The Meaning Of Life A Reader

[Lcs Basinger]

Ihad to do some of these things myself, but less than average, because I had lucked into a tenure-track position at Graz. Relative to the usual post-doc, I was free. And, as with so many kinds of freedom, to have it was also to be confronted by a question: how should I use it?

The natural option for my post-doc work would have been to plough the departmental furrow and find ever more pedantic things to say about John Rawls. But Austria, I somehow felt, had heard enough about what people thought about the difference principle. Fine. Not that, then. But what instead?

Bliss it must have been in that dawn to be alive! But the French Revolution went from equality to tyranny, and in time, it turned out that Dummett had been too optimistic about analytic philosophy. The programme was revised and ultimately abandoned.

These examples are suggestive, nothing more. But there is an explanation behind them that is important. The neglect of sceptical and nihilist worries about meaning in life is no accident. Rather, it is a necessary expression of the debate as it is framed and conducted.

And if we look at it from the other angle, the use of the method is an expression of the assumption, and an explanation of why the former is so widely accepted. If you assume that meaning in life is something that is sometimes actually realised in individual lives, it makes perfect sense to try to find examples of those lives in which it is realised so that you can then start identifying some general features of meaningful lives.

Tolstoy is hardly going to find any of this of much use. His problem is precisely that he thinks his life is meaningless, so a theory of meaning that is built on the assumption that his life is meaningful is at best a joke to him.

I speak of Tolstoy, but I am speaking of myself too. I had turned to analytic philosophy with a hope born of desperation. I longed for something that would help me with my crisis, something that would relieve the pain. I found nothing. The assumption that allowed the analytic philosopher to proceed was the exact locus of my crises.

Consider the temples of ancient Greece. Once they were thick with blood and smoke. They were places where living creatures were sacrificed, where novices were initiated by frightening esoteric rituals, where strange chants mingled with cries of pain and ecstasy. Today, they are tourist attractions.

The discipline of academic philosophy is like those Greek temples. Its practitioners are caretakers wandering around empty rooms, painting the walls, and washing the floor while the entire edifice collapses around them.

Look at the words that professional philosophers produce. Look, for however long you can bear, into the pages of arcane journals filled with intricate disputes about how many trolleys can dance on the head of a pin. Peek into classrooms that are filled with the atmosphere of boredom and futility. Speak to young philosophers, young practitioners of the discipline, the ones who should be filled with love and excitement for philosophy and see instead their disappointment and their cynicism.

Philosophy was once alive too, almost terrifyingly so. Why else would a man called Socrates choose to cheerfully go to his death rather than betray it? Can we make it alive again by going back to a vision of how the Greeks did philosophy?

Context counts in our early text encounters and shapes our experience of reading, as memoirs of childhood reading often show (e.g. Mangan, 2018). Which places were of salience to you as you look back on your early reading? Can you recall even now the smell, sound and sensations of your life at the time? The people around you? The emotions attached ? These are part of our reading histories, of who we were and potentially who we became as readers.

If reading is anything, it is surely thinking about meaning, and when we connect the texts we read to the stories of our lives (and vice versa) we bring our memories, experiences, prior knowledge and understanding to bear on whatever we are reading. As Rosenblatt observed:

Each study and the website have helped me understand more of the complex relationships, identity enactments and interplay between adult and child and child-child readers. In effect, my early pleasure in reading and renewed passion has been examined through this work. The lines between being a reader and researching reading have become blurred. Perhaps this has happened in your life story too? Have your personal practices and intense enthusiasm for something influenced your own scholarly enquiries?

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all:

I am also the creator of The Universe in Verse, the author of a very long, very yellow book titled Figuring and a very slender, very colorful book titled The Snail with the Right Heart, the editor of an eight-year labor titled A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and a past-life contributor to The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, and other editorial exoplanets.

These descriptions of trauma, abuse, and violence are the core of what Yanagihara was attempting to do with A Little Life as a literary project. In an interview for Vulture, Yanagihara said she wanted to write a book where nothing good happened to the main character and that they were unable to stop their suffering. As she stated,

Thanks for reading! The next newsletter comes out next week. Make sure to subscribe to never miss a newsletter and to like, comment, and share it if you enjoyed it - it really helps me find more people interested in my writing. You can find me in the meantime on Goodreads, Letterboxd, Twitter, and Instagram.

Content Warning: This week\u2019s newsletter dives into a spoiler-free review of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The book tackles a variety of difficult subject matter, most notably sexual violence and self-harm. I refer to these topics in passing in my review but do not describe any scenes in detail. If you would prefer to skip this newsletter, I totally understand. I\u2019ll be back with a more light-hearted \u201CObsessions\u201D newsletter next week.

There\u2019s a less clear version of this list as it applies to contemporary books. While there are many novels that have moved me, there are only three books from my recent memory that I finished and felt completely stunned by: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Darryl by Jackie Ess, and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

A Little Life has a notorious reputation on Bookstagram and BookTok. The book defies the meaning of a content warning, diving deeply and brutally into subjects such as child abuse, self-harm, sexual violence, kidnapping, pedophilia, and suicide. Most reviews come with a heavy warning to not read the book if you\u2019re in a bad headspace, with many reviewers writing that they\u2019re unsure if they should even recommend the book to others at all.

Despite this, A Little Life is an extremely popular read. Although it was published six years ago, there are 43,0000 people currently reading it on Goodreads alone. By comparison, Sally Rooney\u2019s Beautiful World Where Are You, a blockbuster book released two weeks ago, has 14,000 users reading it currently.

The other thing that stands out is the novel\u2019s length. At over 700 pages in hardcover and 800 in paperback, A Little Life is the definition of a tome. While the average novel ranges from 80,000 to 120,000 words, the word count of A Little Life is approximately 375,000. As a fast reader, I can finish a book in three to four hours: A Little Life took me 16.

In spite of its horrific subject matter and Biblical length (or perhaps because of it), A Little Life was released to universal critical acclaim when it was first released in 2015. Yanagihara placed as a finalist for that year\u2019s National Book Award and Man Booker Prize, and won the widely-respected Kirkus Prize, despite the fact that both she and her editor thought that the book would not sell well due to its content.

As a dedicated reader and fan of queer contemporary fiction, I avoided A Little Life for a long time. It\u2019s one of my friend\u2019s most-hated books of all time. The novel never fails to stir up Discourse when Gay Writes does an Instagram story prompt.

Still, the book\u2019s cover \u2014 a black-and-white photo of a face titled \u201COrgasmic Man\u201D taken by gay photographer Peter Hujar \u2014 started to become absolutely unavoidable on my Explore page. I decided it was time for me and my morbid curiosity to see what all the talk was about.

The first thing that struck me about A Little Life was the quality of the writing. As a frequent reader, it\u2019s very rare to be stunned by a book on the sheer level of its prose: the last time I felt as gripped by sentences was reading Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan Novels in 2018.

The first hundred pages of A Little Life are gripping and moving, telling the backstory of three college friends \u2014 Willem, JB, and Malcolm \u2014 pursuing artistic careers in New York City. As the novel progresses, more terrain is covered, spanning multiple years and points of view. Each character is richly detailed, with plentiful backstory.

As a writer, I was struck with the specificity with which Yanagihara created the character\u2019s lives, from describing the fictional-yet-completely-believable plays and films that Willem acts in throughout his years as a celebrated actor, to the exhibition and individual painting titles in each series described for JB\u2019s visual art career.

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