The Digue
2010
I’m running along the digue: a dyke that runs across much of the delta of the River Orb in the Languedoc region of France and was built to discourage the storm surges of the winter Mediterranean. To the south of the digue lies the maïre, and after that the beach. Already, young families are starting to make their way down there, to a place of life and warmth and the echoing laughter of the children of summer.
I first came to this place with my father when I was a boy and he was still a relatively young man. And, no matter where it has taken me in between, my life always seems to return here: keeps bringing me back, offering me one excuse, then another, that I just can’t seem to refuse. Now I’m a father, still relatively young, or so I tell myself. A little more than a decade ago, I carried rocks from this place to bury a wolf that I had come to think of as my brother. The memories of a boy with his father, of a young man with his dead wolf brother, of a man growing old fast whom life has brought back to this place once again — that these memories should belong to a single life strikes me as stunningly improbable. But whose memories would they be if not mine?
On the land side of the digue, there are abandoned vineyards. The winter Mediterranean does not really care too much about our efforts to discourage it and, two or three times in a winter, water will surge over the digue. Where the vines once grew is now bitter, broken ground. The houses of those who once worked the grapes are derelict, and there remain only the broken lines of vines, withered and blasted, mixed with the increasingly triumphant smatterings of cord grass and marsh samphire.
The idea of a line, in some form or other, often decisively shapes the way we think of time. We talk of ‘time’s arrow’, or we think of time as a river — perhaps even as a man and his dog running along a dyke from the past into an unknown future. The fact that we use metaphors that are spatial suggests that we don’t really understand time very well at all. Physicists, on the other hand, tell us that time is an expression of entropy: that the direction of time follows the direction of increasing entropy. I am not sure that physicists understand time any better than the rest of us. But, even so, there are very different metaphors associated with the account physics provides. Entropy is disorder, and so time is a transformation of order into disorder. And, armed with this, we might think of time as a series of waves, storm surges; washing in, retreating, and repeating over and over again. Each time the surge retreats, it leaves less and less of what was there before. When I first came to this place, the vines were young and green, and bent over with the weight of the grapes they carried. But the surges of time have done their work, and this is what remains. Soon, what is left of these vineyards will have returned to the maïre.
It is not time’s arrows but time’s surges that break us down. In the end, we all return to the maïre.
Hugo and I are on a fifteen-mile circuit of the Orb delta. We all arrived here from Miami a couple of months ago. In Miami in summer, or the hurricane and humidity festival that passes for a summer in those parts, six miles is enough to nearly kill us, and we don’t get much change out of an hour. But we’re beasting this run. We both struggled initially with the extra distance, but two months later we’re doing these fifteen miles in two hours thirty, give or take. It’s not exactly cold, of course. This is the south of France in June, and it’s probably only a few degrees below the temperature in Miami when we left — but the dry air feels wonderful. Hugo is so cocky he’s even putting in some extra miles, dashing off to meet the white horses and black bulls that line the edges of the fields as we pass. Hugo is not a particularly brave dog and I smirk at his fawning approaches. Not so many years ago, I ran here with somewhat different animals.
We began running west along the beach, and then turned north along the edge of the rivierette, a small saltwater lagoon. Then west again for a couple of miles along the digue, over as far as the digue will go, to the Grande Maïre, the massive saltwater lagoon from which the rivierette was born a few centuries ago, the result it is thought of subsidence. Turning north along its densely bullrushed banks, we run for a few more miles, water on one side, fields and then vineyards on the other — the hills of the Massif Central shimmering in the hot distance that lies to the front of us. Then we’ll hook up with the Canal du Midi, the incredible engineering legacy of Pierre-Paul Riquet, Béziers’ most famous son. The canal stretches over 150 miles, from the Garonne river in the west to the Etang de Thau some thirty miles east of us. We head along the canal for only a few of those miles, west towards Villeneuve-lès-Béziers, shaded from the growing sun by the mighty sycamores that line its banks. Then, continuing on the dirt tracks through the vineyards to Sérignan, we head down to the beach and a turn to the east that takes us back home.
But these are all just contingencies: distances, directions, times, even landscape. They don’t matter. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is. Here, on an early summer’s morning in Languedoc, the heartbeat is a gentle one. There is the gentle sinking of my feet into sandy ground, the gentle pant-pant-pant of Hugo’s breath and the quiet jingle-jingle-jingle of the tags that adorn his collar. There is the whispering rustle of the tramontane — the wind of the mountains — in the branches of the sycamores above me and in the vines that surround me. There is the gentle dance of the butterflies in the warm breeze. When the run does its work, I will become lost in its beating heart. We run on.
I remember another run, along some of these same trails, but in a different time, almost a different life. Brenin had lymphoma, the vet had told me, and the prognosis was what in the profession they call ‘guarded’. In other words, he was going to die. It was going to be soon and my primary duty now, the last important thing I could do for my old friend, was to make his death as easy as it could be. As easy as it could be for him, I mean. That probably meant making it hard for me. If he could just slip away in the night, painlessly, unaware … But I suspected that was not the way it was going to be. Not since Max II had any dog of mine slipped away in their sleep and I had been six years old at the time. I was going to have to make a decision, a final judgement. The judgement would be that Brenin’s life was no longer worth living. Not a second less of a life worth living, and not a second more of a life that was not. That was the goal. Then I would have to take him to the vet, and I would have to ask the vet to kill him. I am human. I make mistakes. My decision would always be riddled with doubt. Even now, years later, I ask myself: was that the right day? Did I get it right? Was it too soon? Or was I too slow, too late — too weak? These are questions I have never been able to answer and probably never will.
We had just returned from taking Nina and Tess to boarding kennels for a few days. They were still young then, exhausting to be around; and I had decided Brenin might benefit from a short rest, a break from their grinding effervescence. Upon our return, I quickly noticed a change in Brenin’s demeanour. Brighter, more alert, more interested, hungrier than he had been in weeks — I offered him the spaghetti I had made for my lunch and he quickly devoured it. Then he did something altogether unexpected. He jumped onto the sofa and howled.
When he was a young wolf, Brenin had a little party piece that he would perform most days. He would run full-tilt at the settee, jump onto it and then continue his run up the wall. When he had got as high as his momentum would carry him, which was typically around three-quarters of the way up a standard living-room wall, he would spin his back legs up and around — a kind of canine cartwheel — and then run back down the wall. This was his way of letting me know we had been dawdling in the house for far too long, and that it was time for a run. Time had stripped him of this sort of outrageous athleticism — jumping on the settee and howling had become his middle-aged substitute. Still, I knew exactly what he was suggesting.
There was a ditch at the end of the garden and when we got there Brenin began to run up and down it, over to the trees on the other side and back again: a display of excitement of the sort I had not seen — not from him anyway — in a number of years. When we’d left the house, I had envisaged a gentle stroll, an opportunity to sniff a few smells and mark a little territory. But something in his behaviour, perhaps it was a glint in his almond eye, convinced me that something strange was happening. And so we did something that even now I still cannot quite believe.
I had not been running for the best part of a year. Whenever I’d tried, Brenin, more than a decade old now, would soon start lagging behind. At first, I had tried to incorporate this into the run: running forward for a while, then jogging back to reunite with Brenin, before heading forward again to catch up with Nina and Tess. I think it had been the look of desperation on his face, the desperation that goes with understanding that your body will not do what you want it to any more — I was probably projecting, admittedly — that convinced me to stop doing this. Nina and Tess could still run all day, of course. But I could not do this to my old wolf brother and so my running with the pack had transformed into gentle walks.
That was how we began our last, entirely unexpected, run together. I had quickly put on some shorts, dug out my neglected running shoes and we’d set off through the woods, along a narrow path that brought us out to the Canal du Midi. For the first couple of miles we ran in the shadows of the giant sycamores. If this had been July, the trees would have been a blessing. But it wasn’t, and they weren’t. This was January; we were only a few days into the New Year. The tramontane, this time tasting of the snows of Lozère and Auvergne, swept down between the trees, a sycamore windtunnel. This was a run as cold as death. Every run has its own heartbeat, and this was the beat of a heart that was cold. The barren, leafless branches of those giant sycamore trees danced to the wind of snow and mountains. Our feet were soundless; our breath and the jingle-jingle-jingle of Brenin’s chain were lost in the wind. We were not there.
I had expected Brenin to tire quickly. I had expected a quick return to the house. But he did not tire. Not a bit: he drifted, apparently without effort, over the ground beside me, almost like the Brenin of old, almost as if he was floating an inch or two above the earth; almost as if he wasn’t dying. In fact, if you had to pick the dying member of the two of us, you almost certainly would not have chosen Brenin. The year in France had, let us say, not been kind to me. I’d spent it writing a little, thinking a lot, but most of all drinking copious amounts of young wine — I had become good friends with the wines of Faugères and St Chinian in particular. I had stopped running, and the wine had been slowly catching up with me. So here I was: soft, slow, staring down the barrel of forty and looking my age for the first time since looking my age had become a bad thing.
We reached the village a couple of miles away and soon after that there was a turn off from the Canal, down a little dirt track that ran along the edge of the village’s vineyards. I was getting a little worried, because we were approaching the furthermost point of the run from our house. The cancer had robbed Brenin of a considerable amount of his weight. But even so, he would still have been around 120 pounds, and I really did not relish the prospect of having to carry him three miles home. But he glided on, apparently untroubled by the death that grew inside him. After about a mile, the track swung south and brought us to the eastern edge of the Grande Maïre. On one side there was the maïre, on the other there were fields scattered with the white horses and black bulls of the region. Many of the bulls were up to their knees in water. It did not seem to bother them too much.
The sun warmed us slightly, now we had left the trees behind. Even the tramontane couldn’t quite take that away from a sun that had begun its slow afternoon descent into the sea, and danced fiercely on the wind-worried waters of the maire. After a mile or so of tracking the lagoon, we reached the digue. We ran along here for half a mile or so, and then turned south again and we soon reached the beach. It was there that we rested and sat in the dying January sun, watching the waves wash gently onto the golden sands, sands littered with trunks of trees and assorted detritus from last week’s storm. The sun sank slowly over the snow-peaked Canigou, nestled in the mountains that wrapped around the coast, south down to Spain.
The empty house was waiting for both of us. But, for a while at least, we sat and watched the sun.
I was thirty-nine when Brenin died. That is not, it strikes me, a particularly good year for any of us: an existential fin de siècle (in the bad rather than good way). That’s when our myelin sheaths start breaking down. They coat the axons — the connections between brain cells. The more these sheaths break down, the worse the connectivity between neurons becomes, and the slower in both thought and deed we become. Thus begins the long road to cognitive and motor decline. The speed at which you are able to process information, and also move your body, increases with the frequency of what is known as neuronal ‘action potential’ (AP). This is an electrical discharge that travels along axons. Fast processing of information, and fast bodily movements, require high-frequency AP bursts. And high-frequency AP bursts depend on the integrity of the myelin sheaths coating your axons. So, as these sheaths break down, you will not only be incapable of thinking as quickly as you once could, you will be incapable of moving as quickly too. Myelin integrity starts to decline at thirty-nine.
Apparently, I will also have lost getting on for 20 per cent of my muscle mass. That is another thing that will have happened to me since I sat on the beach with Brenin that day. At least, that is the standard loss between forty and forty-nine years of age. I am not yet forty-eight, not quite — on the day of this run with Hugo along the Orb delta — but even so. And while it is a truism that different people age at different rates, once decline starts in any given area, that decline is — without some serious intervention — typically linear. In other words, a graph plotting our decline in one or another respect would follow a straight line. The gradient of the line will vary from one person to another, and for a single person it will vary from one capacity to another. But for each capacity, the line’s descent is usually, bar a few minor local eccentricities, linear. This is the line of our lives.
I am sure being a mammal brings with it numerous benefits, but also one notable drawback. Many reptiles, for example, do not decline — not in the way mammals do. With all mammals, there is a gradual increased mortality with age: the older a mammal is, the more likely it is to be eaten, or to slow down too much to be able to catch food. The mortality of reptiles does not increase gradually with age — it remains pretty much constant until the reptile is very old. As mammals get older, they lose the capacity for oocytogenesis — they can no longer produce oocytes, female reproductive cells. There is no loss of this capacity in reptiles. They can keep producing young (more accurately, eggs containing the young-to-be) almost until they die. Some reptiles can regenerate lost limbs; no mammals can. Mammals typically have two sets of teeth, and once they have worked their way through them, they are out of luck. Reptiles enjoy continuous tooth replacement throughout life. Mammals therefore decline in a way that reptiles do not. But mammals evolved from reptiles. What evolutionary processes would have brought about this difference in response to the passage of time?
An animal that has evolved in a hazardous environment — one where there are many predators, for example — will maximize reproduction. That’s the strategy best suited to cope with hazard. An animal of this sort will be what’s known as r-selected, and this sort of selection will favour rapid development, small body sizes and a short lifespan. An animal living in an environment with few hazards, on the other hand, will face significant competition for resources from other members of the same species. Such an animal will be K-selected, and such selection will favour parental involvement, delayed development, larger body sizes and longer lifespans. In recent years at least, humans, elephants and whales are K-selected; mice, voles and rats are r-selected.
The expression ‘in recent years’, however, is a telling one — and the ‘years’ in question number, at most, the last sixty-five million. When the dinosaurs were still around — and this period also comprises nearly two-thirds of mammalian history — all mammals were r-selected: they were small, nocturnal animals, growing no bigger than rats and stuck stubbornly at the bottom of the food chain. So, according to one well-known story, I am declining in the way I am because of r-selection in early mammals, something that my later K-selection was not able to completely erase or overwrite.
So that clears it up: it’s all the dinosaurs’ fault. It is a little bit unlucky when you think about it. Without r-selection in early mammals, my life might have taken on more reptilian contours. Thrusting and burgeoning I might have remained, right up until I dropped. From this perspective, my mammalian life profile seems just a little unlucky — given that there clearly were other possibilities. If only my earliest ancestors had not been so timorous, then it might all have been different. If intelligent reptiles had co-evolved with us, descendants of the dinosaurs, then I am fairly certain I would be more than a little envious. I’m sure I’d conclude that in the great evolutionary lottery of life I had drawn a markedly shorter straw than them. ‘Unlucky, mate!’ a sympathetic post-dinosaur might respond. I suppose I might (in, it goes without saying, some extraordinarily loose sense of ‘might’) have been descended from mayflies: two hours and that’s my lot. But just because I am luckier than some doesn’t mean I’m not unlucky, all things considered.
Philosophers have had very little to say about decline and death, which is rather surprising given their centrality in our lives. And what they have said is often barely believable. For example, on the subject of death, many prominent philosophers have been surprisingly upbeat. Epicurus argued that death cannot harm us because while we are alive it has not happened yet — and so can’t have harmed us yet — and when it happens we are no longer around to be harmed. Much more recently, Bernard Williams argued that immortality is overrated on the grounds that it would result in the eventual loss of our categorical desires — the desires that give us a reason for living — and eternal ennui would be the result.
While content with saying some rather implausible things about death, philosophers — Schopenhauer aside — have had next to nothing to say on the subject of decline. To the extent they do, their efforts are equally implausible. For example, Cephalus, the old man of ironic name who features, briefly, in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, maintains that being old and infirm is a good thing because you are no longer subject to the tyranny of ‘youthful lusts’. But their failure to address the issue of decline reveals itself most clearly in philosophers’ ruminations about what is important in life. These seem strangely off-target, almost as if decline is not an inevitable feature of life. Hedonists tell us to be happy. Happiness is what life is all about. But this is a life where I get worse and worse and then die. Should I not be at least open to the possibility that life is not really about that at all? If life is all about being happy, then this life, bequeathed me by my history, biology and the laws of the natural world, seems stunningly inapt. Taking my happiness where I can find it — maybe that is what it is about. But then what about the rest of life — the large swathes of it where I cannot find happiness? How do I live these presumably dominant segments of my life?
Then there is the mantra of the Enlightenment, enthusiastically adopted in the country to which we shall, in a few days, return: ‘Be the best you can be!’ Life is all about self-realization: shaping yourself according to a vision of how you would like yourself to be; striving, and becoming the best incarnation of this vision that is possible for you. But this overlooks the fact that, for the most part, this life is a process of becoming worse than I once was. As Schopenhauer put it: ‘Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse — until at last the worst of all arrives.’ I can be the best I can be at getting worse, I suppose. But this is nowhere near as inspiring as the original version.
Nietzsche tells us: be strong. What does not kill me makes me stronger. Maybe, but unfortunately something is, sooner or later, going to kill me. He adds: happiness is the feeling that one’s power is increasing. This is deeply unfortunate, because for most of this life I will find my power diminishing. I would have thought that the question of how I should live this life must take this obvious fact as a starting point, and not blithely ignore it.
When I had just started my life as a professional philosopher, the keynote speaker at a conference I was attending, a very distinguished and well-known philosopher, was presented with an obvious objection to his clearly flawed argument. This was in the Q&A session immediately afterwards and so the audience was still there. He failed to respond adequately, instead opting for a series of rambling observations of little relevance. The man who had asked the question, a big-hearted colleague of mine, desisted from the questioning and scribbled a note that he passed to me: ‘He can’t do it any more.’ Indeed, he couldn’t. It was obvious. But this did not stop the rest of the audience from jumping on him like a murder of crows sensing a fatally weakened peer. This had a big impact on me. I know this is what life has in store for me. One day — I don’t know when it will be but I know it will come — I won’t be able to do it any more either and whether my inability is exhibited in public like this, or merely secreted away in the private sphere, does not really matter that much. Either way, this is, for me at least, monumentally sad. ‘At least you will have escaped those tyrannical youthful lusts,’ I imagine Cephalus muttering to me. Yes, well, that makes it all okay then, doesn’t it. When some philosophers talk about life and what is important in it, I find I cannot help thinking of this old and distinguished philosopher who had done good work and couldn’t do it any more. All I see is a series of rambling observations of dubious relevance.
It is at this point in the run and its ruminations, as Hugo and I are making our way back to the village along the digue, that my calf decides, in my view rather unnecessarily, to emphatically reaffirm my mammalian bloodline. Calf tears have been happening to me off and on since around 1997 — since those runs in Kinsale, when I used to charge down the hill by Charles Fort, just for the hell of it. My left calf first went on one of these descents and has been going periodically ever since. My right joined in too, after a couple of years, even though by then I had excised the downhill sprints from my running. But before today I’d had no problems for the past three years and thought I’d left this particular issue behind. I hang around on the digue for a while, to see if I can somehow miraculously stretch this problem away. It isn’t going anywhere.
The rehab times for this injury have been getting longer and longer. I say ‘rehab’, but it is not as if I have actually done any, unless lounging around the house feeling sorry for myself, muttering about how unfair it all is, counts as rehab. When this problem first occurred, I was running again in two weeks. The last time it happened, it was more like six. I really should get it properly rehabbed this time — have someone dig out the scar tissue or whatever it is they do. In the meantime, I suppose I might as well try to be ‘philosophical’ about the whole thing. At my age — striding the highways and byways of these dangerous heart-attack years — of all the ways in which a run might end abruptly, a grade II tear of the calf is far from the worst.
R-I-C-E: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. All the things I am not doing now, but should be. I limped home from the run this morning to find there was an immediate demand for my services. There will be no more running for quite some time, I suspect. But walking, limping, hobbling and shuffling — these are things I am going to have to do anyway. Serious illness, the loss of a limb: that might have bought me a day or two … but this is all very familiar. My boys need to run. ‘Come on, Daddy, we want to go to the beach.’ And so I find myself limping heavily, perhaps a little theatrically I admit, along the 700 yards or so of path that leads to the sea. A few yards in front of me is Brenin, my older son. He’s just turned three years old and sits proudly upon his first bike, peddling furiously and thankfully getting nowhere fast. Emma is up ahead, on a rented bicycle, and on the back of this is a seat that contains Macsen, my younger son, who was one year old last month. The flamingos, the flamant roses, have arrived early this year. When I first came to this part of the world, not much older than my sons are now, my jaw used to drop at what I thought of as these ridiculously exotic birds. But Brenin and Macsen are Miamians. ‘They’re not very bright, Daddy,’ Brenin informs me. He’s right; compared to the gleaming, orange Caribbean flamingos he sees in Miami, they are distinctly pallid.
The icy blast of the sea is a welcome relief, for a change. Brenin’s lips will be blue within minutes, but he isn’t going to be dragged out of there without a fight. We must play an important game — lifting him over the waves whilst simultaneously chanting the liturgy, ‘UP-AND-OVER.’ ‘You didn’t say it, Daddy: you’ve got to say it!’ Then sandcastles — surrounded by a system of moats that would not have embarrassed Pierre-Paul Riquet, filled with water fetched from the Mediterranean by me, shuffling and shambling — their sole purpose to be destroyed at some subsequent time to be determined by the boys. Running from a distance, they perform graceless belly flops on the castles, hitting the sand hard, yipping like hyenas over and over again, aided and abetted by Hugo who bounds along beside them barking and frothing like a dog in the grip of la rage. I might have played this game once. But then I got old and didn’t understand it any more. Perhaps I am beginning to understand it again.
I suspect children, and the dogs of children, understand what is important in life far better than adults. When I build the sandcastles, it is work: I do it for the enjoyment of my sons. When they destroy those castles, it is play: they do this for no other reason than to do it. As the castles die the death of a thousand belly flops, I can think of no more emphatic affirmation of the value of play over work. There is a joy that goes with this — the joy of giving yourself over wholly to the activity and not the outcome, the deed and not the goal. Perhaps I can no longer understand the game; but I can see the joy, I can feel it. I can hear it echoing out across the water towards Africa. And yet: we are not far away. I can see it. We’re no more than a few metres away from the place where I once sat with a dying wolf, and watched the cold winter sun set slowly on his life.
This joy echoes out across the water but also back through the days of my life. An earlier time — Brenin had been dead two short months, and Nina, Tess and I had resumed our runs together. It was a bright, cold spring day, and we had journeyed up into the Cévennes, the mountains of the southern Massif Central. ‘Col’ is the French word for a mountain pass. Today we were going to do a thirty-kilometre run through the Col du Minier — ‘the pass of miners’. I had brought a small backpack, with a little food and water, and a map. I wasn’t going to push. It had been a long time since I had run the long run. If it took all day, so be it.
The sun danced brightly on the cold blue waters of a mountain lake. We had run only six kilometres, the map told me, but already I was starting to feel it. When one has been living at sea level, performance tends to start to decline at around 3000 feet. We were at nearly 4000 feet, so altitude may have played some role. But I suspect I was the main problem. I was very, very out of shape, and the few 10k runs I had put in back on the digue had not really kicked in yet. Every time I returned to running after a lay-off, the pain was worse than before. The run went on, and while my snarling Achilles tendon had gone temporarily dormant — no doubt it would wake up again later on — I was struggling badly. Nina and Tess, too, were finding things far from easy. They were also getting older, and the year’s hiatus we had taken from running had taken its toll. Nothing much was happening for me — there were no dancing thoughts that day. It was just a slog.
I remember this run for one reason only. At around ten kilometres or so we stopped for a sit down and a quick bite to eat. The open mountaintop had given way to woodland a few kilometres back and we sat in a little clearing by the side of the trail. Nina and Tess collapsed, exhausted. Then, after a few minutes, a little food, a little water, Tess rose to her feet, moved away a few yards, and then charged at Nina and performed the play bow. Nina leapt to her feet, as if she had spent the last few days resting, and they tore up and down the trail, play-growling, play-snapping at each other’s shoulders and necks. And I could see the joy. I could see it there, in the exaggerated gape of Nina’s jaw, and the exaggerated bounce of Tess’s stride. Joy is not just an inner feeling. It can be seen, when you know how to look.
It was cold up in those mountains. The snows had not long departed those hills, and even at midday, clouds still clung stubbornly to the floors of the valleys below us. The sun did not warm that clearing in which I sat, but the joy of those two friends did. I had seen this sort of play many times before, of course. It was an almost daily occurrence. And when they played like this, I knew they were happy — as much as one can ever know anything about what is going on inside the mind of another. But today, it is different. I do not infer their joy: I see it. Some fields are made of grass, and others are made of energy. We walk through the former, and are immersed in the latter. Nina and Tess were fortunate enough to run through many fields of grass — and through Irish fields of barley and French fields of lavender. When they did, their joy would radiate out from them, reverberating across the open space — the clearing between us. Standing there with them, in a clearing in a wood in a mountain pass in France, I was immersed in a field of joy; embraced by it. This joy had permeated my runs down through all these years, although I did not know how to see it. When I run with the pack, joy warms me from the outside in.
It is here too, today, on this beach. Joy is the recognition of intrinsic value in life, the recognition of what is important for its own sake. I see the joy of my boys of summer; I hear it resonating across the blue water. But not just their joy — mine also. Formerly a feeling curled up inside of me, my joy has relocated to a place outside of me. There have been times in my life — too small in number, too fleeting in duration — when joy is like this. Joy that was a way of feeling now becomes a way of seeing. A few seconds — that is all. This transformation of inner to outer lasts a few seconds and then it is gone. But I’m coming to think they might be the most important seconds of my life. This transformation in joy is love showing herself. Love may last a lifetime, but she shows herself most completely only in moments.
Many people do not understand decline; they are unfamiliar with its anatomy and physiology. Injuries play the role of the waves of time. An injury washes over you, and you never quite come back as strong as you were before. Perhaps you won’t notice this initially. Maybe you feel fine. But there’s a weakness that has set up home in your muscle or joint — no amount of rehab will change that — and sooner or later its time will come again. First there’s a little niggle, then another, then there are more. There are days when you are not quite a hundred per cent, but you go out running anyway. And that’s fine: that’s what you have to do — because these days will become more and more frequent. Before you know it, you are never quite a hundred per cent. But you keep on going, because that is what you have to do. First you are running at 95 per cent, then it’s 90; and then in a heartbeat you are down to 75 per cent. Your distances are going down just as your times are going up. And you do not know how it happened. You think, if I can just stay injury-free for a while, clear up these niggles, if I can just get a good run at it, then I can get back to what I was doing before; get back to the distances and times I was doing before this run of bad luck started. But this misses the point entirely. Decline is a run of bad luck of just this sort. You will never get a good run at it again. The niggles, the aches, the weaknesses build up; and in the end you are just a tissue of niggles, aches and weaknesses woven together. No amount of rest will change this. You come back and feel good for a while, but it’s so short, and before you know it you will be back to exactly where you were before the break. This is the face of decline, of erasure, of gradual disappearance. This is what it looks like. Running has many faces. One of these is the digue, a way of trying to hold back the storm surges of winter. Maybe it will hold for a while. But, in the end, we all return to the maïre.
It is common to think of life as a process of development. In growing older, we will come to understand what is important in life. With age comes wisdom, and if we are sufficiently assiduous and skilled in the use of this wisdom, perhaps even the meaning of our lives will reveal itself to us. Youth, on the other hand, is the time of immaturity: an existential prequel whose importance lies only in equipping us for the adult life to come. It is paradoxical then, as Moritz Schlick once remarked, that ‘the time of preparation appears as the sweetest portion of existence, while the time of fulfilment seems the most toilsome’.
This paradox is, perhaps, a sign that we have misunderstood youth. It is a sign that what is important in life is not a destination towards which we are heading, but is scattered around a person’s life, and exists most fundamentally in these moments when joy warms us from the outside in — moments of dedication to the activity and not the outcome, to the deed and not the goal. Joy is the recognition of something that is worth doing for its own sake; it is the recognition of intrinsic value as it makes itself known in a person’s life. It is true that these moments of joy cluster together most noticeably in youth. Children and their dogs are much better at knowing what is important in life. They understand that the most important things in life are the things that are worth doing for their own sake. And the things not worth doing for their own sake are not worth doing at all. They know intrinsic value instinctively, effortlessly. For me, it was hard work. It has taken me half a lifetime to rediscover what I once must have known. Even now, there are times when I find it difficult to understand this joy, let alone feel it. In these times, I understand my fall from Grace, my exile from Eden.
Nevertheless, there are also times when my exile is temporarily rescinded. ‘The meaning of life is youth,’ Schlick once wrote. But youth, in the relevant sense, is not a matter of chronology, of one’s biological age. The lines on one’s face do not necessarily banish a person from the garden of youth. Youth exists wherever action has become play. Youth exists whenever there is doing for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Youth exists whenever there is dedication to the deed and not the goal. With this dedication comes joy, because joy is nothing more than the recognition of intrinsic value in life. This is a life where we all return to the maïre. And what redeems this life is the intrinsic value we find in it, if we know how to look.