On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life

PROLOGUE

I LEARNED HOW TO LIVE, which is to say I learned how to read, around the turn of the millennium. The world was young, Labour was ‘new’, and I was just getting going. Until my early twenties, it had all been about the path of least persistence, about maximum coasting at minimum cost. Contemporaries with career paths, into law and finance, into the industries of the educated, baffled me; not because I disapproved of their choices, but because I could not muster their motivation. Concentration was beyond me, an arena of ambition that I had yet even to imagine, let alone enter. Like characters in a play by Samuel Beckett – drift and drag, wallow and wander – my defining verbs were not so much doing words as stalling words, modes of waiting in a mud of stasis. Nothing much was happening, repeatedly. When would life begin in earnest?

The answer, it turned out, was when I started reading in earnest. Sometime in the late 1990s I had an epiphany: words are what give us meaning. The trick, I began to realise, was to take this literally. I’d studied languages, I’d learned the rules; I knew the semantics of sense and signification. But I hadn’t twigged that meaning is also meaning, that language, used artfully, points to purpose. Not just that of others, but also, it now hit me, my own. Words, ideas, the life of the mind: here was a way not just to live, but to come alive.

The path ahead of me beckoned. Language, I was starting to see, does not just help us communicate and cogitate – it opens up unparalleled worlds of history and culture, parallel worlds of insight and understanding. A book is un livre is ein Buch is un libro. They are all the same, but they are all different, variously imagined in various cultures. In the interstices between them, in the ways in which words are used not just to connect but to create, direction dawned. Culture is comparative, greater than any of us – and so, I was beginning to realise, is meaning. It was as though I’d put on headphones with simultaneous translation, interpreting the world into perfect clarity. Suddenly, I understood the world and my modest place in it. I had found my voice.

‘All I have is a voice’, writes W.H. Auden. In the end, that is all any of us has, the tiniest of tremors in a universe of indifference. But we can train it, like a singer; we can tune it, like a writer; we can tutor it, like a reader. Used well, our voice can echo in millions of heads. If we remember in particular the line that follows Auden’s claim – ‘we must love one another or die’ – it’s because we respond not just to the sentiment but to the simplicity, to the common contours of the human condition. Auden himself found the line glib, ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. Despite his misgivings, his voice has moved millions of readers, as though sheer strength of feeling could forestall the inevitability of death.

Death may be inevitable, but living is not, at least not in its enhanced, existential sense. My quarter-life crisis taught me this much: we have to work out what we want to do with our lives. We have to find our voice. As we grow older and settle into maturity, we start to intuit the finitude of things, including our own existence and its limited number of possibilities. We are what we articulate, if only to ourselves. Our self-image is our self-imagination. Until my early twenties, my internal narrative had been one of circumstance and complacency. With the leap into maturity, it became one of substance and curiosity. The headphones of culture tuned out the noise and forced me to focus.

We can all learn to focus. To live fully, we have to hear fully: words give meaning to life because they give voice to the meaning of life. We can choose to couch this impulse in religious terms – ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’ – but really there is no need: poets are secular prophets. ‘Praise this world, not the untold world’, writes the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his ninth Duino Elegy (1922). It is enough – it is hard enough – to acknowledge what is in front of us.

To a greater or lesser extent, all writing testifies to this simple truth. We can’t predict the future. We can’t call up certainty. We can, however, inject ourselves with insight; we can inhale imagination. All we have to do is pick up a book. All we have to do is read – not just because we learn from or through books, but because the very existence of literature, as a form of art predicated on the use of words to express ideas or identities, presupposes the possibility of meaning. If the test of a true book is whether it functions as an axe for the frozen sea inside us – to develop, once more, Franz Kafka’s over-exposed aphorism – this implies that we have an internal sea in the first place, and that it is worth exploring.

For many of us, and certainly for me, it is our feelings that are frozen as much as our minds. Wary of emotion, suspicious of sentiment, I took refuge, as I emerged unready into adulthood, in dispassionate scholarship, in ‘the life of the mind’. What I hadn’t yet realised was that the life of the mind is something else again, more elusive and mercurial, more conditional on figuring out why it is that we spend so much time living it in the first place. I hadn’t yet realised that meaning requires attention, like a long-term relationship that has been taken for granted. The meaning of our lives is our longest-term relationship, and we do take it for granted.

Art, if we only listen, shows us this all along. Weirder and more disturbing than it first sounds, Kafka’s celebrated statement makes the point memorably when put back into its original context: ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? [ … ] We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from anyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ A motivational speech this is not.

What it is, though, is a love letter, among the darkest ever written, to the power of literature. Reading and writing are professions of faith in the possibility of purpose: why else do we turn to books if not to broaden our sense of the capacities of life? In their very existence, in the very energy involved in writing them, all books are life-affirming, even those that would seek to deny or denigrate life, to banish us into forests far from anyone. The most nihilistic of works is still a creative act, powered by purpose.

This book itemises such purpose. Identifying ten lessons from literature for the meaning – and meanness – of life, it explores the ways in which reading and writing can help us ask difficult questions, challenge the status quo, project our minds into the past and future, imagine other worlds, and see ourselves and others differently. The impact of literature, the force of the word, cannot be stated strongly enough: in the secular universe of post-Enlightenment modernity, writing has shaped us as much as any army or religion. The way we think of our personal identities, to take just one example, is nothing if not post-Romantic. The way we think of our professional careers is nothing if not post-Realistic; all of us are the protagonists of our own Bildungsroman. What, though, is the precise strength of literature as a moral force? How can it teach us to lead fuller, richer lives? And how can it help give us that elusive sense of meaning?

‘Meaning’, like ‘cool’, is one of those great abstract nouns we spend much of our lives pursuing without ever quite knowing what they are. Quarantined in quotation marks they retreat as we advance, recoiling from our attempts to understand them. It’s always been said that you can’t be cool if you have to ask what it is. Perhaps meaning is the opposite, in that it can only be obtained by asking what it is. We can’t judge our own coolness, but we can and must judge our own meaning. To reflect on purpose is to live on purpose: the grammar of meaning is nothing if not self-conscious, a deliberation on how to live deliberately. There must be a user’s manual somewhere. There must be a map.

Literature has always been my map – not in the physical sense of charting coordinates, but in the metaphysical sense of indicating direction. Here be meaning: even a blank page points to purpose, to the cartography of consciousness. It starts, of course, with children’s literature, which plays a vital role in how we develop as autonomous agents. Our sense of ourselves and our place in society, our moral and emotional capacities, are established early on in life by the formative stories that we encounter when young. It is not so much the content or plot of these stories that shape us – all those quest narratives and escapist fantasies, all those plucky little outsiders who take on the dull, unimaginative grown-ups – as their tone or voice, the vivid charm of an A.A. Milne or the morbid cruelty of a Roald Dahl. The hand that writes the fable writes the world.

As we grow older we seek independence, which means that we seek a greater intensity of experience. Ambushed by adolescence, we begin, at first tentatively and then urgently to establish our own autonomous identity. We ‘rebel’. Our sense of self is keyed not only to its outward manifestations – to the long hair and earrings, to the carefully curated T-shirts – but to its inward pressures, to the egotistical sublime of the teenage mind. We speak of reading ‘voraciously’, an adverb that suggests not so much satisfaction as dissatisfaction, a melancholy awareness that we can never ingest sufficient narrative momentum. Can we mean voraciously? Can we be voraciously? Such is the adolescent ambition.

It’s far from certain, though, that it makes us happy. If we think of the most voracious moments in our lives – particularly our younger lives – they tend to be moments of self-forgetting. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll: the cliché is of unconsciousness, an unholy trinity of self-suppression. Yet we can’t live at a constant pitch of intensity; mere oblivion, by definition, won’t clarify consciousness. Happiness cannot just be climax, or the rest of life will be anti-climax. We have to find ways of bringing meaning out of the privileged moment and into life as a whole.

This is where literature can help. ‘We live entirely [ … ] by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images’, wrote Joan Didion in 1979, proving her point by corralling assorted offcuts of the Californian surreal. Our moods, our identity and self-esteem, depend on our constantly shifting responses to external stimuli, to the many micro-aggressions of the everyday. The sea can make me feel sad or exhilarated, friends can make me feel empowered or emasculated. It depends on how I read them. It depends on my narrative line.

Another way of saying this is that my view of life depends on how I edit life. My coy ellipsis in Didion’s statement gives the game away: we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line. ‘Especially’, but not exclusively, since we all seek to impose meaning of some sort on those unruly images. Prisoners of our perspectives, we are also the editors of existence, giving rhythm and cadence, rise and fall, to the parameters of our life sentence. Perhaps we just need to think about life as though we were writing it.

Writing – drafting, reading, deleting and redrafting – transcends the prison of the present. It places us not just in time, but out of time. Like Proust with his scallop-shaped madeleine, words help us make the pilgrimage to the past. But they also help us look to the future. In his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley casts poets not only as the guardians of the ‘spirit of the age’, but as the guarantors of posterity. Importantly, however, they themselves do not consciously agitate for any particular cause. They have ‘little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers’, but serve merely as conductors of the ‘electric life which burns within their words’. It is their disinterest that guarantees their interest, their distance from the present that means they can legislate for the future. ‘Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration,’ writes Shelley in his celebrated conclusion, ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

Is it time we acknowledged them? If we take the idea of legislation not as a legal or political term but as a moral or emotional one, it becomes possible to understand poets – and writers more generally – as the unacknowledged legislators of meaning. Writers, I want to suggest, are the prophets of purpose. Whenever we are unsure of ourselves or our place on the planet, we can turn to literature for alternative existences, alternative articulations of how and why we get out of bed in the morning. While none