We see through moments and for that reason the moment escapes us. A wolf sees the moment but cannot see through it. Time’s arrow escapes him. That is the difference between us and wolves. We relate to time in a different way. We are temporal creatures in a way that wolves and dogs are not. Indeed, according to Heidegger, temporality, as he called it, is the essence of human beings. I am not concerned with the question of what time really is. Neither, for that matter, was Heidegger. No one knows what time really is – the excitable pronouncements of some scientists notwithstanding – and I suspect that no one ever will. It is the experience of time that is crucial for us.
Actually, that is not quite right. It is my philosophical training that makes me look for sharp distinctions where there are none. Philosophy is an act of power – some would say hubris – where we try to impose our distinctions and divisions on a world that doesn’t really accept them and isn’t really suited to them. The world is too slippery for us. Instead of the divisions we would like to find, there are, I suspect, merely degrees of similarity and difference. A wolf is a creature of time as well as of the moment. It is just that we are more creatures of time, and less creatures of the moment, than is he. We are better at looking through moments than the wolf. And he is better at looking at moments than are we. The wolf is close enough to us for us to understand both what we gain by this and what we lose by it. If a wolf could speak, we could, I think, understand him.
The ape in us is quick to turn any difference to its advantage: any descriptive difference becomes immediately transformed into an evaluative one. The ape tells us that we are better than the wolf because we are more adept at looking through the moment. This conveniently forgets that the wolf is better at looking at the moment. If living with Brenin taught me one thing, it is that superiority is always superiority in one or another respect. More than that, superiority in one respect is likely to show up as a deficiency elsewhere.
Temporality – experiencing time as a line stretching from the past into the future – brings with it certain advantages, but also certain disadvantages. There are apes aplenty willing to extol the advantages of temporality. The purpose of this particular ape is to draw attention to the disadvantage: we cannot understand the significance of our own lives and, for precisely that reason, we find it so difficult to be happy.
During the last few weeks of Brenin’s life, we did something together that illuminated for me just what it is to be a creature of the moment rather than a creature of time – a creature that is better suited to looking at moments than looking through them. By this time, I knew Brenin was going to die – at least I knew this intellectually, even if I was steadfastly refusing to engage with it emotionally. I decided that Brenin needed a few days’ break from Nina and Tess. They were always pestering him, even when he was trying to sleep – which, during his last days, was most of the time. It wasn’t their fault. I couldn’t take them for a walk, because that would have meant leaving Brenin by himself. And I didn’t have the heart for that. I could imagine him wearily but determinedly struggling to his feet, spurred on by Nina and Tess’s boisterous excitement, and being desperately unhappy when I told him he couldn’t come with us. And I wasn’t going to make him spend his last days like that. So, during the last few weeks, Nina and Tess had been restricted to the garden and house, and, understandably, they were becoming more and more hyper. I figured Brenin could do with a break, and so I took Nina and Tess to kennels in Issanka, a village about an hour or so up the road, in the direction of Montpellier. I decided I would leave them there just for a few days, to allow Brenin to get some quality rest.
When Brenin and I returned to the house – he had insisted on going with us to Issanka, of course – he gradually underwent a strange transformation. Indeed, quality rest seemed to be the last thing on his mind. He followed me around the house, bouncing up and down, yipping excitedly. When I made myself a plate of spaghetti, he demanded his share of it – something he hadn’t done in a long, long time. So I asked him, ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ His reaction, not quite the Buffalo Boy of old, but still quite impressive – he jumped up on to the sofa and howled – confirmed that he did indeed. I imagined us taking a gentle stroll over to the digue and walking along there for a few hundred yards or so. But when I got to the gate, Brenin was bounding around, running up and down the ditch that separated us from the nature reserve. So I did something I still can’t quite believe even today.
I hadn’t been running since shortly after we moved to France – and that was over a year ago. I tried, when we first arrived here, but I noticed that, after the first couple of miles, Brenin began to lag a long way behind us, and he wasn’t happy about it at all. He had become old without me realizing it. So I replaced the runs with walks, punctuated with swimming on the beach and trips to the boulangerie and La Réunion. Nor had I been doing any other form of exercise. When I arrived I bought a set of weights and a bench. But it was only rarely I could talk myself into actually using them, and for the most part they sat, forlorn, on the sun terrace – a gently rusting reminder of how I had let myself go.
As Brenin had become older and weaker, I had become older and weaker too. That is often how it goes when you live with dogs. I had spent most of the year in France in a sort of premature retirement, doing some writing, but spending an awful lot of time soaking my feet in young wine. Nina and Tess, of course, were still up for long runs. But Brenin was not and we went for walks instead. And so, because of the peculiar way in which the composition of our lives had become entwined, Brenin’s physical decline was mirrored by my own. Now I stood outside the house, and looked at Brenin running up and down the ditch, and said, ‘Let’s give it a go, my son. One last hurrah for the Rowlands boys. How about it?’ So I dug out my shorts and we went running. I was watching Brenin carefully, and was fully expecting him to start tiring quickly. If so, I would have come straight home. But he didn’t tire. We must have made quite a picture, the two of us: a dying wolf and a hopelessly out of shape man staring down the barrel of forty. We ran through the woods up to the Canal du Midi, ran along there in the shade of the giant beech trees that line its banks. Brenin ran alongside me, easily matching my stride. Then we cut through the nature reserve – following the fields of black bulls and white ponies of the ranches down to the digue. Still he didn’t tire. Like the Brenin of old, he ghosted effortlessly over the ground, as if he were floating an inch or two above it, with me, his plodding, puffing, graceless ape, bumbling and stumbling along beside him.
Who knows? Perhaps he just wanted me on my own for a while. Perhaps he wanted to say goodbye, and couldn’t do it properly with Nina and Tess dogging his steps. Whatever the reason, that day saw a distinct upturn in his energy and demeanour. And he never really lost it – not even the return of Nina and Tess in a few days’ time could diminish it. We never went running together again – he never quite matched the energy levels of that day. But we went for a walk most days. He was OK. And he was OK almost until the day he died.
I can’t help contrasting Brenin with how I would have been if I had cancer. For Brenin, cancer was an affliction of the moment. One moment he would feel fine. But another moment, an hour later, he would feel ill. But each moment was complete in itself and bore no relation to any other moment. For me, cancer would be an affliction of time, not an affliction of the moment. The horror of cancer – of any serious human illness – is the fact that it is spread out through time. Its horror lies in the fact that it will cut off the arrows of our desires, and our goals and projects: and we know it. I would have stayed at home to rest. I would have stayed home to rest even if I, at that moment, felt great. That is what you do when you have cancer. Because we are temporal creatures, our serious afflictions are temporal blights. Their horror consists in what they do through time, not in what they do at any moment. Because of this, they have a dominion over us that they cannot have over a creature of the moment.
The wolf takes each moment on its merits. And that is what we apes find so hard to do. For us, each moment is endlessly deferred. Each moment has a significance that depends on its relation to other moments and a content that is irredeemably tainted by those other moments. We are creatures of time, but wolves are creatures of the moment. Moments, for us, are transparent. They are what we reach through when we try to take possession of things. They are diaphanous. For us, moments are never fully real. They are not there. Moments are the ghosts of past and future, the echoes and anticipations of what was and what might be.
In his classic analysis of our experience of time, Edmund Husserl argued that the experience of what we call ‘now’ can be broken down into three different experiential components. There is, in part, an experience of what he called the primal now. But in our ordinary consciousness of time, this experience of the primal now is indelibly shaped by both anticipations of the likely future course of experience and recollections of its recent past. The former he called experiential protentions, the latter retentions. To see what he means, pick up something that lies to hand. You hold, let’s suppose, a glass of wine in your hand. You experience it as a glass, presumably. But your fingers are not touching the entire glass, just parts of it. Even so, it feels to you as if you have a glass in your hand, not that you have parts of a glass in your hand. Your experience of holding the glass is not constrained by the limits of your hands that allow you to have this experience. Why? According to Husserl, it is because your experience of holding the glass – an experience of something you are doing now – is made up of anticipations of how your experience will change in given circumstances and recollections of how it has changed in the recent past. For example, you anticipate that if you slide your fingers downwards, you will encounter a narrowing of the field of your touch, consistent with your holding the stem of the glass rather than the bulb. Similarly, you might remember that when you slid your fingers down the glass moments earlier, your experience changed in this sort of way. Even an experience of the now, Husserl argued, is inextricably bound up with experiences of the past and future.
This much, I am fairly sure, is true of wolves as well as humans. We never experience the now as such – the primal now is an abstraction, and does not correspond to anything we can ever encounter in experience. What we call the now is in part past and in part future. But differences of degree can be just as important as differences of kind. We humans have taken this to an entirely new level. So much of our lives is spent living in the past or living in the future. Maybe, when we try hard enough, we can experience the now in something like the way a wolf does, as something only minimally written upon by retentions of the past and protentions of the future. But this is not our ordinary way of encountering the world. In us, and in our ordinary experience of the world, the now has been effaced: it has shrivelled away to nothing.
There are many disadvantages of being a temporal creature; some obvious, some less so. An obvious one is that we spend a large, perhaps disproportionate, amount of our time dwelling on a past that is no more and a future that is yet to be. Our remembered past and our desired future decisively shape what we laughably refer to as the here and now. Temporal creatures can be neurotic in a way that creatures of the moment cannot.
Temporality, however, also has drawbacks that are both more subtle and more important. There is a kind of temporal blight to which only humans are subject because only humans live enough in the past and future for this affliction to take hold. Because we are better at looking through moments than looking at them – because we are temporal animals – we both want our lives to have meaning and are unable to understand how our lives could have meaning. Temporality’s gift to us is the desire for what we cannot understand.
Sisyphus was a mortal who had offended the gods in some way. In precisely what way is not really known and stories differ. Perhaps the most popular account is that after his death, Sisyphus talked Hades into allowing him to return temporarily to earth, on an urgent mission of some sort, and promised to return as soon as his mission was complete. However, when he had again seen the light of day and felt the warmth of the sun on his face, Sisyphus had no wish to return to the dark of the underworld. And so he didn’t. Ignoring numerous admonitions and disregarding explicit instructions to return, Sisyphus managed to live many more years in the light. Eventually, following a decree of the gods, he was forcibly returned to the underworld; and there was made ready his rock.
Sisyphus’s punishment was to roll a huge rock up a hill. When this task was completed, after many days, weeks or even months of exhausting labour, the rock would roll back down the hill, to the very bottom, and Sisyphus would have to begin his labour all over again. And that was it, for all eternity. This is a truly horrible punishment, embodying a cruelty of which perhaps only the gods would be capable. But in what, exactly, does its horror lie?
The way the myth is usually told emphasizes the difficulty of Sisyphus’s labour. The rock is typically described as massive, of a size he is barely capable of moving. Thus Sisyphus’s every step up the hill taxes his heart and nerves and sinews to their limits. But, as Richard Taylor has pointed out, it is doubtful that the true horror of Sisyphus’s punishment lies in its difficulty. Suppose the gods had given him, instead of a massive boulder, a small pebble – one that he might easily fit in his pocket. Sisyphus, then, might take a leisurely stroll to the top of the hill. Watch the pebble roll down and begin his labour all over again. Despite the less arduous nature of this task, the horror of Sisyphus’s punishment is, I think, scarcely mitigated.
We are the animals that think what is most important in life is happiness. Because of this, we are strongly tempted to suppose that the horror of Sisyphus’s punishment lies in the fact that he hates it – the punishment makes him so unhappy. But I don’t think this is correct either. We can only assume that Sisyphus reviles his fate. However, suppose the gods were less vengeful than they are represented in the myth. Suppose they, in fact, took steps to mitigate his unhappiness; steps that were aimed at reconciling Sisyphus with his destiny. They did this by implanting in Sisyphus an irrational, but nevertheless intense, compulsion to roll rocks up hills. We needn’t worry too much about how they did this; it is the result that is important. And the result is that Sisyphus is now never happier than when he is rolling rocks up hills. In fact, if he is not allowed to roll rocks uphill, he becomes distinctly frustrated, even depressed. And so the mercy of the gods takes the form of making Sisyphus desire, indeed embrace with all his heart, the very punishment they have inflicted on him. His one true desire in life is to roll rocks up hills, and he is guaranteed its eternal fulfilment. This mercy of the gods is no doubt perverse; but it is nonetheless mercy.
Indeed, it is mercy so complete that perhaps there is no real sense in which Sisyphus’s task can any longer be regarded as a punishment. If anything, it seems more reward than punishment. If happiness is feeling good about life, feeling that life and everything in it is wonderful, Sisyphus’s new existential situation seems optimal. No one could be happier than Sisyphus, guaranteed the eternal fulfilment of his deepest desire. If happiness is what is most important in life, then it should be impossible to imagine a better life than that of Sisyphus.
However, it seems to me that the horror of Sisyphus’s punishment is not diminished one iota by the mercy of the gods. Sometimes the rewards of the gods can be worse than their retributions. I think we should now feel even sorrier for Sisyphus than we did before. Prior to the ‘mercy’ of the gods, Sisyphus at least possessed some sort of dignity. Powerful but vicious beings have imposed his fate on him. He recognizes the futility of his labour. He performs this labour through necessity. There is nothing else he can do – not even die. But he recognizes the futility of his task and he has contempt for the gods who have imposed it on him. This dignity is lost once the gods become merciful. Now our contempt, tinged with sympathy perhaps but contempt nonetheless, must be directed as much at Sisyphus as at the gods who made him that way: Sisyphus the dupe, Sisyphus the deluded, Sisyphus the stupid. Perhaps on those long trudges back down the hill, Sisyphus sometimes dimly recalls the times before the mercy of the gods. Perhaps some small, still voice in the backwaters of his soul calls out to him. And perhaps then, briefly, Sisyphus understands, through echoes and whispers, what has happened to him. And he realizes that he has become a diminished thing. Sisyphus understands that he has lost something important; more important than the happiness he now enjoys. The mercy of the gods has taken from Sisyphus the possibility that his life – or rather his afterlife – will amount to anything more than a sick joke. It is precisely this possibility that is more important than his happiness.
I doubt that we are the sorts of animals that can be happy, a least not in the way we think of happiness. Calculation – our simian schemes and deceptions – has permeated too deeply into our souls for us to be happy. We chase the feelings that come with the success of our machinations and mendacities, and we shun the feelings that come with their failure. No sooner have we taken one mark than we are looking for the next. We are always on the make and our happiness, consequently, slips through our grasp. Feeling – and this is what we take happiness to be – is a creature of the moment. For us, there is no moment – every moment is endlessly deferred. Therefore for us there can be no happiness.
But at least we can understand now our obsession with feelings: this is a symptom of something far deeper. Our preoccupation with feeling a certain way – the widespread assumption that this is what is most important in life – is an attempt to reclaim something that our living in the past and in the future has taken from us: the moment. This, for us, is no longer a real possibility. But even if we could be happy – even if we were the sorts of creatures for which happiness is a real possibility – that is not what it is about.
The real horror of Sisyphus’s punishment, of course, lies neither in its difficulty nor in the fact that it makes Sisyphus so desperately unhappy. The horror of the punishment lies in its sheer futility. It is not simply that Sisyphus’s task comes to nothing. You can be faced with a meaningful task that you fail to achieve. Your efforts, then, come to nothing. This may be a source of sadness and regret. But there is no horror. The horror of Sisyphus’s task, whether it is easy or difficult, whether he loves it or detests it, lies not in the fact that he fails but in that there is nothing that would count as success. Whether he gets the boulder to the top or not, it still rolls down and he must begin again. His labour is futile. It aims at nothing. His task is as barren as the boulder.
This might tempt us into thinking that if only we could find a purpose for Sisyphus’s task, then everything would be all right. It would be purpose, rather than happiness, that is the most important thing to find in life – whether the life is that of Sisyphus or anyone else. But, once again, I don’t think this can be correct. To see why, suppose there was a point to Sisyphus’s labour. Suppose there was a goal towards which his efforts aimed. Instead of the boulder rolling back down the hill, it stayed put at the top. And his trudges back down the hill were therefore not to collect the same boulder, but different ones. The command of the gods was now to build a temple, one that was mighty and beautiful, a fitting tribute, as they saw it, to their own power and magnificence. Suppose also, if you like, that, being merciful gods, they inculcated an intense desire in Sisyphus to do just this. After ages of grim and dreadful toil, we might imagine him succeeding in his task. The temple is now complete. He can rest on that high mountain and regard with satisfaction the fruits of his labour. There’s just one question: what now?
There is the rub. If you think of what is most important in life as a goal or purpose, then as soon as that purpose is achieved your life no longer has meaning. Just as Sisyphus’s existence in the original telling of the tale has no meaning because it has no purpose, so too, in our retelling, Sisyphus’s existence loses whatever meaning it has as soon as his purpose is complete. His life on that high mountain, gazing for ever at a goal he can neither change nor add to, is as meaningless as his life rolling a huge and intransigent boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again as soon as he reaches the summit.
We think of time as a line stretching from the past into the future, with the lives of each one of us laid out as overlapping segments of this line. Perhaps this is why it is so natural for us to think of what is important in life as a goal towards which our lives are directed – as something towards which we are progressing. What is most important in life is something we have to work towards. It is a function of our life’s goals and projects. And if we work hard enough, and are talented enough, and, perhaps, are lucky enough, this is something we can achieve. It is not, of course, exactly clear when this may happen. Some think that what is most important in life can be achieved in this life. Many think that it can be achieved only in the next life, and that the importance of this life is simply a matter of preparing us for the next. But even casual reflection on the case of Sisyphus should convince us that the meaning of life cannot be like this. Whatever else the meaning of life is, it cannot consist in progression towards some goal or end point – whether the point is in this life or the next.
The myth of Sisyphus is, of course, an allegory for human life (and indeed was used as such by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus). The allegory is not subtle. The life of each and every one of us is like one of Sisyphus’s journeys to the summit, and each day in our life is as one of Sisyphus’s steps on this journey. The only difference is this: Sisyphus himself returns to push the bolder up the hill once more, while we leave this to our children.
As you go to work today, or school or wherever it is you go, look at the bustling throng. What are they doing? Where are they going? Focus on one of them. Perhaps he is going to an office where he will do the same things today as he did yesterday, and where he will do the same things tomorrow as he does today. On the inside, he may pulsate with energy and purpose. The report has to be on the desk of Ms X by 3 p.m. – this is crucial – and he must not forget the meeting with Mr Y at 4.30 p.m. – and if this does not go well the consequences for performance in the North American market will be grim. He understands all of these as very important things. Perhaps he enjoys these things, perhaps not. He does them anyway because he has a home and a family and must raise his children. Why? So that in a few years’ time they can do much the same things as him for much the same reasons, and produce children of their own, who, in turn, do much the same things for much the same reasons. They will then be the ones worrying about reports and meetings and performance in the North American market.
This is the existential dilemma revealed to us by Sisyphus. Like the man who must meet Ms X and Mr Y, and worry about the North American market, we can fill our lives with little goals, diminutive purposes. But these cannot provide our life with meaning, because these goals aim only at their own repetition – either by us or by our children. But if we were to find a purpose that was somehow grand enough to give meaning to our lives – and I’m not sure I have any idea what such a purpose would be – then we must, at all costs, make sure we don’t achieve this purpose. As soon as we do, our life would once again lack meaning. It would be nice, of course, if we could time the achieving of our grand meaning-giving purpose to coincide with our last, dying, breath. But what sort of purpose can be achieved when we are at our weakest? And if we can achieve it when we are at our weakest, why could we not have done so before? Are we to think of the meaning of life as being like a fish we have had on a hook for some time and are simply waiting until we die to pull it out? What sort of meaning is that? And how much of a fish can it really be if we are able to pull it out of the water as the strength slips from us?
If we assume that the meaning of life consists in a purpose, then we must hope we never achieve that purpose. If the meaning of life consists in a purpose, a necessary condition of life continuing to have meaning is our failure to achieve that purpose. As far as I can see, this is to make the meaning of life into a hope that can never be fulfilled. But what is the point of a hope that can never be fulfilled? A futile hope cannot give life meaning. Sisyphus no doubt entertained the futile hope that the boulder would, for the first time ever, stay at the top of the hill where he left it. But this hope did not give Sisyphus’s life meaning. The meaning of life, I think we should conclude, is not to be found in a progression towards an end point or goal. There is no meaning in the end.
If the meaning of life is not happiness and it is not purpose, then what is it? Indeed, what sort of thing could it possibly be? In connection with philosophical problems, Wittgenstein used to speak of the decisive movement in the conjuring trick. A seemingly insoluble philosophical problem, Wittgenstein thought, will always turn out to be based on one or another assumption that we have unconsciously, and ultimately illicitly, smuggled into the debate. This assumption decisively sets us on a certain way of thinking about the problem. And the impasse we eventually, but inevitably, reach is an expression not of the problem itself but of the assumption that has caused us to think about the problem in the way that we have.
For the meaning of life, here is my suggestion for the decisive movement in the conjuring trick. We have assumed that what is most important in life is to have something. If our lives are a line constituted by the arcing arrows of our desires, then we can possess whatever those arrows encompass. In the nineteenth-century American West, settlers were sometimes promised as much land as they could cover in a day’s ride. This was called a land grab. We think that we can, in principle, possess whatever the arrows of our desires, goals and projects can cover. Whatever is most important in life – the meaning of our lives – can, through talent, industry and perhaps luck, be grabbed. This might be happiness, or it might be a purpose. Both of these are things that one can have. But this, I learned from Brenin, is not how it is with the meaning of life. The most important thing in life – the meaning of life, if that is how you want to think of it – is to be found in precisely what we cannot have.
The idea that the meaning of life is something that can be possessed is, I suspect, a legacy of our grasping simian soul. For an ape, having is very important. An ape measures itself in terms of what it has. But for a wolf it is being rather than having that is crucial. For a wolf what is most important in life is not to possess a given thing or a quantity. It is to be a certain type of wolf. But even if we acknowledge this, our simian soul will soon try to reassert the primacy of possession. To be a certain type of ape – that is something towards which we can strive. To be a certain type of ape is simply one more purpose that we can have. The ape that we most want to be is something towards which we can progress. It is something to be achieved if we are sufficiently clever, sufficiently industrious and sufficiently lucky.
The most important and difficult lesson to learn in life is that this is not how things are. What is most important in life is not something that you can ever possess. The meaning of life is to be found precisely in those things that temporal creatures cannot possess: moments. This is why it is so difficult for us to identify a plausible meaning for our lives. Moments are the one thing that we apes cannot possess. Our possession of things is based on effacing the moment – moments are things we reach through in order to possess the objects of our desires. We want to possess the things we value, stake claim to those things; our lives are one big land grab. And because of this we are creatures of time, not creatures of the moment: the moment that always slips through our grasping fingers and opposable thumbs.
In saying that the meaning of life is to be found in moments, I am not repeating those facile little homilies that entreat us to ‘live in the moment’. I would never recommend trying to do something that is impossible. Rather, the idea is that there are some moments, not all of them by any means, but there are some moments; and in the shadows of these moments we will find out what is most important in our lives. These are our highest moments.
The expression ‘highest moments’ will no doubt mislead us, pointing us back in the direction of the view of life’s meaning we should reject. We are likely to think of our highest moments in one of three ways, all of which are erroneous. The first way is to think of our highest moments as ones towards which our life can progress – as moments towards which our lives are building, moments that can be achieved if we are sufficiently talented and industrious. But our highest moments are not the culmination of our lives – they are not the towards-which of our existence. The highest moments of our lives are scattered through those lives. These are moments scattered through time: the ripples made by a wolf as he splashes in the warm summer waters of the Mediterranean.
We are so conditioned to thinking of what is important in life as happiness, which we understand as feeling good, that all talk of highest moments will inevitably bring to mind some kind of nirvana-like state of intense pleasure. This is the second way of misunderstanding what I mean by highest moments. In fact, our highest moments are rarely pleasant ones. Sometimes they are the most unpleasant times imaginable – the darkest moments of our lives. Our highest moments are when we are at our best. And often it takes something truly horrible for us to be so.
There is another, more subtle and more insidious but equally erroneous way of thinking about higher moments. This is that our highest moments reveal to us what we really are. These are the moments, we think, that define us. There is a persistent trend in Western thought for thinking of the self or person as the sort of thing that can be defined. Echoing Shakespeare, we solemnly intone sayings like: to thine own self be true. This suggests that there is such a thing as a true you, and that you can either be true or false to this you. I seriously doubt if this is how things are. I seriously doubt if there is a true you, or me for that matter – a self or person that persists through and transcends all the different ways in which we might be false to it. In fact, I doubt this was even Shakespeare’s view – putting it, as he did, in the mouth of a manifest fool like Polonius (and thanks to Colin McGinn for convincing me of this).
So, I doubt there is a real me, as opposed to a false me. There is just me. Indeed, I am no longer sure that there is even that. What I call me may just be a succession of different people, all psychologically and emotionally related, and all united by the illusion that they are all me. Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. The crucial point is that each of my highest moments is complete in itself and does not require justification in the supposed role it plays in defining who and what I am. It is the moments that are important and not the person that they are (erroneously) supposed to reveal. That is the hard lesson.
I am a professional philosopher and therefore a stubborn form of scepticism is, or should be, my stock in trade. Poor old God, after all the trouble He took with me – the absurdly improbable intervention in the form of Brenin’s stone ghost – and I still can’t quite bring myself to believe in Him. But if I could believe, then I would hope God was the God of Eli Jenkins’s prayer in Under Milk Wood: the God who would always look for our best side and not our worst. Our highest moments reveal our best side and not our worst. The me at my worst is as real as the me at my best. But what makes me worth it – if I am – is the me at my best.
I was at my best, I am convinced, when I was saying no to Brenin’s death during those early days in France. I was a sleep-deprived deep shade of crazy. I thought I was dead and in hell. My view of what was going on in my life made Tertullian sound positively reasonable. I was sectionable. But, nonetheless, these were among the highest moments of my life. This is what Sisyphus eventually understood. We are at our best when there is no point in going on; when there is no hope for which to go on. But hope is a form of desire, and so it is what makes us temporal creatures – the arrows of our hope arcing off into the undiscovered country of our future. And sometimes it is necessary to put hope in its place – to put it back in its sleazy little box. And so we go on anyway – and in doing so we make a point (although that, of course, is not why we do it – any reason would undermine the point). In those moments, we say, ‘F**k you!’ to the gods of Olympus, to the gods of this world or the next, and their plans for us to roll rocks up hills for all eternity – either that or foist the job on our children. To be at our best we have to be pushed into a corner, where there is no hope and nothing to be gained from going on. And we go on anyway.
We are at our best when death is leaning over our shoulder and there is nothing we can do about it and our time is nearly done. But we say, ‘F**k you!’ to the line of our lives and embrace instead the moment. I am going to die, but in this moment I feel good and I feel strong. And I am going to do what I will. This moment is complete in itself and needs no further justification in other moments, past or future.
We are at our best when the ninety-five-pound pit bull of life has us by the throat and pinned to the ground. And we are just three-month-old cubs and can be easily torn apart. There is pain coming, and we know it, and there is no hope. But we don’t whine or yelp. We don’t even struggle. Instead, there emanates from deep inside of us a growl, a growl that is calm and sonorous, that belies our tender age and existential fragility. That growl says, ‘F**k you!’
Why am I here? After four billion years of blind and unthinking development, the universe produced me. Was it worth it? I seriously doubt it. But I am here to say, ‘F**k you!’ anyway – when the gods have given me no hope, when Cerberus, the dog of the pit, has me pinned to the ground by the neck. It’s not my happy moments; it is these moments, I now know, that are my highest moments, because they are my most important moments. And they are important because of what they are in themselves, not because of any supposed role they play in defining who I am. If I am, in any shape or form, worth it – if I am a worthwhile thing for the universe to have done – then it is these moments that make me so.
And so it was, I suppose, a wolf that revealed all this to me; he was the light and I could see myself in the shadow he cast. What I learned was, in effect, the antithesis of religion. Religion always deals in hope. If you are a Christian or a Muslim, it is the hope that you will be worthy of heaven. If you are a Buddhist, it is the hope that you will attain release from the great wheel of life and death and so find nirvana. In the Judaeo-Christian religions, hope is even elevated into the primary virtue and renamed faith.
Hope is the used-car salesman of human existence: so friendly, so plausible. But you cannot rely on him. What is most important in your life is the you that remains when your hope runs out. Time will take everything from us in the end. Everything we have acquired through talent, industry and luck will be taken from us. Time takes our strength, our desires, our goals, our projects, our future, our happiness and even our hope. Anything we can have, anything we can possess, time will take it from us. But what time can never take from us is who we were in our best moments.
There is a painting called Lone Wolf, by Alfred von Kowalski. It depicts a wolf standing at night on a snow-capped hill, looking down at a small log cabin. The cabin has smoke rising from its chimney and a light glowing warmly in its window. The cabin always reminded me of Knockduff, when I returned from one of our winter evening walks, with Brenin and the girls trotting ahead of me, away from the darkness of the woods and towards the welcoming light I had left on in the window. Kowalski’s picture is, of course, allegorical – a depiction of the outsider looking in on the warm and cosy comfort of someone else’s life. But perhaps the cabin reminded me of Knockduff only because the wolf reminded me of me and the life I had lived.
One way or another, that life came to an end, or at least began to draw to its conclusion, on that dark January night in Languedoc when I put Brenin in the ground and raged against God and nearly drank myself to death. I sometimes wonder if I really died that night. Descartes, on his own long, dark night of the soul, found his refuge in a God who would not deceive him. Descartes could doubt almost everything – that there was a physical world around him, that he had a physical body. He could, gifted mathematician and logician that he was, doubt the truths of mathematics and logic. But he could not doubt that there existed a God who was kind and good. This God would not let him be deceived, as long as he took sufficient care in evaluating his beliefs.
I think Descartes was probably wrong about this. There is a difference between a good God and a kind God. A good God might not let us be deceived. But a kind God almost certainly would. The highest moments of our lives are so hard and so withering. There is a reason the worth of our lives can only be revealed to us in moments. We are not strong enough for it to be revealed in any other way. Although I am not a religious man in any conventional sense of that term, sometimes, when I remember the night of Brenin’s death, when I looked across the flames of his funeral pyre and saw his stone ghost looking back at me, I think that God was telling me: It’s OK, Mark, it really is. It doesn’t have to be hard all the time. You are safe. This feeling, I think, is the essence of the religion of humans.
So I sometimes wonder if this is, perhaps, the astonishingly beautiful dream of a dead man, bequeathed him by a kind God, rather than the good God of Descartes. This is a God who would let me be deceived, precisely because that is what a kind God does. This was the same God I cursed with my dying breath.
I wonder this because if God had appeared to me that night, given me a pen and paper and asked me to write down how I wanted my life to be from now on, I couldn’t have written it better. I’m now married – to Emma, not only the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but the kindest person I’ve ever known: someone who is unquestionably, demonstrably, irredeemably and categorically superior to me.
My career has spiralled ever upwards – from a humble lecturer at an even humbler university, whom nobody wanted to know, I’m now offered improbably inflated salaries by top universities in the US. My books have become bestsellers – or, at least, what passes for bestsellers in the rarefied atmosphere of academic publishing. And I am no longer the sort of person who is capable, or who would even consider, drinking two litres of Jack in a single sitting, no matter what the circumstances or motivation. As you must have realized, you don’t get to be the sort of person who can drink like that without many, many years of consistent and dedicated practice.
I’m not saying this to gloat, or because I am especially pleased with myself. Quite the contrary: I am genuinely – staggeringly – bemused. I say it because I know that none of it is, in the end, what makes me worth it. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud. But, at the same time, I’m wary of this pride. This is the pride of the ape, of my sulking, skulking simian soul: the soul which thinks that what is most important in life is to guide oneself to the top of the pile through instrumental reason and all that goes with it. But when I remember Brenin, I remember also that what is most important is the you that remains when your calculations fail – when the schemes you have schemed shudder to a halt, and the lies you have lied stick in your throat. In the end, it’s all luck – all of it – and the gods can take away your luck as quickly as they confer it. What is most important is the person you are when your luck runs out.
On that night I buried Brenin, in the rosy warmth of his funeral fire and the sharp and biting cold of the Languedoc night, we find the fundamental human condition. A life lived in the rosy warmth and kindness of hope is the one any of us would choose if we could. We would be mad not to. But what is most important when the time comes – and it always will – is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf. Such a life is too hard, too wintry, and we could only wither. But there come moments when we can live it. It is these moments that make us worth it because, in the end, it is only our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that is what it would tell us.
I couldn’t leave Brenin’s bones lying all alone in the South of France. So I bought a house in the same village. On our daily walks, we would say hello to his stone ghost as we passed. However, I’m writing these concluding sentences from Miami. I succumbed, eventually, to one of the aforementioned improbably inflated salaries. Emma and I arrived here a few months ago. Nina and Tess are still around, and it goes without saying that they came with us. Nina still wakes me up each day at 6 a.m., and if my hands or feet are not exposed outside the bedsheet, she’ll rearrange the sheet until they are. Lick, lick: don’t you know we have people to see and places to go? But they’re beginning to show their age. They spend most of their days sleeping – out by the pool, or in the garden, or on the sofa. I can’t go running with them any more. That is something I returned to after Brenin’s death – much to their delight. But now they fall behind me after the first mile or so and there’s just no point. Perhaps I’ll grow fat and slow for a while with my two girls, just as I did with Brenin. But they do enjoy their gentle walks along the Old Cutler Road, where they still find the energy to intimidate the American dogs they meet, which are all far too enthusiastic and excitable – too young – for Nina and Tess’s predilections. I’m sure they’re delighted that all the local dogs are terrified of them. They, and their owners, cross the street to avoid us. But that’s OK. If I know Nina and Tess at all, I’m pretty sure they would want to go out as top dogs. But they’re fading, the two of them. The warmth is really good for Nina’s arthritis – and, believe me, I know how she feels.
Sometimes I get a feeling; it’s the strangest feeling. It’s that I used to be a wolf and I’m now just a stupid Labrador. Brenin has come to represent to me a part of my life that is no more. The feeling is bittersweet. I am sad because I am no longer the wolf that I was. And I’m happy because I’m no longer the wolf that I was. But above all I once was a wolf. I am a creature of time, but I still remember that it’s the highest moments that count – moments scattered through your life like grains of barley at harvest time – not where you start and not where you end up. Perhaps one cannot remain a wolf all one’s life. But that is never what it was about. One day the gods will once again decide to give me no hope. Perhaps this will be soon. I hope not; but it’s going to happen. When it does, I shall do my best to remember the wolf cub pinned to the ground by his neck.
But here is the truth of the pack: our moments are never our own. Sometimes my memories of Brenin are tinged with a strange sort of amazement. It’s as if the memories are made up of two partially overlapping images: one senses that the images are connected in an important way, but they’re too blurred to make out. And then they suddenly converge – snap into focus – like images in an old kaleidoscope. I remember Brenin next to me, striding the touchlines of the rugby pitch in Tuscaloosa. I remember him sitting next to me at the post-match party, when pretty Alabama girls would come up and say, ‘I just love your dog.’ I remember him running with me through the streets of Tuscaloosa; and when the Tuscaloosa city streets transform into lanes of an Irish countryside, I remember the pack running next to me, easily matching its stride to mine. I remember the three of them bouncing like salmon through the seas of barley. I remember Brenin dying in my arms in the back of the Jeep as the vet inserts the needle into the vein on his front right leg. And when the convergence of images happens, I think: is that really me? Was it really me that did those things? Is that really my life?
This realization sometimes strikes me as a faintly surreal discovery. It is not me I remember striding the touchline in Tuscaloosa; it is the wolf that walked beside me. It is not me I remember at the party, it is the wolf that sat beside me and the pretty girls that approached me because of this. It is not me I remember running through the streets of Tuscaloosa or the country lanes of Kinsale; it is the wolves who matched their stride to mine. My memory of myself is always displaced. That I am in these memories at all is not given; sometimes it is a fortuitous bonus that must be discovered.
I never remember myself. I remember myself only through my memories of others. Here we are decisively confronted with the fallacy of egoism; the fundamental error of the ape. What is important is not what we have but who we were when we were at our best. And who we were when we were at our best is only revealed to us in moments – our highest moments. But our moments are never our own. Even when we are truly alone, when the pit bull has us pinned to the ground, and we are but cubs and easily broken, it is the dog we remember and not ourselves. Our moments – our most wonderful and our most terrifying moments – these become ours only through our memories of others, whether these others are good or evil. Our moments belong to the pack, and we remember ourselves through them.
If I had been a wolf instead of an ape, then I would be referred to as a disperser. Sometimes a wolf will leave its pack and head off into the woods, never to return. They have begun a journey and they will never again go home. No one is sure why they do this. Some postulate a genetic longing to breed, coupled with an unwillingness to wait their turn to move up the pack’s hierarchy. Some argue that dispersers are especially antisocial wolves who don’t enjoy the company of other wolves in the way that normal wolves do. I can identify, in my way, with both accounts. But who knows? Perhaps some wolves just think there is a big old world out there and it would be a shame not to see as much of it as they can. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Some dispersers die alone. Others, the lucky ones, meet other dispersers and form packs of their own.
And so, by some strange twist of fate, my life is now the best it has ever been – at least if we judge that in terms of how happy I am. As I write these sentences, Emma is poised to go into labour. Well, I say ‘poised’ to go into labour, but she’s been poised for a few days now. There are lots of pronounced uterine rumblings, but nothing organized or regular enough to be decisive. Nonetheless, I live in hope. I’m fully expecting to hear her call out at any moment for me to grab the bag and drive her to South Miami Hospital. So I must be brief. After forty years as a rootless and restless disperser, I have finally found a human pack. My first child, my son, will be born any day now – and I have a feeling, a sneaking suspicion that I can’t quite shake, that it’s going to be today. And I hope this doesn’t give him too much to live up to, but I think I just might call him Brenin.
Brenin: I worry about your bones, lying 3,000 miles away in France. I hope you’re not too lonely. I miss you, and I miss seeing your stone ghost every morning. But, the gods willing, our pack will be there again soon, for Languedoc’s never-ending summer. Until then, sleep well, my wolf brother. We’ll meet again in dreams.