AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
Читать онлайн книгу.
to London for the birth. Anna slept in the living room, snug in a Moses basket perched on my red futon, which was now doing respectable duty as a sofa.
It was the first term of my last year. With a new baby in the mix, I approached it like a job. Where my fellow students were getting up when they fancied, shaking off hangovers, smoking roll-ups, playing snooker in the common room, and putting off work until the essay deadline was upon them and they were forced to pull an all-nighter, I was a picture of orderliness. I arrived at the library when the doors opened, did my research, wrote my essays, reported for my tutorials, and in the afternoon relieved Simone of baby care. I cycled back not just with books in my basket but bumper packs of nappies dangling from the handlebars.
In the evenings we’d stay in, watching EastEnders on a portable black and white TV with a dodgy picture, while Anna fed or snoozed. When she was doing neither, and just crying, we would take turns swinging the Moses basket and humming lullabies until she dropped off. When even that didn’t work, we’d turn on the vacuum cleaner. No, not to suck the bawling infant out of our lives. It’s not unusual for babies to find ‘non-periodic’ noise soothing, and for Anna it did the trick.
That model of ‘lots of time, few responsibilities’, which was the model by which most arts students lived, was supposed to empower them. Free from the quotidian constraints that were to shackle them after college, they would not only satisfy their academic requirements, but would naturally read around their subject and generally improve their minds.
That was the theory. In practice, the absence of pressure caused a reduction in drive. They grew lazy. At least, that had been my experience before dropping out. Now that my third year had come around, the time available to me for studying, shortened by family commitments, meant that I had no choice but to be efficient. I would argue that the constraints actually improved the quality of my work, in that I saw my studying time as precious. I focused. No doubt there is a general rule in that: we work best under a certain amount of stress. A bell curve applies, as in the diagram opposite. Maybe all students should have a young family.
On purpose
The overarching question that guides this book is, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ While tracking a life, in this case mine, along a more or less straight line, each chapter offers a different tangent to that question. The tangent suggested in the last chapter was that of standing in the flow of life. As if planting one’s feet in a river, being human means feeling the past of the species surge up behind us, while sensing its urge to flow onwards. None of us is more than a boulder in the onward mission of the life force.
In this new chapter, I shall crop that trans-generational view down to an individual life span. How do we make our allotted time on earth meaningful? We do so, I believe, by identifying and pursuing a purpose. By ‘purpose’ I mean more than doing what we have to do to survive. One of the elements that makes us human is that we are capable of going beyond meeting our immediate needs for survival. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of doing that. Sometimes survival is the best that we can hope for. Think of refugees or people living on the breadline. Once our basic needs have been met, however, we naturally want to optimise our lives, to make them go as well as possible.
That we can do in one of two ways. Either we try to make our lives more comfortable or we try to make them more meaningful. In reality, the choice isn’t black and white: we’ll make trade-offs between the two. To use an obvious example, we might take a job with a charity that doesn’t pay so well because we want to make a difference; but we stop short of giving away all our earnings in order to maintain a standard of living. Thus we strike the balance between meaning and comfort that feels right for us. Often we find that balance intuitively, without explicitly posing the question. It’s an intuition that we all possess, this knowing whether we are driven more by meaning or by comfort.
The lucky few manage to square the circle. A human rights lawyer will have meaningful work while enjoying a pretty decent lifestyle. A smaller minority still will pursue personal comfort with no regard for meaning at all. To use another obvious example: bankers. For such groups, there is perhaps a hidden cost to be paid, however. Not only can gaining money go together with losing meaning, but in the process the conscience may become restive. In the blinkered pursuit of wealth, the desires of the self eclipse the needs of the soul to such a degree that, in the darkness, doubts about one’s very goodness as a human being may arise. An excess of comfort can feel uncomfortable. The thicker the mattress, the greater the chance of a pea.
I was given my own sense of purpose through those twin occupations of studying for my finals and being a parent. They filled the crater that had opened up when I dropped out and went to live in France with no life-plan to speak of. As it turned out, my studies provided a purpose that would sustain me beyond the immediate challenge of preparing for my exams.
French intellectuals
I had gone up to read English at Oxford in October 1984. There had recently formed a group calling itself ‘Oxford English Limited’ (OEL). The name was a pun: OEL’s mission was to expose the limitations of the English Literature syllabus. Its high-minded members claimed that the study of English at Oxford had been reduced to whimsical musings about novels and the lives of their authors. Made up largely of Marxists, OEL insisted that literature be examined in its political context. Rather than extolling Pride and Prejudice for its marvellous characters and charming plot, we should be looking at the way in which class differences were reinforced by its author. Through this lens, which was the opposite of rose-tinted, it appeared that Jane Austen was doing little more than condoning the bourgeois way of life. She was thereby perpetuating capitalism rather than disrupting it – disruption being the Marxist protocol.
The early 1980s was the era of Margaret Thatcher. Discontent with her brand of Conservatism infected not just those on the far Left but also those of more moderate kidney. That Marxist approach to literature fitted with an anti-authoritarianism that was in the air. Yet to me it came as a jolt. At school I had been taught to judge literature purely on its aesthetic merits. Did the novel achieve a satisfying unity or did it feel fragmented? Were the characters ‘flat’ or ‘round’? How successfully did the language used by the author express his or her intentions? Here was a much more abrasive approach. According to OEL, a novel was less a work of art than a battleground upon which ideologies were fought out. Like many of my peers, I was forced to rethink my assumptions.
The OEL call to politicise the study of literature went together with a wider attempt by progressive dons in the English faculty to bring continental thinking to bear upon literary studies. Of especial interest were the ideas of Parisian intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. Though the differences between these thinkers were as great as the similarities, their output was often taken en bloc. This block went by the moniker of ‘Post-Structuralism’. It combined a depth of analysis with a width of reference that made the Oxford way of doing things seem to me parochial and light-weight.
From that list of thinkers, it was the last, Jacques Derrida, to whom I felt the greatest draw. There was a book of Derrida’s called Writing and Difference – my paperback translation had an avocado green cover – over which I pored as if it were the oracle. I’m not sure that I understood a word to begin with. But that didn’t matter. I became mesmerised by the intricacy of the sentence structure, the elegance of the argumentation, the intensity of the analysis, the boldness of the conclusions.
This too was disruptive but in a way which, to my mind, was far more fundamental than that of the Marxists. Derrida was systematically deconstructing the cornerstones of Western philosophy, all the way from Plato through to his own contemporaries. Those cornerstones weren’t merely academic. They were the ideas on which Western society as a whole was built – ideas like democracy, truth, justice and freedom. Derrida was showing how many of these ideas just didn’t stand up under scrutiny, and that it was time to start again from scratch. To me, it was thrilling.