exercise books. They weren’t particularly advanced books, certainly nothing beyond what I had gotten to in the years I had taken lessons. One of the books would be open and they would be studying it intently. They would pore over the pieces and talk to one another about the tune and notes and how to play it. They rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone else beyond exchanging greetings. They were engrossed in the sheets in front of them.

I don’t know what made me think of them this week. Maybe it was because I was talking about the meaning of life in one of my classes. Whatever the reason, there’s something instructive in that little bit of their lives that I know about and that I’ve recounted here. 

They were, by every normal worldly measure, people who did not matter very much. In most ways they were on the edge of society even in a place as out of the way and insignificant as my hometown. They were dedicating their evenings to something that neither one of them was ever going to become very good at. I don’t even know that they had a piano at home to play, and they weren’t looking at difficult pieces. That activity, as little as it mattered to anyone else, mattered to them. They had a real artistic interest and they showed a real dedication to it and to getting better at it, to understanding the playing of music. 

They were cultivating themselves. That cultivation seems to have created a beauty and sweetness in their lives, even if no one else could share in it or benefit from it. From the outside, it certainly seemed that they were leading small lives, but small lives can be flourishing ones as much as great lives can be. Sometimes, it may just be enough to tend one’s one garden and tend it well. 

Thinking about absurdity and individualism

I was thinking this morning about the role of the absurdity of human life in the existentialism of Sartre and the absurdism of Camus and those around and influenced by and influencing them. At least for Sartre and Camus, the non-existence of God plays a large part in the account of absurdity. Because there is no God, there can be no objective meaning to our lives. Because there is no objective purpose—and because all our plans and accomplishments come to an end with our deaths and disappearance into nothingness—our lives are absurd. They serve no purpose. And, we are, at best, like dear old Sisyphus.

But, can we hold onto this kind of absurdity for more than a moment, if we avoid the modern trap of seeing ourselves as atomistic individuals? (I’ll merely mention here that there’s also something precious and luxurious in this flavor of concern with absurdity.) What I mean is just this: My life undoubtedly appears or is absurd if it begins ex nihilo—in effect, though not in fact—with my conception or birth or first choice and ends wholly and finally at my death. Leaving aside questions of religion and survival, this is an extremely impoverished idea of a human being or life. Regardless of whether there is a God or whether I go on in some personal way after death, I am part of something larger than myself. I come from a family and a community and I contribute to at least one of those in ways that will continue after I am dead and long-forgotten. I’m unlikely to be remembered for long, but even if that’s correct, some almost-almost-indiscernible effect of my having been here with remain in what does remain. If that’s right, the idea that my life is absurd or a cosmic joke is harder to maintain.

Beginning to think through some things about giving meaning to

Drawing on Nietzsche and his own harrowing experiences in the concentration camps to which he lost his family, Viktor Frankl re-emphasized the importance of finding meaning of some sort in order to survive. We are meaning-needing creatures. I don't know that this is unique to us. Domesticated animals, at least, can become listless, bored, and depressed without some directed activity. Most of us have also seen animals in the zoo pacing a dirt-path in their enclosures perhaps because the activity toward which their lives would normally be directed or devoted have been taken from them.

We can give meaning to the world and to objects in it. This is more plausibly unique to us as a species. We are not only need-ers of, but also creators of, meaning. And, we can give meaning not just to words, but also to objects and places and any number of things. A trivial example: I have a small pebble, blood-colored and roughly in the shape of a heart. It has a meaning for me, though it of course has no meaning in itself, no natural meaning. (That's saying nothing more than objects in the world are not intentional unless they are given intentionality by semantic monsters like us.)

What I've been puzzling over recently is the difficulty of giving meaning to an object. The pebble for instance has a meaning that I gave to it, but I wasn't able to do that as a pure act of the will. It should be clear that I'm playing loosely with the notion of meaning, thinking about denotation and connotation and various other members of the family of meanings, but it seems to me in any case, an individual isn't enough to give something meaning. There's Wittgenstein's private language argument in the Investigations—unless there is no such argument to be found—but there's also a more general sense in which I think one individual cannot create meaning out of whole cloth. The pebble has the kind of meaning it does for me because of some of its own characteristics (shape, color, etc.) and the context of its being found by me while walking my dog Mateo and the subsequent events of Mateo's death shortly thereafter. None of these is sufficient for it to have any kind of meaning; though a human is necessary to give meaning even if—as in this case—the meaning is in a sense private—a meaning only for me—I don't think I could give whatever meaning I wished to whatever object or word or experience just by an act of the will, by fiat. That's the sense, it seems to me, in which the perhaps-illusory private language argument is correct: no individual by herself is sufficient to create meaning, because meaning has to be answerable to some other constraint in order really to be meaning. 

Even in the case of language, I'm not sure that constraint has to be another language user.

Extinction

I think Twitter took me there, but in my office hour—during which, as per normal, a student failed to show up for an appointment—I ended up reading a little bit about the work of Guy McPherson, late of the University of Arizona, who has predicted for more than a decade that humans will be extinct by 2030, all of civilization having ended years before. The last few days have been unseasonably hot. Of course, the last few months and years have been, as well. So, the idea of abrupt climate change leading to massive changes doesn't seem all that implausible to me. 

I'm not that interested, though, in figuring out the science of his predictions. Instead, it got me thinking, as we always should be—and, as I take McPherson to think, since he believes we are well past the point of solving our problems—about whether this life is one that can be thought of as worth it. Of course, if I knew that all of humanity had no more than 14 more years at best, I would radically change my life; but, in that case it would be because I'd not be sure that there was much point in anything at all. Maybe there would be a point, but that point would have to be entirely present-oriented. Even assuming that humanity will make it, am I living a life that is worth it, or a life that, were I to die in 14 years, I could look back on and think, "That was a pretty good one?" If not, why not?