The same is true of running in general, and not just the running of that particularly intransigent hill. In running, the goal is to get from A to B — or to get from being at A at a given time to also being at A at a later time, if you begin and end at your own house — and there are various ways of achieving this pre-lusory goal: driving, walking, cycling. Indeed, if the goal is to get from A to A, then all you need to do is stay put. To run is to voluntarily choose a relatively difficult way of achieving this pre-lusory goal. This is true of games in general, not just running games: to play a game is to adopt a (relatively) difficult way of achieving a goal that could, in principle, always be achieved by other, less difficult, means. We do this precisely so we can engage in the activity of achieving the goal in this way: we do it precisely so we can play the game. All running can be play — it depends on why one does it. In fact, it seems I must go further than this. The essence of running is play — play is what running essentially is — and even when one runs for other, specific, reasons, play keeps continually reasserting itself at the heart of running. Running may be hard, but when it is done properly it is not hard work. Play can be hard too — as hard as any work. I have always presented my running, both to other people and to myself, as a response to the pressure exerted on me by three large and destructive canines. I believed this and at one time it might even have been true. But now I’m beginning to understand that it can only be part of the truth. Those animals needed to be kept as exhausted as possible — that is true. But I could have chosen easier ways of doing it. I could have walked the fields rather than run the lanes — the dogs would have run almost as much, or even more if the fields were full of rabbits. I could have used my mountain bike regularly — and not just when I was injured. When I chose to run with them, and when I continued to run with them day in day out, I was choosing to play. And now, courtesy of Moritz Schlick and Bernard Suits, I am beginning to see why I chose this. To run, indeed to play any game, is to be in direct contact — as direct a contact as is possible — with intrinsic value in life.
Running, however, is a particularly pure example of contact with intrinsic value because it is what we might call an ‘undifferentiated’ activity — a peculiarly undifferentiated game. It is unstructured, or far less structured than most other forms of play. At the other end of the athletic spectrum, we find sports like cricket and tennis that are highly differentiated in the sense that they are broken down into discrete parts. The game of cricket is broken down into innings, which are broken down into overs, which are broken down into individual deliveries. Tennis is, similarly, segmented into sets that are broken down into games that are, in turn, broken down into individual points. In these sports, the advice is to play each ball or point as it comes, and there is a familiar phenomenon — known as ‘choking’ or ‘the yips’ — which results from a failure to heed this advice. You choke when your focus switches from the individual point you are playing or delivery you are facing and start worrying about your situation in the wider context of the game — or, indeed, how you fared on previous points or even in previous games. If you think your place in the cricket team is under threat because you have not been scoring many runs lately, you may well get the yips. If you think this point in a tennis game you are playing is crucial because if you lose it you also lose the set, you may well choke. The antidote to choking or the yips is always the same: focus on this moment, this point, this delivery and nothing else.
We can understand this phenomenon in terms of the ideas of intrinsic and instrumental value. In focusing on the individual point and nothing else, one comes to see that point as being valuable for what it is in itself. As soon as this focus is lost, the individual point comes to have only instrumental value — its value becomes tied to its place or role in the wider game. The point becomes important because of what it means or signifies, and not because of what it is. Once this happens, you are lost: you choke. When you play each point as it comes, or play each delivery on its own merits, you are doing just that: playing. But when the value of each point or delivery becomes instrumental, what you are doing is work.
A run is not differentiated or structured like this. It has no discernible parts. There are individual strides and swingings of arms, but these all flow into each other. So a run, in effect, has the same status as an individual segment in a highly structured game. At its best, it is something done far its own sake, play not work. Even when it is done for other reasons, its essential nature as play has a way of reasserting itself.
We live in a narrowly instrumental age, and the idea of something that is done for its own sake is one received only with great difficulty. Nothing can be done for its own sake — everything must be done for the sake of something else. Even games, we assume, must have some instrumental purpose. When animals play, we are told, they do so in order to acquire skills — predatory, evasive — that will be useful in later life. The same is true of children — their play is an important part in the overall process whereby they become ‘socialized’. The message is in each case the same: play is not really play — it is work. I do not want to deny of course that what seems like play can really be work. Conversely, many things that seem like work can really be play. The difference between work and play does not lie in what you do, but why you do it. As Schlick put it: ‘Human action is work, not because it bears fruit, but only when it proceeds from, and is governed by, the thought of its fruit.’ By the same token, action is play when it is done simply in order to do it. Whether or not the action has other beneficial consequences is irrelevant to whether it counts as play. So even if it is true that the function of play is to somehow equip you for later life, play is still play as long as you do what you do for no other reason than that you want to.
Does this idea of playing for the sake of playing even make sense? If I run because I want to run, then surely that is because I enjoy it. But then the enjoyment, the pleasure that running gives me, would seem to be the external goal of the run. And so, it seems, my running counts as work after all. But this inference would be premature. The enjoyment of running is part of what it is to run. There is no such thing as enjoyment in the abstract. There is only this or that form of enjoyment. Compare the enjoyment of running with the enjoyment of chess; the enjoyment of sex with the enjoyment of winning. There is no general type of thing — enjoyment in general, non-specific enjoyment — that all these things share. There is simply the enjoyment of running, the enjoyment of chess, the enjoyment of sex and the enjoyment of winning. Running is not simply a physical activity — the putting of one foot in front of another until a certain distance has been covered. It is also a mental activity. The enjoyment of running is not an external goal towards which running is aimed. It is an integral part of the activity of running.
This is hidden by the word ‘enjoyment’ — a peculiarly unhelpful and disingenuous word. Often, enjoyment is thought of as a pleasant feeling. Since the same feeling can, in principle, be produced in different ways — a suitably designed pill, for example, might be able to induce the requisite feelings of pleasure — this might lead one to think that the enjoyment of running is extrinsic to it. If this is what enjoyment is — pleasant feelings — then I suspect enjoyment is only tangentially connected to running: the mental life of running cannot be captured in this way. I have tried to capture the essence of this mental life in terms of the idea of the heartbeat of the run — the place of dancing thoughts. There is no pill that can take you to this place. The heartbeat of the run is intrinsic to the run. It is perhaps true that I run to become lost in the heartbeat of the run. But this is just another way of saying I run for the sake of running.
In this respect — the peripheral character of enjoyment — running and writing are kindred activities. Writing is not a game: there is no pre-lusory goal toward which I bring to bear a lusory attitude. But, as Suits also points out, not all playing is the playing of a game. Writing can be play; and it can also be work. It all depends on why I do it. If I am writing
something only because I have to — I have entered into some contractual agreement, for example — then my writing is work. But my best writing is never like this. My best writing happens when I simply find all these ideas flying around in my head, and I do not know exactly what they are or where they lead, but feel compelled to find out. I write because I want to know what it is I am thinking, and I never really know this until I see it on the page in front of me. I trap ideas in the form of words, inspect and assess them. This play has a value all of its own and, when I engage in it, there is nothing in the world I would rather be doing. To write is to play with shiny, sparkly, twinkling ideas. When writing becomes work — these ideas become muted and stale. But little, if any, of this has to do with enjoyment in the traditional sense. Often it is more like torture — more like running that hill of Kinsale.
Running that hill was a game of a special sort — and it is easy to see how little this game had to do with enjoyment in the conventional sense. The game involved intense suffering, not pleasure; nor was this torture redeemed by the dancing thoughts of the run’s heartbeat. This was a game of enduring, of finding out how much would break me. I always ran that hill just to see if I could — to see if I could still make myself do it today just as I had done it yesterday. Finding out if the hill would beat me — knowing one way or the other — that was the point of this game within a game; it was a game of knowing. Sometimes knowing, of this sort at least, is also part of what it is run.
I started my life of running as an adult with instrumental goals in mind. And on any given day, I can run with instrumental goals in mind. But once I reach the run’s heartbeat, the place of dancing thoughts, these goals have long been left behind. Once again, I have Schlick to thank for helping me understand why. He wrote: ‘It is the joy in sheer creation, the dedication to the activity, the absorption in the movement, which transforms work into play. As we know there is a great enchantment which almost always brings this transformation about — rhythm. To be sure, it will only work perfectly where it is not brought externally and deliberately to the activity, and artificially coupled with it, but evolves spontaneously from the nature of the action and its natural form.’ Once the rhythm of the run has done its hypnotic work, when the heartbeat of the run emerges ‘spontaneously from the nature of the action and its natural form’, I am running only to run. Before that, I am not running, not really: I am simply moving. This point when motion transforms into running — this is the point when work becomes play. My body moves, but my thoughts play in the place my mind used to be.
If running is intrinsically valuable, then the heartbeat of the run, it would seem, is its experiential correlate. To experience the heartbeat of the run is to experience intrinsic value. The heartbeat of the run is intrinsic value making itself known in the world: it is something that is important in life revealing itself to me.
Some people have at least flirted with the idea that running is something like a religion, or with the idea that the experience of running is something like a religious experience. But I think the heartbeat of the run is actually the antithesis of religion or, at least, of one way of thinking about religion. The way of thinking about religion I have in mind is exemplified by Tolstoy. I remember reading, many years ago, Tolstoy’s ‘My Confession’: an honest, moving, if perhaps a little melodramatic, account of the way Tolstoy came to think of the meaning of life. When he had reached a certain point in his life, Tolstoy became afflicted with questions of a certain form: ‘So what?’ ‘And then?’ ‘Why?’ I have six thousand desyatinas of land in Samara and three hundred horses. So what? Moreover, I’m going to be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare and Molière. And then? Consequently, I am able to provide a good education and a comfortable life for my children. Why? Tolstoy’s inability to answer these questions upset him — a lot. ‘If I did not answer them, I could not live.’
He explains this prise de conscience with an allegory. A traveller in an Eastern land jumps into a well to escape the attentions of an ‘infuriated beast’. However, at the bottom of the well is a dragon. Caught between beast and dragon, the traveller finds himself clinging to a branch of a small bush that grows out of a cleft in the wall. Then, just when he thinks that things cannot get any worse, they inevitably do. Two mice, one black, one white, appear and start nibbling on the branch. At any moment, the branch is going to break and the traveller will fall to his death. He knows this. Nevertheless, while he is still hanging there, he sees some drops of honey hanging on the leaves of the bush. The traveller reaches out for the honey with his tongue and licks the leaves. Similarly, Tolstoy thought, he clings grimly to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death is waiting for him. He tries to lick the honey, which used to give him pleasure but no longer does. And the white and black mice of day and night nibble away at the life to which he is clinging. This is not a fable, Tolstoy claimed: it is ‘veritable, indisputable, comprehensible truth’.
The ‘truth’ in question seems to be a certain sort of realization coupled with a series of inferences based on that knowledge. At least part of Tolstoy’s realization is that he is going to die — not just as an abstract possibility that will eventually catch up with him somewhere down the line, but as a concrete reality, understood viscerally rather than intellectually. The result: the honey is no longer sweet. Nothing matters. It is not just his death that disturbs him. Sooner or later, he cheerfully continues, my family will become ill, suffer and die, and there will be nothing left but ‘stench and worms’. Also, there is the question of his work — his non-biological legacy. In the blink of an eye, he realizes, it will all be forgotten.
Medieval philosophers had an expression: sub specie aeternitatis — under the gaze of eternity. Actually, you do not need eternity, any sufficiently long-term view will do. Under the gaze of eternity or, at any rate, a sufficiently long time, any trace that Tolstoy ever existed will be erased. He will have disappeared, so will everyone he ever loved, and his work will beat a rapid path after him into the long good night. In terms of his artistic legacy — he has done better than most of us. One hundred years after his death his work is still widely read and highly regarded. But even so, a few more hundred years and who knows? A few thousand years and the odds lengthen considerably. Even if his works last as long as the human race, this is but the blink of an eye in the cosmic scheme of things. Disappearance waits for all of us, even Tolstoy. The ancient Greeks had an idea of what they called ‘objective immortality’ — the survival of a person through their work. But, unfortunately, objective procrastination would be a more accurate label. It is just putting off the inevitable. So what? And then? Why?
Tolstoy’s reaction to this was a familiar one: he sought solace in faith, faith in the promise of a life after this one. Faith is what connects we who do not last long with the infinite and eternal. ‘No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite — a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation and death. Consequently, in faith alone could we find the meaning and possibility of life.’
This is one expression of the religious view of life. I do not mean to suggest it is the only view of life licensed by religion, but it is certainly a common one. According to this view, the value of this life is to be found in the next life — as long as we go to the right place. So this life has merely instrumental value. It is valuable to the extent that it prepares us for, and provides us entry to, the life that is to come. In the heartbeat of the run, I think I experience the antithesis of this attitude. I experience intrinsic value in this life. The experience is, therefore, an affirmation that there are things we do in this life that are intrinsically valuable.
Tolstoy, I think, is right to this extent. Any satisfying account of the meaning of life must be capable of redeeming life. Life is horrific in ways that Tolstoy identified, and also, I think, in ways that he did not. Running may point to intrinsic value in this life. But a meaning to life would require m
ore than intrinsic value in life. It would require that this intrinsic value be important enough, big enough, to balance — in our dreams, perhaps even outweigh — the horror of life. Can what is valuable for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else do this? Can I infer meaning in life from value in life? I am not sure. To do that, I must think more about the horror of life. I must reduce it to its most basic principles. I must identify its essence.
We are in the home stretch, Nina and Tess still cling grimly to my heels and I give them each a little pat of encouragement. ‘Nearly home now, a big drink of water for you when we get there’ — that always gives them a little boost. The ears prick up and they press on with new enthusiasm. We run beside the royal palms that line this part of 77th Avenue. This really is a world away, and for Nina and Tess it is a lifetime away, from the hedgerowed lanes of Kinsale when they were still young dogs and charged up that hill with me day in and day out. Over the canal bridge we go and in through the gates of the community. When we reach the bottom of the driveway, I stop at the mailbox. Someone has left a business card there, someone who apparently pressure-cleans roofs. On the back is scrawled a terrifying handwritten message: ‘Roof mold eats tiles — call us.’ Ah yes, fear — the greatest friend of the tyranny of purpose. Back to work.
5
The Serpent of Eden
2009
Scrub oaks, gnarled and twisted, scowl down on either side of the narrow path; a path clogged with rotting leaves and the fallen fronds of royal palms. In the tropics, there is no winter: the leaves fall from the trees in the spring but are quickly replaced. In Miami, it is early morning in early May and already there is the heat. It scours the forest for the last hiding places of the night’s steamy cool, searching under stones, digging down into the fissures where the rattlers live. Its moist and persistent fingers reach into my mouth, my nostrils; slithering their way into my lungs, insinuating themselves into my blood, thin and quick.
Running with the Pack Page 10
