The School of Life

by The School Of Life

A part of our mind is forever forward-thinking and hopeful, seeking to maximize opportunities and develop potential. Much of this energy registers as vague tension about new directions we might take. We could experience this inchoate restlessness when we read an article, hear of a colleague’s plans or glimpse an idea about next year flit across our mental landscape as we lie in the bath or walk around a park. The excitement points indistinctly to better, more fulfilled versions of ourselves. We should allow our minds to wonder at greater length than usual about what the excitement (it could be a view, a book, a place, an insight) might want to tell us about ourselves. In a poem written in 1908, the German poet Rilke described coming across an ancient statue of the Greek god Apollo. It had had its arms knocked off at the shoulders but still manifested the intelligence and dignity of the culture that had produced it. Rilke felt an unclear excitement, and as he meditated upon and investigated his response, he concluded that the statue was sending him a message, which he announced in the final, dramatic line of his short poem, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’:

  Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

  [You must change your life.]

  Under the unhealthy sway of German Romanticism, Rilke realized that he had developed an abstruse way of thinking and expressing himself. Now the Greek statue was being recognized by one part of his mind as a symbol of the intellectual clarity of ancient Greece, which his conscience knew he needed to pay more attention to. By decoding his excitement, Rilke was catching sight of an alternative way of being.

  The case may be particular, but the underlying principle is universal. We each face calls, triggered by chance encounters with people, objects or ideas, to change our lives. Something within us knows far better than our day-to-day consciousness permits us to realize the direction we need to go in in order to become whom we could really be.

  A daily period of philosophical meditation does not so much dissolve problems as create an occasion during which the mind can order and understand itself. Fears, resentments and hopes become easier to name; we grow less scared of the contents of our own minds – and less resentful, calmer and clearer about our direction. We start, in faltering steps, to know ourselves slightly better.

  A MORE NORMAL NORMALITY

  If part of the reason we don’t look more regularly into ourselves is our shame and fear at the unusual nature of what we may find there, then a crucial collective resource in the path to self-knowledge is a redrawn sense of what is normal.

  Our picture of acceptability is – very often – way out of line with what is actually true and widespread. Many things that we might assume to be uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange about us are in reality wholly ubiquitous, though simply rarely spoken of in the reserved and cautious public sphere.

  Any idea of the normal currently in circulation is not an accurate map of what is customary for a human to be. We are – each one of us – far more compulsive, anxious, sexual, tender, mean, generous, playful, thoughtful, dazed and at sea than we are encouraged to accept.

  The misunderstanding begins with a basic fact about our minds: that we know through immediate experience what is going on inside us, but can only know about others from what they choose to tell us – which will almost always be a very edited version of the truth. We know our somewhat shocking reality from close up; we are left to guess about other people’s from what their faces tell us, which is not very much.

  We simply cannot trust that sides of our deep selves will have counterparts in those we meet, and so remain silent and shy, struggling to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can have any of the vulnerabilities, perversions and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters.

  Ideally, the task of culture would be to compensate for the failings of our brains. It should assist us to a more correct vision of what other people are normally like – by taking us, in realistic and sensitive ways, into the inner lives of strangers. Novels, films and songs should constantly be defining and evoking states of mind we thought we were alone in experiencing but that belong to the typical lot of humankind. We should put down the average novel wondering – with relief – how the novelist had come to know so much about us. We should begin to understand that an average stranger is always far more likely to be as we know we are – with all our quirks, fragilities, compulsions and surprising aspects – than they are to resemble the apparently ‘normal’ person their exterior implies.

  We need culture to take on the task because we cannot do it all by ourselves. In order to know ourselves well, we rely on the level of self-awareness, courage and honesty circulating in society as a whole. We will be as hypocritical as the most representative voices around us and we will, conversely, be freed by what society is prepared to countenance as acceptable.

  There is, at present, so much we pretend not to feel. Starting in childhood, we have instilled in us, so subtly we don’t even notice, strong notions about what is and is not permissible to experience. Traditionally, boys were not allowed to acknowledge that they felt like crying and girls weren’t allowed to entertain certain kinds of ambitions. We might not have such obviously naive prohibitions today, but other, equally powerful ones have taken their place. We may have picked up covert but forceful indications that no decent person could be enthusiastic about making money or unable to cope at work, tempted by an affair or still upset over a break-up.

  Furthermore, despite the apparently sexually liberated spirit of the times, the lion’s share of our sexual impulses remains impossible to avow. There is still a great deal we are not meant to feel in order to fit that most desirable of categories: a good boy or girl.

  The way to greater honesty follows some of the techniques evident from the rehabilitation of the people who commit crimes. We must reduce the shame and danger of confession. We need a broader, more reassuring sense of what is common. Of course it is normal to be envious, crude, sexual, weak, in need, childlike, grandiose, terrified and furious. It is normal to desire random adventures even within loving, committed unions. It is normal to be hurt by ‘small’ signs of rejection, and to be made quickly very insecure by any evidence of neglect by a partner. It is normal to harbour hopes for ourselves professionally that go far beyond what we have currently been able to achieve. It is normal to envy other people, many times a day, to be very upset by any kind of criticism of our work or performance, and to be so sad we regularly daydream of flight or a premature end.

  The journey to self-knowledge needs to begin with a better map of the terrain of normality.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF A BREAKDOWN

  One of the great problems of human beings is that we’re far too good at keeping going. We’re experts at surrendering to the demands of the external world, living up to what is expected of us and getting on with the priorities defined by others around us. We keep showing up and doing our tasks – and we can pull off this magical feat for up to decades at a time without so much as an outward twitch or crack.

  Until suddenly, one day, much to everyone’s surprise (including our own), we break. The rupture can take many forms. We can no longer get out of bed. We fall into silence. We develop all-consuming social anxiety. We refuse to eat. We babble incoherently. We lose command over part of our body. We are compelled to do something extremely scandalous and entirely contrary to our normal behaviour. We become wholly paranoid in a given area. We refuse to play by the usual rules in our relationship, we have an affair, ramp up the fighting, or otherwise poke a very large stick in the wheels of daily life.

  Breakdowns are hugely inconvenient for everyone and so, unsurprisingly, there is an immediate rush to medicalize them and attempt to excise them from the scene, so that business as usual can resume.

  But this is to misunderstand what is going on when we break down. A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction, it is a very real – albeit very inarticulate – bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a pr
ocess of growth, self-understanding and self-development which it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well, properly well, through a stage of falling very ill.

  The danger, therefore, if we merely medicalize a breakdown and attempt to shift it away at once is that we will miss the lesson embedded within our sickness. A breakdown isn’t just a pain, though it is that too of course; it is an extraordinary opportunity to learn.

  The reason we break down is that we have not, over years, flexed very much. There were things we needed to hear inside our minds that we deftly put to one side; there were messages we needed to heed, bits of emotional learning and communicating we didn’t do, and now, after being patient for so long, far too long, the emotional self is attempting to make itself heard in the only way it now knows how. It has become entirely desperate – and we should understand and even sympathize with its mute rage. What the breakdown is telling us above anything else is that it must no longer be business as usual; that things have to change or (and this can be properly frightening to witness) that death might be preferable.

  Why can’t we simply listen to the emotional need calmly and in good time, thus avoiding the melodrama of a breakdown? Because the conscious mind is inherently lazy and squeamish and so reluctant to engage with what the breakdown eventually has to tell it with brutality. For years, it refuses to listen to a particular sadness, or is in flight from a dysfunction in a relationship, or pushes desires down very far beneath the surface.

  A good mental physician tries hard to listen to rather than censor the illness. They detect within its oddities a plea for more time for ourselves, for a closer relationship, for a more honest, fulfilled way of being, for acceptance for who we really are sexually … That is why we started to drink, or to become reclusive, or to grow entirely paranoid or manically seductive.

  A crisis represents an appetite for growth that hasn’t found another way of expressing itself. Many people, after a horrific few months or years of breakdown, will say, ‘I don’t know how I’d ever have got well if I hadn’t fallen ill.’

  In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge.

  II : OTHERS

  * * *

  1 Kindness

  CHARITY OF INTERPRETATION

  At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone something that they may not entirely deserve and that it is a long way beyond the call of duty for us to provide: sympathy.

  We are often in trouble of a distinctive sort. We’re not quite in a ditch; we may even have a little money, but we are in difficulties nevertheless, as much at the mercy of strangers as if we were beggars – and equally unappealing to the hard-nosed and impatient. Just like the most scabrous of panhandlers, we have lost any claim on the respect of the righteous.

  We may have done something highly foolish or disreputable. We may have been inconsiderate or hasty. We may have lied or lost our temper. Perhaps our deficiency is one of temperament: under the pressure of disappointment, our personalities have grown sour or boastful. Or we come across as dispiritingly shy or cynical in our dealings with others.

  We need charity, but not of the usual kind; we need what we might term a ‘charity of interpretation’: that is, we require an uncommonly generous assessment of our idiocy, weakness, eccentricity or deceit.

  We need onlookers who can provide some of the rationale we have grown too mute, cowed or ashamed to proffer. Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They will remember that the person before them was once a baby too.

  The charitable interpreter holds on also to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface, along with the possibility of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances; to all the bits of the truth that can cast a less catastrophic light on folly.

  In cases of financial charity, the gifts tend to go in one direction only, from the rich to the poor. Those who give may be generous, but they tend to experience only one side of the equation, remaining for all their lives the donor rather than the recipient. They can be reasonably sure that they won’t ever be in material need, which is what can lend a somewhat unimaginative or aloof tone to their generosity. But when it comes to the gift of charitable interpretation, none of us is ever committedly beyond need. Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the remote material suffering of strangers, but also of being ready to do more than condemn and hate the sinful around us, hopeful that we too may be accorded a tolerable degree of sympathy in our forthcoming hour of failure and shame.

  LOSERS AND TRAGIC FAILURES

  Our societies are very interested in winners but don’t really know what to do about losers – of which there are always, by definition, a far greater number.

  For a long time, around success and failure, the rhetoric tends to be upbeat. We hear about resilience, bouncing back, never surrendering and giving it another go. But there’s only so long this kind of talk can go on. At some point, the conclusion becomes inevitable: things won’t work out. The political career isn’t going to have a come-back. There’ll be no way of getting finance for the film. The novel won’t be accepted by the thirty-second publisher. The criminal charges are forever going to taint one’s reputation.

  Where does responsibility for success and failure lie? Nowadays, the answer tends to be: squarely with the individual concerned. That’s why failure isn’t just hard (as it has always been), it is a catastrophe. There is no metaphysical consolation, no possibility of appealing to the idea of ‘bad luck’, no one to blame but oneself. Suicide rates climb exponentially once societies become modern and start to hold people profoundly responsible for their biographies. Meritocracies turn failure from a misfortune to an unbudgeable verdict on one’s nature. We trust that the world is more or less just – and that, the odd exception aside, people will secure roughly what they deserve. Those who are condemned and broken did something wrong; those who succeeded worked hard and were good. The status of a person has to be a more or less reliable indicator of their effort and decency.

  But not all societies and eras have seen success and failure in such a stark and forbidding light. In ancient Greece, another rather remarkable possibility – ignored by our own era – was envisaged: you could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic drama. They put on huge festivals, which all the citizens were expected to attend, to act out stories of appalling, often grisly, failure: people were seen to break a minor law, or make a hasty decision, or sleep with the wrong person and the results were ignominy and death. Yet what happened was shown to be to a large extent in the hands of what the Greeks calle
d ‘fate’ or ‘the gods’. It was the Greeks’ poetic way of saying that things often work out randomly, according to dynamics that simply don’t reflect the merits of the individuals concerned.

  The great Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles – recounted stories of essentially respectable, intelligent and honest men and women who, on account of a minor and understandable error or omission, unleashed catastrophe and ended up in a very short time dead or ruined. The way in which these stories of downfall were told was intended to leave audiences stunned by the recognition of how easily any life might be undone and how a small mistake can require us to pay the ultimate price. They were to walk out of the theatre afraid for themselves and filled with pity for the cruelty of the fate dealt out to the unknowing and unfortunate heroes soaked in blood on stage. Having followed the slow unfurling of events from prosperity and esteem to disgrace and disaster, audiences would be in no mood to pass easy moral judgement. It would make no sense to dismiss Oedipus or Medea, Antigone and Electra with anything approximating the catch-all, infinitely damning modern term for those who do not make it: losers. These great fictional characters belonged to a far nobler, more dignified and more humane category which tragedy helped to map: that of the tragic failure, the person who loses without thereby forfeiting the right to sympathy and mercy.

  Tragedy is the sympathetic, morally complex account of how good people can end up in disaster. It attempts to teach us that goodness is seldom fairly rewarded or error paid for in commensurate ways. The most shocking events can befall the more or less innocent or the only averagely muddled and weak. We do not inhabit a properly moral universe: disaster at points befalls those who could not have expected it to be a fair outcome, given what they did. The Greeks were the originators of a remarkable, appalling and still-too-seldom-accepted possibility that failure is not reserved simply for the evil.