Author: Mark Hannam

A certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them.  Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities.

Somebody once explained to me that the difference in social attitude that distinguishes North Americans from Europeans, can best be summarised by considering the different ways in which representatives from these two cultures attempt to explain certain feature of their society.  Europeans, it is said, explain the present in terms of the past: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by some history, providing the antecedent causal story.  North Americans, by contrast, are said to explain the present in terms of the future: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by setting out some purpose, the pursuit of which orientates both current and subsequent actions.

I’m not really persuaded by this story of alleged cultural difference.  Among people I know, conservatism is common but evenly spread on both sides of the Atlantic, and pragmatism, although rarer, also exists on both continents.  Nonetheless, while dismissing the simplistic generalisation, it is worth noting that the character of this social attitude is important, since it helps shape many of our values and major life decisions.   Do we try to stay true to something in our past – whether personal, ancestral or cultural – or is our loyalty tied up with some aims and objectives that are not yet achieved, but that we are working towards?

At one extreme, there are people who believe in fate or destiny: we can but fulfil what was determined for us before we were born.  Our future is simply the unfolding of some genetic or astrological blueprint, from which there is no escape.  At the other extreme is a form of radical existentialism, which says that every morning we start our lives anew, and each choice we make, while it might be influenced or shaped by the past, should be a point of radical departure.   Most of us do not inhabit these extremes: we value the past, and acknowledge its influence on us, but we also want to be free to choose the most important goals that we work towards in life.

I think – indeed, I hope – that I am not greatly influenced by or beholden to the past. I find the study of history interesting, not least because it helps to show – in a precautionary way – the extent to which so much of contemporary life is held tight by the clutch of tradition, and the extent to which so many of my contemporaries are dulled by the ‘anæsthetic effect of custom’ (to borrow a phrase from Marcel Proust).  In the main, many of us, by default, avoid becoming the masters and mistresses of our own destiny, too easily satisfied with keeping the world more or less as we inherited it from our parents.  Today is much like yesterday, tomorrow will be much like today.

I am increasingly tempted by the pragmatist extreme, to want to make the world anew every day.  My conviction is growing that habit is death.   Last January, I visited the Kilauea volcano in Hawai’i, which has subsequently entered a phase of more vigorous eruption (please note, logicians consider post hoc ergo propter hoc to be a fallacy).  The hard, black volcanic rock that covers the lava belt, which runs from the crater to the sea, appears as ancient as the earth itself, but is in fact only thirty-five years old at most.  Walking across this lava, I realised that the earth’s crust is, in places, being made anew every day.  The creation story is still not over.

Living each day without regard for anything that went before seems impractical.  We cannot make everything new every day, just as we cannot re-build a boat at sea all at once.  We need to work gradually, one part of our lives at a time, holding some things stable while other things are changed.   The question is whether we work hard to re-fashion and improve the major things – our character, our values, our friendships, life goals – or whether we limit ourselves to the superficial – our clothes and hair, our phone company, the music in our earphones.

In his writings on ethics, Aristotle – cited above – observes that there are some activities that are valuable in themselves and others that are valuable because they are means by which to achieve a more valued goal.  When we pursue a course of action that leads towards a desired outcome, the outcome is better than the actions that led us to it.   Well, maybe.  There are some cases – simple examples, like queuing to buy a ticket, and life changing examples, like under-going chemotherapy – where no-one would willingly undertake the action unless it held out the promise of a benefit upon completion.  There are many means that are valued only for being means.

But there are other parts of our lives, where the means and the ends are entwined in more complicated fashion, where the pleasure and the value come from the pursuit of the goal as much as from the achievement of the goal.  The pleasures of exercise, or work, of friendship, are not to be found in some elevated teleological purpose, but in the activity itself.  These are goals that cannot ever be achieved, completed, perfected or consumed: they are like the horizon line, ever receding as we make progress towards it; they are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the absence of which detracts nothing from the beauty of refracted light.

To put this another way, the problem with goals or purposes is that either we achieve them – in which case our lives are left bereft of meaning, without challenge and structure – or we fail to achieve them – in which case we are left unhappy.   To be purposeful, in the truest sense, not only do we need to set our own goals, but we need to set some important goals that are unattainable, whose value lies in their pursuit rather than their achievement.   We need to create some of our world anew every day and we need to be sure never to complete it.

The seventh day can only be a fast lane to unhappiness.

 

To live is not like walking through a field

I like to run.  Not as fast as I used to, but even a modest challenge to heart, lungs and muscles still feels good.   In London I run on Hackney Marshes: there are no cars, not many other runners or cyclists competing for space, and badly-behaved dogs are a rare annoyance.  (To be fair, it’s generally the owners whose behaviour demands censure for their failure to control; the dogs’ exuberance is only natural).   Hackney Marshes has good pathways, a mix of tarmac and hardened earth, which are useable all year unless there is ice.

By contrast, when I’m at my house on the west coast of Ireland, I run on a beach, around 2.5km in length and generally deserted.  If the tide is out, the sand near the water, beautifully flat and compact, is as springy as a modern athletic track, and a joy to run on.  When the tide is in, I am forced to run nearer the dunes on the soft sand, which is more forgiving for my knee and ankle joints, but much more demanding of my leg muscles.  Progress is slow and, when there’s a strong westerly wind, wearying.

Yesterday the autumn sun was bright in an almost cloudless sky, the wind was calm, the temperature mild for November, the tide was low and the sand firm.  Running was exhilarating.  I have no complaint.   It was an hour well spent.  But on other days, when dark clouds are streaming in from the Atlantic, when the wind is strong and the rain near horizontal, and the waves are lapping at the foot of the dunes, then I know I will have to work my muscles hard, every step of the way.   Perhaps I should defer exercise until tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, when conditions have improved?

This question is very familiar to me, and not just because of the average annual rainfall in County Donegal.  For it is a question both about running but also about living: do I wait for low tide or will I brave the soft sand?

“To live is not like walking through a field”.  I came across this Russian proverb while reading some of Pasternak’s poetry, skilfully woven into his reflections on the burden of living dutifully in difficult times.  The immediately preceding line reads: “Alone. / Now is the time of Pharisees.” (From: “Hamlet”).  For Pasternak, as for many other Russian writers, composers and painters, the 1930s, 40s and 50s were bleak, risky years.  To stay loyal to one’s vocation as an artist, to speak with a true, untimid voice, carried a high price, for oneself and for one’s family and friends.  Something was very rotten in the state of the soviets.

I am fortunate not to have lived in that place at that time.  I have no reason to fear that what I write today, in this post, will put my life in danger, nor that of my family, nor will I be sent into internal exile.   The situation in Russia has improved since Pasternak’s time, but is by no measure as safe as Western Europe.  Poets are no longer the principal victims of today’s Pharisees, who have turned their attention to journalists and dissidents in exile.  Now it is those who report facts who face the gravest threat, rather than those who offer meanings.

And yet, however much freedom we enjoy in the wealthy countries of Europe, North America and Australasia, however easy it is to secure a reasonable standard of life, with more than sufficient food, shelter, warmth and leisure, it remains the case that to live is not like walking through a field.  Because living is more than subsisting.  For Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s great fictional creation, the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Bolshevik government provided the tumultuous context in which he lived, worked and wrote.  But the great questions he asked – What is love?  What is duty?  Why are certain places important to us?   How and where is happiness to be found?   What does it mean, for me, to live a good life? – are real and difficult, resisting easy answers in all times and in all places.

Perhaps it is true that when life is precarious, these existential questions of meaning and purpose become more evident.  When the threat of arbitrary arrest, of punishment, exile and death are ever present, when simply keeping alive is the hardest of work, then we are more attuned to the consequences of not attending closely to questions of ultimate value.  Harshness breeds sharpness.  The converse, that the comfortable consumerism of the richer nations leads to sloppy thinking about what the real point of living might be, seems also to be true.  Jaded appetites tend to moral apathy.

As our material lives continue to improve – and for almost everyone in the world they have continued to improve significantly over the past two or three decades, whether we notice or not – the risk is that we increasingly forego the soft sand.  In our material summertime, the living is easy.  However, the great questions – about love, duty, place, happiness and goodness – are always hard to answer honestly.  And as we grope towards answers, whoever and wherever we are, they make great demands upon us, which are often not easily satisfied.  Every affirmative answer is always, at the same time, a rejection of other options.   Every yes implies many noes.

For me the need to confront these questions, regularly and genuinely, without self-deception or bad faith, is what it means to strive.  It is not that I choose a hard way in life for its own sake, as if difficulty is its own reward.  Rather, it is that some days if you want to run, the only option is the soft sand; and if you want to live well, the only answers to awkward questions are tough, demanding, chastening.

If a good life matters, then strive we must.  Not just for the pleasure of upsetting the Pharisees – although that matters too and brings its own reward – but because there is so much less of lasting value to be found along the easy way, the comfortable life, along which progress can be quick, but is achieved without attaining any deep sense of purposefulness.

 

 

 

 

She knows there’s no success like failure/ And that failure’s no success at all.

I was fifteen when I first heard these lyrics, although they had been written more than a decade earlier, during the miraculous mid-60s, when Dylan released an album every year, each one full of greatest hits.  By the time I discovered his music he was playing in a large band with backing singers, and some of the immediacy and tenderness of his early love songs was lost from the music; but never from the words.

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