What is the meaning of life? “Being alive is the meaning” says mythologist Joseph Campbell. “What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.” He’s advocating for a passionate participation in this world, rather than holding out for a heavenly afterlife. Some of my favorite characters stand out for possessing this kind of vitality. Kenny Powers of HBO’s Eastbound & Down is a cross between a man on a hero’s journey and Falstaff, Shakespeare’s endearingly debaucherous reveler. Kath Day of NBC’s Kath & Kim truly enjoys her day-to-day suburban life, and lives it with passion. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ speaker in God’s Grandeur is as optimistic as Kath and as high-spirited as Kenny Powers.
In the season three premiere of Eastbound, minor leaguer Kenny tries to patch things up with his estranged girlfriend (and mother of his one-year-old son) by taking April out for a night on the town. Kenny lives in Myrtle Beach, and what follows is a montage of the two of them gazing into the sunset, shotgunning beers on a cruise, playing mini golf, brawling with other golfers, escaping hand-in-hand from security, driving bumper cars, playing carnival games, getting drunk a carousel, creating t-shirts airbrushed with their caricatures, and taking pictures with strangers on the boardwalk. Whether Kenny’s twirling swords in his dojo, boogie boarding in the ocean, or dancing his way from the bullpen to the mound, his hedonistic nature is endearing because of its childlike sense of wonder. “Hell is life drying up” is another Joseph Campbell-ism.
On Kath & Kim, Kath Day is an Everywoman — a middle-aged suburban single mom with a can-do spirit. Played expertly by Molly Shannon, Kath’s enthusiasm for life comes through in everything she does, from hearing her fiancee knock on the front door (“Come in if you’re sexy!”) to growing her in-home hairstyling business (“The prom market is a big one, and I want a piece of it!”). In one scene, she and her fiancee are getting ready for bed at side-by-side sinks, and Phil considers using a mud mask. “Life is not a dress rehearsal!” Kath exclaims, which Joseph Conrad would agree with. Shannon is so expressive with her voice, face, and body that Kath can believably wax rhapsodic about anything (“That Stedman, so handsome. So serious.”).
The vitality of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems is especially sweet in his early devotional poems. Part of their buoyancy comes from his fireworks-like use of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition, expressive pauses, exclamations, questions, and interjections. And part comes from the ebullient content, such as in “God’s Grandeur,” where the speaker praises life’s eternal freshness in the form of a new, bright morning every day: