Christians are to be envied at Easter. The story of death and resurrection, suffering and rebirth is a beautiful and all-encompassing one. For non-believers, a diet of chocolate and wall-to-wall snooker, and the prospect of a perhaps drizzly bank holiday, do not have the same teleological logic. The religious narrative gives life meaning. The notion that there is a plan and purpose is deeply satisfying.
The last line of Kenneth Williams’s diary encapsulates the conundrum we all face: “Oh, what’s the bloody point?” James Bailey’s new book, The Meaning of Life, sought answers to that vexing question from a variety of what Bailey calls “extraordinary people”. Like a philosophically inclined Henry Root, Bailey – “unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad’s caravan” – sent more than a thousand letters to well-known artists and philosophers, and to people who had suffered some tragedy that might, he thought, give them special insight into life’s purpose and meaning.
Some replied at length, and, for many, the meaning of life resided in love or small acts of kindness. But it was the pithier contributions that had more impact. The writer Michael Frayn gently mocked the whole exercise. “It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut,” he replied. “Once we’ve got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a ‘meaning’, we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up.” Great age, it seems, brings its own bleak wisdom. “Sorry, but you caught me at the wrong end of my existence,” the playwright Alan Ayckbourn grumbled. “I have no idea why I write, nor indeed why I’m still alive.”
The young seek meaning and purpose. The old have no time for it. “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” sings Falstaff at the end of Verdi’s valedictory opera. All the world’s a joke. Verdi, feted for his tragic endings, was having his own little joke in fashioning this ebullient finale. Ayckbourn reaches the same Falstaffian conclusion. “What the hell?” he concludes in his response to Bailey. Many artists have followed a similar path – from floridity and purpose to concision and irresolution. Fail again, fail better. Religion and art are often antagonists: one feeds on certainty, the other on doubt.
In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought gives 42 as the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Fans of Adams’s work earnestly asked him what the number meant. “It was a joke,” he insisted. “It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number ... I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’.” Decoding the meaning of life, Adams is wittily suggesting, is a mug’s game. Cracking the meaning of pickled walnuts may indeed be more fulfilling.
If this Easter you are celebrating the working out of a divine plan, enjoy Sunday’s magnificent reawakening. If not, put your faith in Montaigne’s answer to Williams’s great philosophical inquiry. “If you have been able to examine and manage your own life, you have achieved the greatest task of all,” he writes in his final essay, On Experience. “Our most glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. All other things – reigning, building, accumulating wealth – are at most small props, superfluous accessories.” A life well lived has its own logic.
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