The really real Meaning of Life™
18 April 2012 Leave a comment
Not long ago, I had one of those, you know, witty, French, thoughts-from-the-stairs, something-something d’escalier, post conversation moments, l’esprit de l’escalier. A thought well deserving of the French description since most of the day had past, as had a long commute and many flights of stairs had been both ascended and descended. Now that I’ve set a clear scenario of my mental landscape and you are prepared for a deepity, I shall begin.
There was a conversation which, via a left turn at religion, lead to that part in belief systems about the meaning of life or as I like to put it “The Meaning of Life™.”
My co-conversant had brushed aside all other religions with broad strokes of Buddhism and was explaining how there was so much sense in reincarnation.
“We are reborn in order to learn whatever lessons we haven’t learned in previous lives,” she said matter of factly. This elicited my usual response to those sorts of statements which presuppose some kind of imprinting mechanism onto a non-corporeal substrate. Her counter was that without reincarnation, there would be no meaning to life. This was automatically rephrased in my head as – meaning in life is dependant upon re-birth. This set off all of the alarm bells for me. Hers was such a strong statement, making reincarnation the lynch pin of all meaning in life, that I was cowed for a moment, all tact and diplomacy left me and the only thing that came forth was, “Perhaps life is meaningless.”
This had the effect of pitching us into direct opposition and she launched into a series of rather distraught, but defensive, statements asserting the depressing nature of the thought of the meaninglessness of life. Initially, I made noises of agreement. Then I qualified what I said by saying, “maybe life doesn’t have any inherent meaning, no meaning in itself but only, and importantly, the meaning we give it.”
She didn’t take my point at all and told me (again) that I have a depressing outlook.
As is so often the case, I failed to produce an analogy.*sigh* Like Rousseau, I am much better at conversation by (e)mail.
So, now, my esprit de l’escalier. I was rehashing the conversation in my mind and an analogy popped into it that I thought was just ducky, or, at least adequate, and that is the inherent meaninglessness of language. The very words we speak, much like the lives we live, are so suffused with meaning that we forget very easily that they are actually without any inherent meaning. Go to a library, or go online and look up a book, a newspaper, anything in a language you don’t know and marvel at the fact that you cannot parse a single sentence, or relate to a single word. Ask yourself which is the subject, which the object and the verb. Sure, the language you see means something to someone but does that give it everlasting, absolute meaning?
You could make up your own word, tell yourself what it means, repeat it over and over in your mind until you remember it effortlessly. Now write the same word in your primary language next to the one you made up. Compare them, do they each carry the same depth of meaning, the same linguistic heft? Would they carry equal weight in a sentence? I sincerely doubt it.
All of this to say, we accept words and language as a means to express our deepest and strongest (and most trivial for that matter) thoughts and feelings while, at least at a certain level, just as easily accepting that these words have no meaning aside from what we as a culture ascribe to them. Yet it is with this same sense that I would more poetically say, “Perhaps there is a tenuousness to meaning, one that depends directly on being, that plumps flesh on the bones of existence, and is exercised by community but ultimately fails in death, lingering only in the minds of the bereft.” Only, this is unthinkable and depressing and contemptible and dehumanising. So we are told.
