The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 2

  Each of these adventures remains attractive enough to absorb a person for a whole lifetime, but since they were conceived, a new horizon has come into sight. Understanding of the huge universe and of its minute particles has been completely transformed. Men and women have been reshaped by education and information and experiences and expectations that never existed before. The world is filling up with a new kind of human being. Many are no longer comfortable struggling to earn a living using only a fraction of their talents, in ways invented long ago for much more subservient creatures. Each has been trained to be a specialist in a single domain, with skills that can bring deep satisfactions, but which can also narrow the imagination. The ‘meaning of life’ is no longer as clear as it was once supposed to have been. Never have so many humans been uncertain about their larger purpose beyond their daily grind and nightly pleasures. Old assumptions threaten to collapse, leaving one naked. Many people’s assumptions have already collapsed and they are naked.

  I am not content to clothe my nakedness with borrowed or worn-out clothes. I would like to know what alternatives there could be to ‘alternative living’ and ‘dropping out of the rat race’. Utopias and dystopias have led nowhere, so where else can one go if one can no longer believe promises about a better future and one is tired of prophets of gloom and despair? Ideologies which once radiated hope have lost their lustre. Too many people have been left at the wayside by progress, too many do not know how to find their place in it, too many are unsure where it is taking them. New laws, new structures, new theories, new instant cures for troubled souls proliferate, and yet innumerable people still feel frustrated.

  There is of course no shortage of certified and uncertified experts providing advice on how to manoeuvre through all rocks and shallows, real or imagined. A vast choice of remedies is available to help people, however lost or perplexed, to become happy, or rich, or successful or whatever. An overwhelming variety of business solutions, political programmes and psychological therapies already exist. So there is no need for yet another formula to enable you to get what you want. Besides, most people do not get what they want. Many people do not know what they want. Some people might want entirely different pleasures if only they knew about them.

  When stripped of their certainties, humans have always rushed to find new certainties to replace those they have lost. When it is no longer possible to go on doing what one has always done, and when, for example, a steady career with promotion and a secure pension becomes an unrealistic dream, the yearning for security becomes a dominant preoccupation. But I do not find it exhilarating enough to devote myself to propping up and repairing ailing institutions, which keep on breaking down like an old car, when it is obvious that they will sooner or later collapse in crisis again.

  I do not wish to spend my time on earth as a bewildered tourist surrounded by strangers, on holiday from nothingness, in the dark as to when the holiday will end, stuck in a queue waiting for another dollop of ice-cream happiness. I am conscious that I have tasted too few foods, experienced too few forms of work, nibbled too hesitantly at the mountains of knowledge that surround me, loved too few people, understood too few nations and places. I have only partly lived and my only qualification for writing this book is that I would like to know more clearly what a full life could be. Am I fully alive, or do I merely survive, when I just repeat the same gestures, the same breathing in and out, following an itinerary that others have fixed for me, commuting to the same office every day? Or do I need to be renewing myself, not just listening to others sing, not just being entertained by them but composing a song myself that gives inspiration to others, not just being amused, but being a muse myself?

  Instead of searching for a niche in which I would be safe, instead of torturing myself with questions about what my true passions or talents are, I shall aim to get a taste, even just a nibble, of what it is possible to experience as a human being. What I cannot experience personally, I wish to imagine by getting to know others who have gone where I have not been. Rather than being immobilised by being unable to choose between all the options paraded before me, and rather than ignoring what seems too remote or unpalatable, my starting point is that everybody’s experience is of interest to me. A lost soul is one for whom the thoughts of others are a mystery, and to whom no-one listens.

  The great adventure of our time is to discover who inhabits the earth. Though much has been said about the classes and categories into which humans can be more or less uncomfortably fitted, the intimate thoughts and muddled feelings of each of seven billion unique individuals remain largely hidden. The minute discrepancies in the experience and attitudes of each one, which distinguish them from the statistical ‘average person’, are the essence and torment of each life, what attracts and repels, and what makes one who one is. But though people say they are interested above all in people, they do not know one another. All too often, they consider that their intentions or character are misinterpreted and that mistaken conclusions are drawn from superficial appearances.

  A start on this adventure can be made by setting out to explore three neglected places, and first of all the part of life that is most hidden from view. I see private life as emerging from obscurity and challenging public life as the centre of attention. Instead of being obsessed with rules and regulations and the pecking order of organisations, I prefer to explore the consequences that follow from intimate personal relationships increasingly determining the quality of an existence. As families cease to be so dominated by property, as kinship feuds cease to be so bloody, and as the search for congenial partners becomes ever more absorbing and challenging, private life is becoming a source of a new kind of energy and of new priorities. As people have more contacts outside their neighbourhoods, relationships of many more kinds, both transient and long-term, are reshaping the landscape.

  The interaction between two individuals who develop emotional, intellectual or cultural links is producing a new motor of change. The duo or couple is as significant an influence as the solitary soul or the irrational crowd. Humans are not limited to a choice between individual self-reliance and collective struggle. One-to-one relationships now have a more central place in life than ever before, and have also been recognised as the source of many extraordinary achievements in varied fields of endeavour. It was prescient of the Chinese to write the word ‘humaneness’ (ren) with a picture of two human beings, recognising that its essence is in the relationship. Intimacy is a microscope which reveals a hitherto invisible universe that the culture of hierarchy and pretence conceals. Though many may be desperate to preserve their privacy, they also want to be recognised as being special. A new agenda is being opened up by the clash of these sensitivities, the desire to cover oneself up, and the occasional eagerness to undress and be seen as one really is.

  Secondly, I shall cross the most formidable barrier that separates humans, the barrier of death. I see people as living in the past as much as in the present, perpetuating ideas and habits from long ago, though often without being aware of it. To be poor is not only to be short of money, but also to possess only one’s own memories. The originality of our time is that the world is today richer in memories than it has ever been, more than traditional societies ever lived by, but it is making little use of them. There is a huge inheritance of memories waiting to be shared out. Never have there been so many scholars, books, museums, archives and mementos resurrecting all the civilisations that ever existed. Never has so much of the past been alive. Television has even brought it, with all its turpitudes and illusions, into many homes. We can now know about everybody’s ancestors, not just our own tribal ones. Moreover, though to be modern was supposed to mean living in the present and liberating oneself from ancient tyrannies by banishing and forgetting the past, old traditions have survived with a tenaciousness that was never expected. Adding other people’s memories to one’s own memories transforms one’s ideas of what it is possible to do in a lifetime. A new vision of the past makes possi
ble a new vision of the future. History is not a coffin with no escape. On the contrary, it is liberation, a bunch of keys that opens doors to places one never knew existed.

  I see each individual as having a philosophy of history – though it is seldom given such a grand name – that explains for them why they are being swept along by events they cannot control: it may be economic forces or cycles of revolution and reaction, or a spiritual power, or the influence of exceptional people, or the blight of personal traumas. Most people are wrapped up in a patchwork of philosophies, inherited from different centuries, which each has put together in a slightly different pattern. The mind-set they adopt may change a little in response to the harsh knocks of existence, but fragments of old attitudes almost always survive beneath the surface. Nothing limits a person more than these inherited convictions about what is possible and what is not. But history need not be seen as a final judgement on what men and women and children can do. On the contrary, it is a series of unfinished experiments, of missed turnings, of inventions ignored, where trivial accidents often diverted events into directions which have been far from inevitable. Moreover, memories of one’s childhood or of the achievements of one’s ancestors are not enough to form comprehensive judgements about one’s destiny. One can also acquire other memories.

  Thirdly, I look at humanity from a different perspective by moving my focus away from its traditional ambitions, victory in war or harmony in peace. Wars which kill and destroy have ceased to be as glamorous as they once were. Success, which everyone is expected to aim for, is ever more difficult to achieve in work and wealth, and the compensations of victories in sport are feeble consolations. Peace, alas, seems to be a chimera. Humans have never been able to achieve harmony for very long, either with their fellows, or with nature, or with the supernatural, even when they claimed to be obeying the sages who preach brotherly love. Consensus is becoming ever more elusive, for reasons that will become clear in later chapters. I am searching for a new attitude to disagreement, a new skill, new ways of putting disagreement to better use. Instead of focusing on what people or nations or groups have in common, I propose to confront the innumerable minute differences, often seemingly trivial, that keep them apart, and investigate how these can become fertile rather than sterile.

  Of course, no person can know seven billion people, but that number should not be any more intimidating than the many more billions of neurons and molecules invisible to the naked eye that scientists confront, which are just as difficult to comprehend and whose secrets, as they emerge in dribbles, are transforming understanding of the world. To set out on a road that has no end, with no expectation of finding all the answers, has always been more eye-opening than travelling to a fixed destination, because it leaves freedom to stray into by-ways that may prove more rewarding than preordained goals. Humanity’s great adventures were undertaken by a few determined people who disagreed with almost everyone else. We shall see whether benefiting from their experience is more difficult than getting to the moon.

  Humans are not born free. No one is born free of the fear of strangers and the unfamiliar. But history is a record not only of terror and submission but also of danger defied, inspired above all by curiosity. Curiosity is my compass, surprise is my nourishment, boredom is my bane. Curiosity is the best route I know out of the many kinds of fear that turn the light into night, dissolving problems into microscopic particles, each of which becomes an object of wonder rather than a threat. I cherish surprise because it mixes the possible with the impossible and occasionally finds that opposites need not be enemies. Boredom is the groan of the exhausted and the scream of the impatient, and the wailing noise that hope makes when it dies. I have written this book in an attempt to keep hope alive, but not false hope, and not the kind that is mocked by sceptics, cynics and comics. Is that possible if life is no more than a brief candle, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing?

  About one hundred billion lives have been brief candles, snuffed out, with few exceptions, into complete oblivion. That is the best guess as to how many humans there have been since they first appeared on earth. Of course, many departed convinced that they were starting a new existence in another world. Many now succeed in living much longer in this world, but they differ a great deal in how much of life they experience, and how much of life they illuminate. What can one do today not to be just a brief candle?

  An idiot now has the chance to tell a tale that has not been heard before. People were called idiots, when the word was first invented, simply because they were regarded as not a having an indispensable place in society and were not habitual orators in the public assembly, meaning that they were private persons. Today, in that sense, most of us are idiots. People were also called idiots not because they were stupid, but because they were uneducated or ignorant. Today, there is so much knowledge too complicated to master that we have to admit to being idiots in this sense too. All who are isolated socially from those with different incomes and education, or culturally from tastes and languages that mean nothing to them, or professionally because their skills are so specialised, have increasingly become strangers to one another: they may have the technology to communicate, but are far from fully appreciating or liking one another. So I have been trying to find out what kind of conversations could liberate us from the idiocy of our isolation.

  A life becomes significant when it responds to a quandary from which an escape route has not yet been found. At the meeting of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the old monarchical order was crashing under the onslaught of industrial and political revolutions, our forebears invented a new way of looking at the world: the enlightenment and romanticism appeased bewilderment and re-ignited enthusiasm, at least for a time. But today, in response to technology’s overturning of old habits and the discrediting of once seemingly impregnable institutions, no comparable emotional or rational buffer has emerged to protect us from these shocks. That leaves us free to think about what adventures you or I could embark on today that we could not in the past. What new priorities can we give to our private lives? If we cannot become rich, what could be a substitute for prosperity? If religions disagree, what other outcomes are possible beyond strife or doubt? Where there is too little freedom, what is the alternative to rebellion? When there are not enough exciting jobs, what new ways of working could be invented? When romance is disappointing, how else can affections be cultivated? What wisdom can be salvaged from crumbling institutions? When so much is unpredictable, what can replace ambition?

  I do not wish to pontificate about what you should do or believe. I prefer to know what you believe, what other people believe or have believed, how the world appears to others apart from myself, and what would happen if people got to know more about what went on in other people’s heads. It makes no sense to decide what to do with one’s life without knowing what others have done with theirs, and with what results. Persuading you to think as I do would limit the benefit I would gain from listening to you, and it would in any case be pointless, because ideas nearly always change when they move into another mind.

  I appreciate that the last thing many people want is an adventure into the unknown, that life contains stresses too hard to bear, and that withdrawal from the hurly-burly, or taming the mind into quietude, or cultivating contentment, seem the best kind of defence. The world is indeed often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful, or else declare such a task to be impossible. I never forget that a huge proportion of past efforts to find solutions that please everybody has produced undesired and occasionally catastrophic results, and that turning disappointment into an invitation to search for a new direction is easier said than done. I know how futile so many attempts to diminish humanity’s seemingly ineradicable cruelty have been, but I have felt constantly renewed by its ingenuity, its ability to get out of the mess it creates, and its unceasing disco
very of unsuspected wonders and possibilities in both people and the natural world.

  So instead of arguing about whether things are getting better or worse, which they doubtless are, I prefer to devote that time to finding a gift that will express my gratitude to the world for tolerating my presence in it; obviously it will have to be something it does not already possess. That is my treasure hunt. Each of my chapters is a search for a clue.

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  What is a wasted life?

  WHAT CAN A PERSON AIM TO DO today, beyond passing examinations, and establishing a career, and finding a perfect partner, and having a loving family, and enjoying absorbing hobbies? Are there other ambitions that can lead in new directions and compensate for the disappointments that tarnish even the best laid plans?

  Mao Ch’i Ling, a one-time Chinese celebrity, climbed the ladder of success to become a respected public official, and also won esteem as a playwright, poet, painter and musician.

  Despite his many accomplishments, he felt he had wasted his life. His exciting existence included ten years devoted to what he believed was a worthy cause, armed resistance to a foreign invasion. Many of his friends and relatives died in that war, while he assumed a whole variety of disguises to escape arrest and execution, moving endlessly between the most bizarre hiding places. He ended up exhausted by his wanderings, desperate for rest. So he toadied to the government he did not respect, and despised himself for doing so. He survived into old age, but that did not seem to him to be a sufficiently laudable achievement. He could not suppress the feeling that ‘I have not established myself as a virtuous man . . . I failed to make any real contribution . . . My empty words served no purpose . . . My heart is anguished.’ He told his descendants to destroy all his poetry and save only one-tenth of the numerous books he had written. His pitiless obituary, which he wrote himself, ended with these words: ‘His life was lived in vain.’