Poet Mary Oliver has an amazing facility for getting through to her readers. Take her poem "The Summer Day."
"Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"[1]
Well, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? This one - the one we're living right now - maybe not wild - at least precious. Oliver's is a blunt question - and rare - addressed mainly at church - where meaning matters. But this is too abstract. Let me tell you about two young men who have wrestled with that question - and in wrestling share their delight and despair in the human quest for meaning.
Hugh Gallagher was an 18-year-old headed for New York University in 1990 when he wrote an essay which won first prize in the humor category of the 1990 Scholastic Writing Awards. "In order for the admissions staff of our college to get to know you, the applicant, better, we ask that you answer the following question: are there any significant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?"
Gallagher began: "I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row."
Gallagher goes on in that vein for several paragraphs, and then, "I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but I forgot to write it down.... I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis." He concludes, "But I have not yet gone to college."[2]
Gallagher's fanciful essay on "the wonder years" gives full play to the imagination and seems to point at one with elan vitale - a love of life. One wants to know this young man, to probe his fertile mind, to see what makes him tick, even though he had not yet gone to college. One supposes he loves life, full of its joy and irony - and meaning.
But there is another young man - somewhat older - whose life was very different. Kenneth Baldwin was thirty, married and the father of a three-year-old daughter, clean-cut - his appearance suggesting the all-American suburban family man. Baldwin, despite his seeming prosperity, is full of the depth and darkness of despair. Very sensitive, he was berated by his boss at work and felt like a failure. He worried that his wife was deeply disappointed in him. He wanted to quit, but felt quitting would mark him even more of a failure. He feared his wife and daughter would leave him. He spiraled down until he decided to take his life by jumping off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge - a near sure-fire method, since only 17 of the 1,280 people who tried it lived to tell the tale.
"So I decided to go to the bridge. That morning I said I'm gonna work a little late, knowing full well I wasn't gonna live through the day. I'll see ya later." He gave his wife a kiss and went off to work, but continued on to San Francisco. "And I was really happy. I'd known a decision was made. All this pain that I was going through, all this pain that my wife was going through. All of it was going to be finished. I was so happy because I didn't have to worry about it anymore. I could start anew. I was so happy. I was getting so near to ending all the grief I was causing everybody, and myself....
"I got to the Golden Gate Bridge and then I started thinking about what I was doing. And I sobered up quite a bit. It really hit that I wasn't gonna see my daughter again; I wasn't gonna see my wife again; I wasn't gonna be able to play softball anymore. No more of any of the things I wanted to do. I started becoming melancholy. But I never thought of turning back.... So I got up on the bridge. It was a beautiful day. It was Wednesday afternoon. I got to approximately the middle.
"And I sat there and watched. I watched the sailboats. I saw the Coast Guard cutter go under the bridge, which ultimately saved my life. One of those ironies of life you'd see on TV or whatever. Then I counted to ten, and I didn't do anything. I counted to ten again. And again I didn't do anything. I was tryin' to get my nerve up to jump. So I finally counted to ten again and I jumped.
"I vaulted over ... I saw my hands leave the bridge, which was the most terrifying moment of my life so far.... I knew l was gonna die. And I realized that I really didn't want to. I really didn't want to by that time, but I knew it was too late. I don't know how to explain it. When you go too far on something, you realize that you've done it and you realize there's no way to turn back. There's no way to get back on the bridge. I knew it. And that's what terrified me. So I saw my hands leave the railing. And then I looked down and I saw the water. I said, 'God, please let me live, please let me live.' I got about a quarter of the way down and I blacked out."
He hit the water swimming - he had been a Boy Scout. Someone on a passing Coast Guard cutter had seen him, and he was pulled on board - lucky. Baldwin concludes, "I should have died, but I didn't. I feel blessed - like a chosen member of a very elite club.... Life is so much different now because I learned that whether I live or die is my choice.
"People can criticize me, it still hurts me, still cuts me real bad, but I realize that I'm gonna have to live with it because the only alternative is death. And I don't want that, because there's too much to live for. My daughter, my wife, the things we do, the friends that I have, my parents. I have a lot to live for and I realize it now.... I've decided that I'm worth my own time.... Since the jump I've had an amazing year and a half. I've had emotions, I've had sensations that I would never have had. And it's really nice. It's more than nice, but I really can't explain. It's fantastic to be able to sit there and wake up every day and say, 'Wow, I'd never have this day if I didn't live.'"[3]
Kenneth Baldwin's narrative is as amazing as Hugh Gallagher's is amusing. Somewhere between the playful imagination of Hugh Gallagher and the near fatal despair of Kenneth Baldwin we find ourselves. We wonder what's it all about. The Hebrew teacher in Ecclesiastes said all was vanity, life is like the wind, "It is an unhappy business that God has given human beings to be busy with."[4] The author of these words was one of the first existentialists of the Western world. The issue transcends time. The 20th century French existentialist, Albert Camus, said the one truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether or not life is worth the living. Without meaning, what is there?
I concluded the meaning of life is the most urgent of all questions when I heard Victor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, speak in Cleveland more than 30 years ago. That book grew out of his experience in Hitler's death camps. He felt people could bear any "how" if only they had a "why" to live. Out of that life experience he developed his own concept of logotherapy: meaning, or the lack of it, was at the core of mental illness and religious despair.
Camus' routine of get up, take tram, go to work - those monotonous rhythms one day yield to a "why." Why do we get out of bed in the morning to go to work - or to church? However unconscious it may be, there is a reason - somehow that act, that experience has meaning for us - it helps make life worth living. Why do we so fixate on the flight of geese back to these northern climes? Because it gives us joy and a sense of well-being - it has meaning. How do we manage to get through the tough times of life without giving up completely - without taking the plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge or its Rochester equivalent? Because there is yet meaning in our lives that we wish to experience.
Or, look at it this way. What is the difference between swinging a pickaxe on a prison work gang and rooting out a stump to make room for a rose bush? It is the same physical action - the same swinging motion, the same movement of the earth, the same result. But the meaning of the action is different - in one case it is response to coercion; in the other it is an act of freedom. One yields boredom; the other satisfaction. Though the two actions look alike objectively, they are totally different subjectively - one is meaningless - one is meaningful.
But where do we find meaning? Is it something we can find? Something we can pursue? Something we can discover? Is it a something? What is it? The questions overwhelm the answers. There ought to be some easy answers - but there aren't. The statesman Bernard Baruch once promised to give Harpo Marx three pieces of advice he should never forget, but then confessed, "I've forgotten what they were." Meanings can be forgotten too.
With Albert Camus I do not believe this world has any ultimate meaning. While I do not believe humanity is just a fluke of the universe, I do not believe that the universe exists solely for our benefit. The universe simply is - and we are benefactors of that cosmic serendipity. Following Camus' lead, Thomas Carper writes about "Sisyphus's Pet Rock" - Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to ceaselessly roll a stone up a mountain:
I have my rock, my hill. So, every day
My task, though hard, is known. And as I roll
My rock, its weight seems always to convey
A certain satisfaction to the soul.
Near sunset-time, just before I can see
The highest point, I purposely let go.
My rock responds and, thanks to gravity,
Takes its own way back to the plain below.
I follow willingly, our duties done,
And grateful that another day's in store,
And glad to think my rock and I are one
In labor and in meaning. Surely, more
Is not to be expected; surely we
Will have our task throughout eternity."
If there is no meaning embedded in the cosmos, then I believe there are many little meanings in our lives. Mary Oliver, before she pops the big question, "...what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" really answers her own question: She pays attention to life - one definition of prayer is to pay attention - pay attention to living, breathing, touching, hurting, loving, serving, enjoying the plenitude of being that is ours - to experience it at first hand. It is the grasshopper, kneeling in the grass, discovered by strolling through the fields, that are the meanings of everyday. "Which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?"[5]
It hits me now and then during my morning routines. Get up, stretch, open the garage doors, walk, lift weights, feed the cat, eat breakfast, shower, say "goodbye" to Joyce, go to work. The moment I catch myself feeling that this is boring, I think of Nabokov's little phrase, "caress the details," and I take joy in the mere fact that I am able to do these routine things day after day - there is a rare blessing here - the meaning is in the details. I create the meanings simply by living my life consciously - I am awake. My life, if not wild, is at least precious.
And yet there is something more - life is more than a random series of experiences. Our lives, when we pay attention to them, are more poetic than prosaic. There is a pattern which we create out of this patchwork of human experience - the random experiences of meaning can make a mosaic of meaning. The homely routines become part of a life-long relationship that sustains; the letter to the editor becomes part of an ongoing effort to "repair the world"; the hospital visit becomes part of creating a caring community. The Italian author Italo Calvino writes,
"In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels about the empire. Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."[6]
The bridge requires the individual stones to make an arch. A random stone does little good by itself. It is when those singular stones are brought together in a pattern that they take on greater meaning. Yet each one is required to make the bridge. Arch and stone are an interdependent whole.
What does it all mean? I have not discovered the meaning of life only to forget to write it down. I do have three pieces of advice I hope you will not forget:
We create little meanings out of the details, hoping to build a larger meaning - a pattern that will sustain us. Human beings don't find meaning - we create it out of the raw stuff of our own experience. So, if the cosmos, history, life have no meaning to discover, we can so live that our lives have meaning. We are the meaning makers. We behold the senseless stars and write our meanings in them.
I have always loved the words of Maxwell Anderson:
On this star,
In this hard star adventure, knowing not
What the fires mean to right and left, nor whether
A meaning was intended or presumed,
(We) can stand up, and look out blind, and say:
In all these turning lights I find no clue
Only a masterless night, and in my blood
No certain answer. Yet is my mind my own,
Yet is my heart a cry toward something dim
In distance, which is higher than I am
And makes me emperor of the endless dark
Even in seeking.[7]
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