The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  NATURE

  Nature corrects our erroneous, and ultimately very painful, sense that we are essentially free. The idea that we have the freedom to fashion our own destinies as we please has become central to the contemporary world view: we are encouraged to imagine that we can, with time, create exactly the lives we desire, around our relationships, our work and existence more generally. This hopeful scenario has been the source of extraordinary and unnecessary suffering.

  There are many things we want desperately to avoid, which we will spend huge parts of our lives worrying about and which we will then bitterly resent when they force themselves upon us nevertheless.

  The idea of inevitability is central to the natural world: the deciduous tree has to shed it leaves when the temperature dips in autumn; the river must erode its banks; the cold front will deposit its rain; the tide has to rise and fall. The laws of nature are governed by forces nobody has chosen, no one can resist and which brook no exception.

  When we contemplate nature (a forest in the autumn, for example, or the reproductive cycle of the salmon), we are thinking about rules that in their broad, irresistible structure apply to ourselves as well. We too must mature, seek to reproduce, age, fall ill and die. We face a litany of other burdens too: we will never be fully understood by others; we will always be burdened by primordial anxiety; we will never fully know what it is like to be someone else; we will invariably fantasize about more than we can have; we will realize we cannot – in key ways – be who we would wish.

  What we most fear can happen irrespective of our desires. But when we see frustration as a law of nature, we drain it of some of its sting and bitterness. We recognize that limitations are not in any way unique to us. In awesome, majestic scenes (the life of an elephant; the eruption of a volcano), nature moves us away from our habitual tendency to personalize and rail against our lot.

  Sometimes we respond quite negatively to encounters with things that are much larger and more powerful than ourselves. It’s a feeling that can strike us when we are alone in a new city, trying to negotiate a vast railway terminus or the huge underground system at rush hour, and we sense that no one knows anything about us or cares in the least for our confusion. The scale of the place forces upon us the unwelcome fact that we don’t matter in the greater scheme of things and that what is of great concern to us doesn’t figure at all in the minds of others. It’s a crushing, lonely experience that intensifies anxiety and agitation.

  But there’s another way an encounter with the large-scale can affect us – and calm us down – that philosophers have called ‘the sublime’. Heading back to the airport after a series of frustrating meetings, we notice the sun setting behind the mountains. Tiers of clouds are bathed in gold and purple, while huge slanting beams of light cut across the urban landscape. To record the feeling without implying anything mystical, it seems as if one’s attention is being drawn up into the radiant gap between the clouds and the summits, and that one is for a moment merging with the cosmos. Normally the sky isn’t a major focus of attention, but now it’s mesmerizing. For a while it doesn’t seem to matter so much what happened in the office or that the contract will – maddeningly – have to be renegotiated by the legal team.

  At this moment, nature seems to be sending us a humbling message: the incidents of our lives are not terribly important. And yet, strangely, rather than being distressing, this sensation can be a source of immeasurable solace and calm.

  Things that have up to now been looming large in our minds (something has gone wrong with the Singapore discussion, a colleague has behaved coldly, there’s been disagreement about patio furniture) are cut down in size. The sublime drags us away from the minor details which normally – and inevitably – occupy our attention and makes us concentrate on what is truly major. The encounter with the sublime undercuts the gradations of human status and makes everyone – at least for a time – look relatively unimpressive. Next to the mighty canyon or the vast ocean, even the celebrity or the CEO does not seem so mighty.

  Deserts offer particular respite in this context. Year by year little changes: a few more stones will crumble from the mesa; a few plants will eke out an existence; the same pattern of light and shadow will be endlessly repeated. Caring about having a larger office or being worried that one’s car has a small scratch over the left rear wheel or that the sofa is looking a bit moth-eaten doesn’t make much sense against the enormity of time and space. Differences in accomplishments, standing and possessions that torment us in the cities don’t feel especially exciting or impressive when considered from the emotional state that a desert induces. Things happen on the scale of centuries. Today and tomorrow are essentially the same. Your existence is a small, temporary thing. You will die and it will be as if you had never been.

  It could sound demeaning. But these are generous sentiments when we otherwise so easily suffer by exaggerating our own importance. We are truly minute and entirely dispensable. The sublime does not humble us by exalting others; it gives a sense of the lesser status of all of wretched humanity.

  In the late eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought ‘the starry heavens above’ were the most sublime spectacle in nature and that contemplation of this transcendent sight could hugely assist us in coping with our travails. Although Kant was interested in the developing science of astronomy, he saw the field as primarily serving a major psychological purpose. Unfortunately, since then, the advances in astrophysics have become increasingly embarrassed around this aspect of the stars. It would seem deeply odd today if in a science class there were a special section not on the fact that Aldebaran is an orange-red giant star of spectral and luminosity type K5+III and that it is currently losing mass at a rate of (1–1.6) × 10-11 M⦿ yr-1 with a velocity of 30 km s-1 but rather on the ways in which the sight of stars can help us manage our emotional lives and relations with our families – even though knowing how to cope better with anxiety is in most lives a more urgent and important task than steering one’s rocket around the galaxies. Although we’ve made vast scientific progress since Kant’s time, we haven’t properly explored the potential of space as a source of wisdom, as opposed to a puzzle for astrophysicists to unpick.

  On an evening walk you look up and see the planets Venus and Jupiter shining in the darkening sky. As the dusk deepens you might see Andromeda and Aries. It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. They were there, quietly revolving, their light streaming down, as spotted hyenas warily eyed a Stone Age settlement; and as Julius Caesar’s triremes set out after midnight to cross the Channel and reach the cliffs of England’s south coast at dawn. The sight has a calming effect because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes have any relevance. Whatever happens to us, whatever we do, is of no consequence from the point of view of the universe.

  And though we know that the moon is a lifeless accumulation of galactic debris, we might make a point of watching it emerge – as a representative of an entirely different perspective within which our own concerns are mercifully irrelevant.

  A central task of culture should be to remind us that the laws of nature apply to us as well as to trees, clouds and cliff faces. Our goal is to get clearer about where our own tantalizingly powerful yet always limited agency stops: where we will be left with no option but to bow to forces infinitely greater than our own.

  ACCEPTANCE

  The more calm matters to us, the more we will be aware of all the very many times when we have been less calm than we should. We’ll be sensitive to our own painfully frequent bouts of irritation and upset. It can feel laughably hypocritical. Surely a genuine devotion to calm would mean ongoing serenity? But this isn’t a fair judgement, because being calm all the time isn’t ever a viable option. What counts is the commitment one is making to the idea of being a little calmer than last year. We can legitimately count as lovers of calm when we ardently seek to grow calmer, not when we succeed
at being calm on all occasions. However frequent the lapses, it is the devotion that matters.

  Furthermore, it is a psychological law that those who are most attracted to calm will almost certainly also be especially irritable and by nature prone to particularly high levels of anxiety. We have a mistaken picture of what lovers of calm look like if we assume them to be among the most tranquil of the species.

  Typically, lovers of something are not the people who already possess it but those who are hugely aware of how much they lack it – and are therefore especially humble before, and committed to, the task of securing it.

  III : RELATIONSHIPS

  * * *

  1 Getting Together

  BEYOND ROMANTICISM

  To fall in love with someone is such a personal and spontaneous process, it can seem hugely implausible to imagine that something else (call it society or culture) might be playing a covert, critical role in governing our relationships in their most intimate moments.

  Yet the history of humanity shows us so many varied approaches to love, so many different assumptions about how couples are supposed to get together and so many distinctive ways of interpreting our feelings, we should accept with a degree of grace that the way we go about our relationships must in practice owe rather a lot to the prevailing environment beyond our bedrooms. Our loves unfold against a cultural backdrop that creates a powerful sense of what is ‘normal’ in love: it subtly directs us as to where we should place our emotional emphases, it teaches us what to value, how to approach conflicts, what to get excited about, when to tolerate and what we can legitimately be incensed by. Love has a history and we ride, sometimes rather helplessly, its currents.

  Since around 1750, we have been living in the age of Romanticism, an ideology that began in the minds of poets and artists and has now conquered the world, powerfully (yet always quietly) determining how a shopkeeper’s son in Yokohama will approach a first date, how a scriptwriter in Hollywood will shape the ending of a film, or when a middle-aged woman in Buenos Aires might decide to call it a day with her civil servant husband of twenty years.

  No single relationship ever follows the Romantic template exactly, but its broad outlines are frequently present nevertheless and might be summed up as follows:

  ■ Romanticism is deeply hopeful about marriage. It tells us that marriage could combine all the excitement of a love affair with all the advantages of a settled and practical union. Romanticism makes the remarkable claim that it may be possible to feel, after twenty years, a bustling household and a number of children, almost all the longings that previous ages had restricted to a lover at the time of the first embrace.

  ■ Along the way, Romanticism has conceptually united love and sex. It has elevated sex to the supreme expression of admiration and respect for another person. Frequent, mutually satisfying sex is assumed to be not just pleasurable but the expected bellwether of the health of a relationship. Romanticism has thereby turned infrequent sex and adultery from the problems they always were into the catastrophes they now are.

  ■ Romanticism has proposed that true love must mean an end to all loneliness. The right partner will, it promises us, understand us entirely, possibly without our needing to speak very much; they will intuit our souls.

  ■ Romanticism believes that choosing a partner is a matter of surrendering to feelings rather than evaluating practical considerations. For most of recorded history, people had fallen into relationships and married for dynastic, status or financial reasons. It was certainly not expected that, on top of everything else, one should love one’s partner. But for Romanticism, a sound couple should be pulled together by an overwhelming instinct and will know in their hearts – after a few pleasant weeks and some extraordinary sensations in bed – that they have found their destiny.

  ■ Romanticism manifests a powerful disdain for practicalities and money. It has taught us to feel that it is cold – or un-Romantic – to say that we know we are with the right person because they make an excellent financial fit or because we gel over bathroom etiquette and attitudes to punctuality. People, we have learned to think, only turn to practical considerations when all else has failed (‘I couldn’t find love, I had to settle for convenience’) or because they are extraordinarily sinister (the gold-digger, the social climber).

  ■ Romanticism believes that true love should involve delighting in a lover’s every facet, that it is synonymous with accepting everything about someone. The idea that one’s partner (or oneself) might need to evolve and mature is taken to be a sign that a relationship is on the rocks: ‘You’re going to have to change’ is a last-ditch threat and ‘Love me for who I am’ the most noble of cries.

  This template of love is a historical creation. It is hugely beautiful and often enjoyable – for a while. The Romantics were brilliantly perceptive about some dimensions of emotional life and were extremely talented about expressing their hopes and longings. Many of the feelings they celebrated had existed before, but the Romantics elevated them, turning them from passing fancies into serious concepts with the power to determine the course of relationships over a lifetime.

  We can also state at this point that Romanticism has been a disaster for love. It is an intellectual and spiritual movement which has had a devastating impact on the ability of ordinary people to lead successful emotional lives. Our strongest cultural voices have, to our huge cost, given us a very unhelpful script to apply to a hugely tricky task. We have been told, among other things, that:

  ■ we should meet a person of extraordinary inner and outer beauty and immediately feel a special attraction to them, and they to us;

  ■ we should have highly satisfying sex, not only at the start, but for evermore;

  ■ we should never be attracted to anyone else;

  ■ we should understand one another intuitively;

  ■ we don’t need an education in love (we may need to train to become a pilot or a brain surgeon, but not a lover – we will pick that up along the way, by following our feelings);

  ■ we should have no secrets and spend constant time together (work shouldn’t get in the way);

  ■ we should raise a family without any loss of sexual or emotional intensity;

  ■ our lover must be our soulmate, best friend, co-parent, co-chauffeur, accountant, household manager and spiritual guide.

  Reflecting on the history of Romanticism should be consoling because it suggests that quite a lot of the troubles we have with relationships don’t stem (as we normally, guiltily, end up thinking) from our ineptitude, our inadequacy or our regrettable choice of partners. Knowing the history invites another, more useful idea: we were set an incredibly hard task by our culture, which then had the temerity to present it as easy.

  It seems crucial systematically to question the assumptions of the Romantic view of love – not in order to destroy love, but to save it. We need to piece together a post-Romantic theory of couples, because in order to make a relationship last we will almost certainly have to be disloyal to most of the Romantic emotions that edged us into it in the first place. The idea of being post-Romantic shouldn’t imply cynicism; that one has abandoned the hope of relationships ever working out well. The post-Romantic attitude is just as ambitious about good relationships, but it has a very different sense of how hope can be honoured.

  We need to replace the Romantic template with a psychologically mature vision of love we might call Classical, which encourages in us a range of unfamiliar but hopefully effective attitudes:

  ■ that it is normal that love and sex do not always belong together;

  ■ that discussing money early on, up front, in a serious way is not a betrayal of love;

  ■ that realizing that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple in increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation;

  ■ that we will never find everything in another person, nor they in us, not because of some unique incapacity, but because of the basi
c operations of human nature;

  ■ that we need to make immense and often rather artificial-sounding efforts to understand one another because intuition will never be enough;

  ■ that practicalities matter – so, for example, there is special dignity around the topics of laundry and domestic management.

  Such attitudes and many more belong to the new, more hopeful future of love.

  CHOOSING A PARTNER

  Our modern understanding of love is built on the principle of freedom of choice. We have been unshackled from extraneous inhibiting forces – economic, familial, religious – in order to enjoy the freedom to form relationships with exactly whom we like.

  But we have, along the way, made a painful discovery: that the greatest inhibitor of our freedom to choose partners as we would wish comes from within. It turns out that we are never exactly free to love in accordance with wisdom or our aspirations for happiness.

  The originators of the idea of free choice in love certainly imagined that their bold suggestion would bring to an end the sort of unhappy relationships previously brokered by parents and society. But our obedience to our instincts has, very often, proved to be its own disaster. Respecting the special feelings we get around certain people in nightclubs and at train stations, at parties and on websites appears not to have made us any happier in our unions than a medieval couple shackled in marriage by two royal courts keen to preserve the sovereignty of a slice of ancestral land. ‘Instinct’ has been little better than ‘calculation’ in underwriting the quality of our love stories.