Edvard Munch's painting of Rodin's The Thinker

Life is precious. I mean, you have to realize it for it to be true—but once you do, you see how obvious it is. It helps if you read a lot, watch good movies, care about others and the state of the world and do something about it. I’m not sure how you can be taught to do that. I’m even less sure that it needs to be taught… at least any other way than by example.

Yet also it is true that “La contemplation rend souvent la vie malheureuse.” So said Nicolas Chamfort. But “the unexamined life”, as per Socrates, “is not worth living”. I know that contemplation and examination are not the same thing, per se, but maybe it is that we have to make ourselves a bit miserable—or have to be made miserable; have to have misery imposed on us, to some degree, by circumstance—in order for life to appear to us as precious as it is? Would this explain why, then, I find life so precious and worth living? And where is the balance point?

I’m just tossing this stuff up in the air to see what will float or fly, and what will fall again.

See, I’ve been re-reading my words here and considering what I’ve been saying. I’ve drawn some definite lines in the sand. I’ve erected some barricades (at least according to some people). I’ve done so because I have come to honest conclusions in my life. Conclusions about life; its nature, its origins, its outcomes, its end and its, life’s, meaning to me. I don’t know with 100% certainty what’s true. It galls me when people claim they do. But maybe I need to let that go. I know that I don’t know everything. I hardly know anything at all. But what I have learned in the last four decades of my life—mostly via trial and error—has given me the confidence to assert that life is meaningful insofar as we find meaning in it. I’ve said this before, I think. It’s worth repeating. I think now that it’s a matter of semantics, whether one says that life is inherently meaningful (or meaning-ready) or inherently meaningless (or devoid of meaning). It amounts to the same thing in the end. Why? Because we still must suss it out, discover it for ourselves, attach ourselves to it and value it. The ultimate meaning of life could be pinochle or the Glass Bead Game, or poker or The Sims. I don’t think it’s any of those things, but I’m saying that it could be and there’d be know way to know it as such unless and until I decided for myself that it was. The ultimate meaning of life could be reserved for bacteria or minerals. What kind of hubris does it take to say, “Yes, well, of course the ultimate meaning of life is this personal, human thing”? So let’s drop the ‘ultimate meaning’ thing here, right here and now.

Life, it seems to me, is meaningful. It’s meaningful because I find meaning in it or take meaning from it. I find meaning in it or take meaning from it because, as I live my life, events and things (verbs, and nouns with and without the vocative case) take on an intimate resonance through which I glean, or even grok, a sense of connective value. That value is, in the experience of it, timeless, even when it is realized because it is grasped in an inherently finite moment. In other words, ‘valuation’ is not in itself temporal (used here without any implication of there being some metaphysical eternal state).

Sorry for getting all convoluted there. Thing is, it’s difficult to say exactly why it is that life is meaningful, and “It just is!” is not at all good. Every question leads to several possible answers, and each answer leads to several definite questions, and so on. O!, Philosophie! Or do I mean Oy!—as in vey? Were I to wax poetic, as a non sequitur I’d have to assert that life is meaningful because Eros and Psyche are able to reflect on the song of a goat and not die. Eh…

Sorry for getting all non sequiturish on y’all. Anyway…

I think it’s time for me to go seek out a meaningful bite to eat, and leave the contemplation to my stomach for the nonce. Mostly, it contemplates things in the rich domain of gastronomy. Which reminds me that I must add the brilliant M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating to my foreshortened list of Must Reads. The other night I read Fisher’s “The Standing and the Waiting” (from the aforementioned book) to Kisha, at her request, and simply loved it.

Oh, and, speaking of reading, I’m within 45 pages of being finished with Infinite Jest. Not sure what I’ll be reading next, but I’m sure it’ll be good. Perhaps V., or Dance Dance Dance. Very likely I’ll supplement with a Walter Kaufmann book. And, too, I’m about halfway done with A Confederacy of Dunces, which I’m listening to in audiobook format at work.