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The quest for the meaning of life may be the oldest and most infuriating of all time. I’m on that quest this week. To solve this age-old riddle once and for all, I shouted to an F Train conductor as the train was beginning to whiz away, “what’s the meaning of life?” and he screamed back, “pussy!”
I often think of the ending of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” (below) as I muddle through my life in search of meaning. The other day I wrote a cheeky tweet: “The title of the book I don’t have time to write about how I spend half my life filling out CAPTCHAs: ‘I’m Not a Robot; Remember Me.’” But then I started thinking seriously about existence. Okay, so I’m not a robot (as far as I know), but what am I? Human (as far as I know). But what’s the meaning of a human life?
When I told my father-in-law what the subway conductor said, he thought maybe the subway conductor was commenting on the origin of life. As Mitch Albom says, “Behind all your stories is always your mother’s story. Because hers is where yours begin.” Or maybe when it comes to maternal metaphors for the meaning of it all, I’ll turn to Jack Kerouac instead. In the original scroll draft of On the Road, he puts it this way, “All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep.” Now that’s a womb I’d like to sleep in.
I asked my coffee cart guy the same question, and he said, “coffee,” which made me think we link the meaning of existence to what we do with our “one wild and precious life.” This is why E.M. Forster, purveyor of novels, believes, “Human beings have their great chance in,” you guessed it, “the novel.” This is also why, as a writer myself, I’m with Pliny the Elder on this one: “True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read.”
I asked my five-year-old what the meaning of life was and he said, “chicken.” I asked my two-year-old what the meaning of life was and she said, “foofy.”
I like to put a lot of pressure on my family members and place them in uncomfortable ontological positions (just kidding; sort of), so I emailed them the Mary Oliver poem and asked, “what’s the meaning of life?”
I figured I wouldn’t hear back from anyone or it would take a long time for the responses to come back, but the answers came pouring in. As you might imagine, I received some lighter and darker responses that reflected the personalities of the responders.
My father answered, in his inimitable way, and with a nod to the Oliver poem, “To be one with the grasshopper and the One who made it.”
My aunt-in-law said, “I think today that meaning lies in the present and everything else is just talk.”
My brother-in-law, responded with, “My two favorite answers from the pop culture are ‘42’ and ‘Life sucks, and then you die.’ I don’t regard that second one as a joke, I actually think it is a very wise statement. One of my favorite books is The Plague by Camus . . . it really encapsulates how I think about the world, and humanity. To the surprise of some people, I consider it to be an optimistic book. Although I’m actually becoming much more cynical these days because of climate change.There we go. Here’s an original response: The surface of the planet is now gradually warming to the point where it will likely become uninhabitable, which may well lead to the collapse of civilization within my own lifetime. Why? People are stupid, selfish creatures that are incapable of looking at the long term. So . . . what does that tell you about life? I guess it’s not worth very much.”
My mom may not have understood the question, or actually maybe she did. She’s a self-professed odd bird, as, I suppose, am I. She wrote, “As a child, I lay on the grass watching the clouds and said to myself, ‘And I will lie here in my grave forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.’” When it comes to the meaning of that one, your guess is as good as mine.
My sister-in-law said, “The meaning of life is hidden in a cat’s eyes.” Then she followed up with an email a second later that read, “Or possibly the meaning of life is emptying the dishwasher so you can fill it again. Sometimes it seems like that is a representation of the circle of life.”
My mother-in-law said, “The meaning of life is discovered when you give meaning to other people’s lives.” She probably doesn’t remember this, but I actually asked her this question when I started dating her son at the age of sixteen (I suppose I’ve been trying to answer this question for awhile), and she said, “service.”
My father-in-law said, “The meaning of life: Don’t ask; don’t tell.”
My uncle-in-law (is that even the right term?) wrote, “This time the line that grabbed me was ‘the one who has flung herself out of the grass.’ So, without thinking about it, I will say that the point of life is: while being flung out to consider that—wherever (each time) you land—a lovely poet will receive you, not fling you away in disgust, nor crush you in her palm. And she will feed you sugar.”
***
Perhaps the Renaissance writer François Rabelais was on the right track when he wrote on this existential topic, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
Of course I can’t answer the question, but I can tell you a story that gestures towards a kind of answer. I sit here watching my daughter eat green beans. She stares back at me with these over-the-top-observant blue eyes with highly curled lashes, looking at me like she knows everything already. She’s like the original Emerson-style poet, listening to the music of the universe as it came over the transom. Maybe one day she will write it down.
Just finding her legs, she navigates this world of our apartment like a drunken sailor, bopping up against the veil between different worlds. She likes most of all to pause between the before and the after, just marveling.
I carefully tear the green beans into little pieces. She eats them in great big scoops with her adorable monster mitts with which she bangs her world into being. Now she’s banging on the little tray because she wants more, and I’m thinking about how all I do now is hold on to her, hold on and hold on. But I’m also thinking how one day she’ll learn to ride a bike. I’ll run behind her for what seems like forever, holding on and holding on—and then one day I’ll let go.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver