It was evening all afternoon. It is good to remember, and now that it is beginning to get dark early, that even this far south in autumn that the rain falls as snow at above 1,500 metres, and our friend, the blackbird, sat on a tree, appears entirely indifferent to our predicament whether the absence of real purpose in our lives, or a situation where we do not know our way.
There is nothing new about this for US LOT (that is mankind, or the human race) of course. As I said before, I have been all at sea these last two weeks, and while I was “Ballroom Dancing the Mediterranean” in southern Turkey a perfect storm passed through. Unable to travel for several days, my “Holiday Reading” was Der Mann ohne Eigenschaft by Robert Musil, in translation The Man without Qualities (…or literally ‘character’). The book was banned by Hitler in 1938, and was only first published in full in 1978… long after Musil himself was dead. The three Parts of the long 1100 page work have the following headings: ‘A sort of Introduction’, ‘Pseudo-reality’, and ‘Into the Millenium’ (the last with sub-title ‘The Criminals’). These are life stages which equally well describe rather well, as I come to think of it, the experiences of US (older) LOT born soon after the last war ended in 1945.
And it is good to remember, as Steve Jobs put it speaking to Stanford University students in 2005, shortly after learning his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, “Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve encountered to help me make the big choices in life”. While the absence of real purpose – was it a con, a pretence, even for the man who made Apple such a succeess too? Or are there also some of US LOT whose life work is genuinely full of purpose?
A man Without Qualities explores this question, and the hero Ulrich (being somebody representing US LOT) spends a lot of time pondering the purpose of work in the world:
…all moral events take place in a field of energy whose constellation charges them with meaning. They contain good and evil the way an atom contains the possibilities of certain chemical possibilities. They are what they will become, so to speak; and just as the word “hard” denotes four entirely different essences, depending on whether it is connected with love, brutality, zeal, or discipline, the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be a function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, such as are ascribed to actions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all. What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings; the event occurring becomes a symbol of something that perhaps may not be happening but makes itself felt through the symbol; and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as character (Eigenschaft). Accordingly, Ulrich felt that he was capable of every virtue and every baseness: the fact that in a balanced social order virtues as well as vices are tacitly described as equally burdensome attested for him what happens in nature generally, that every play of forces tends in time toward an average value and average condition, toward compromise and inertia. Ulrich regarded morality as it is commonly understood as nothing more than the senile form of a system of energies that cannot be confused with what it originally was without losing ethical force.
It is possible that these views also reflected some uncertainty about life, but uncertainty is sometimes nothing more than the mistrust of the usual certainties, and anyway, it is good to remember that even so experienced a person as mankind itself seems to act on quite similar principles…
Apologies for such a long quotation! It would have been simpler and probably better to describe the experience as like the one I had walking an old mule track up in the hills of ancient Lycia; a blackbird, or at least what seemed a dark bird in the shadow of pine needles, eyeing one from the branch of a cedar tree.
It had stopped raining after three days, apart from occasional thunderstorm cloudbursts of cold wetness. As the great Mediterranean storm eased, the sun had come out and the temperature begun to rise again. I could not help thinking that I had passed through some kind of wordless threshold.