Life as a penal colony, according to Schopenhauer's gloomy outlook

On the Sufferings of the World

 Unless suffering  is the direct and immediate object of

life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd

to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds

everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities

inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose

at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate

misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something

exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by

most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative

in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes

its own existence felt. Leibnitz  is particularly concerned

to defend this absurdity; and he seeks to strengthen his

position by using a palpable and paltry sophism.[1]  It is

the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and

satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state

of pain brought to an end.

This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to

be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very

much more painful.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the

pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the

two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement

is true, let him compare the respective feelings of

two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any

kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still

worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation

open to every one. But what an awful fate this means

for mankind as a whole!

We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under

the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then

another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we

are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in

store for us--sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or

reason.

Comparing the Stoics with Bashō and Krishna

Marcus Aurelius on Mortality and the Key to Living Fully

More from Maria: newsletter@brainpickings.org

“Death is our friend,” Rilke wrote in an exquisite 1923 letter, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” And yet one of the defining features of the human condition is that we long for immortality despite inhabiting a universe governed by impermanence.

Eighteen centuries before Rilke, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius addressed this abiding human paradox of life and death with astonishing lucidity in his Meditations (public library | free ebook) — his indispensable proto-blog, which also gave us the philosophic emperor’s enduring wisdom on how to begin each day for maximum sanity and what his father taught him about honor and humility.

Aurelius, translated here by Gregory Hays, considers how befriending this eternal interplay of life and death can inform and ennoble our existential priorities:

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. 

Cold or warm.
Tired or well-rested.
Despised or honored.
Dying … or busy with other assignments. 

Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: “to do what needs doing.”

In another meditation, he revisits the question of our inescapable impermanence:

Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. 

We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? 

Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it’s gone. 

And life itself: like the decoction of blood, the drawing in of air. We expel the power of breathing we drew in at birth (just yesterday or the day before), breathing it out like the air we exhale at each moment.

Art from Candy Chang’s project Before I Die

With breath-stopping simplicity, Aurelius crystallizes the inevitable and indiscriminate nature of this inhale-exhale cycle that is life:

Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms.

But rather than being dispirited by this awareness, he suggests, we can find it in an enlivening force of moral solidity in the face of our ephemeral existence:

Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people have died — all professions, all nationalities. Follow the thought all the way down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Now extend it to other species. 

We have to go there too, where all of them have already gone: 

… the eloquent and the wise — Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates …
… the heroes of old, the soldiers and kings who followed them …
… the smart, the generous, the hardworking, the cunning, the selfish …
… and even [those] who laughed at the whole brief, fragile business. 

All underground for a long time now. 

And what harm does it do them? Or the others either — the ones whose names we don’t even know?

From this he extracts the ultimate moral:

The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.

Meditations is a requisite read in its entirety — the kind that stays with you for a lifetime and rewards anew with each rereading. Complement it with Seneca, a fellow Stoic, on how to fill the shortness of life with greater width of aliveness and Bertrand Russell on the paradox of immortality.

Footnotes to McCullers and Chekhov on loving

Philosopher Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering It

(courtesy of Maria's Brainpickings)

"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love," the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn admonished in his terrific treatise on how to love – a sentiment profoundly discomfiting in the context of our cultural mythology, which continually casts love as something that happens to us passively and by chance, something we fall into, something that strikes us arrow-like, rather than a skill attained through the same deliberate practice as any other pursuit of human excellence. Our failure to recognize this skillfulness aspect is perhaps the primary reason why love is so intertwined with frustration.

That's what the great German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher Erich Fromm examines in his 1956 masterwork The Art of Loving (public library) – a case for love as as a skill to be honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery, demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort.

Fromm writes:

This book ... wants to show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.

Fromm considers our warped perception of love's necessary yin-yang:

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice of a “love object."

Thoreau and his moral myopia

An excoriating exposé of our paragon of self-reliance, by Kathryn Schulz of the New Yorker...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum

On the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin.

The visitor from Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. “On the whole,” he wrote, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?” This impassive witness also had stern words for those who, undone by the tragedy, could no longer enjoy strolling along the beach. Surely, he admonished, “its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.”

Nietzsche on following the narrow road

Maria Popova shares this from her extraordinary Brain Pickings series:

Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that embracing difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. In 1873, as he was approaching his thirtieth birthday, Nietzsche addressed this perennial question of how we find ourselves and bring forth our gifts in a beautiful essay titled Schopenhauer as Educator (public library), part of his Untimely Meditations.

Nietzsche, translated here by Daniel Pellerin, writes:

Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you." Every young soul hears this call by day and by night and shudders with excitement at the premonition of that degree of happiness that eternities have prepared for those who will give thought to their true liberation. There is no way to help any soul attain this happiness, however, so long as it remains shackled with the chains of opinion and fear. And how hopeless and meaningless life can become without such a liberation! There is no drearier, sorrier creature in nature than the man who has evaded his own genius and who squints now towards the right, now towards the left, now backwards, now in any direction whatever.

Finding the meaning of life along the narrow road

There Is No Theory of Everything

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

 SEPTEMBER 12, 2015 2:30 PM  NYT

CreditTucker Nichols

Over the years, I have had the good fortune to teach a lot of graduate students, mostly in philosophy, and have noticed a recurring fact. Behind every new graduate student stands an undergraduate teacher. This is someone who opened the student’s eyes and ears to the possibility of the life of the mind that they had perhaps imagined but scarcely believed was within their reach. Someone who, through the force of their example, animated a desire to read more, study more and know more. Someone in whom the student heard something fascinating or funny or just downright strange. Someone who heard something significant in what the student said in a way that gave them confidence and self-belief. Such teachers are the often unknown and usually unacknowledged (and underpaid) heroes of the world of higher education.

Some lucky people have several such teachers. This was the case with me. But there is usually one teacher who sticks out and stays in one’s mind, and whose words resound down through the years. These are teachers who become repositories for all sorts of anecdotes, who are fondly recalled through multiple bon mots and jokes told by their former students. It is also very often the case that the really good teachers don’t write or don’t write that much. They are not engaged in “research,” whatever that benighted term means with respect to the humanities. They teach. They talk. Sometimes they even listen and ask questions.

In relation to philosophy, this phenomenon is hardly new. The activity of philosophy begins with Socrates, who didn’t write and about whom many stories were told. Plato and others, like Xenophon, wrote them down and we still read them. It is very often the case that the center of a vivid philosophical culture is held by figures who don’t write but who exist only through the stories that are told about them. One thinks of Sidney Morgenbesser, long-time philosophy professor at Columbia, whom I once heard described as a “mind on the loose.” The philosopher Robert Nozick said of his undergraduate education that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.” On his deathbed, Morgenbesser is said to have asked: “Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?”

In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives

http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3f7029f048&e=f00edf766e

 The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives – even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available – because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting.

We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children – it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice – that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes – that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true – and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.

We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason – and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason – they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do... We share our lives with the people we have failed to be. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage.

We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. Because we are nothing special – on a par with ants and daffodils – it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with – and hopefully enjoy – their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done: first, ideally, we are made to feel special; then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not... When people realize how accidental they are, they are tempted to think of themselves as chosen. We certainly tend to be more special, if only to ourselves, in our (imaginary) unlived lives.

Six Pillars of the Examined Life

Consider Parker Palmer’ proposal for the six pillars of the examined life, annotated by Maria Popova at brainpickings.org.

In his first piece of advice, Palmer calls for living with wholeheartedness, inherent to which – as Seth Godin has memorably argued – is an active surrender to vulnerability. Echoing Donald Barthelme's exquisite case for the art of not-knowing, he urges:

Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart.

What I really mean ... is be passionate, fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world – your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart – with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you – I, all of us – must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success... Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn – that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness

Happiness without meaning is elusive, according to Emily Esfahan Smith, writing in the January 2013 Atlantic

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Some relevant thoughts on The Dangers of Happiness by Carl Cederstrom at the NYTimes

Whenever­ we talk about happiness we also talk about something else: morality. We may not know what happiness itself signifies, but we do know how it has been evoked historically — to set out a template for a moral life. As we rush to make happiness the ultimate aim both for ourselves and society at large, we might want to recall some of the wonderfully rich and depressingly contradictory history of the concept. This might help us better understand our own time and the moral values we subscribe to today.

In his book “Happiness: A History,” the historian Darrin M. McMahon provides an account of how the notion was expressed and embraced over time, going back to the birth of Western civilization, as many such accounts do, in ancient Greece.

Aristotle, one of the first to pay significant attention to the topic, thought that happiness consisted of being a good person. The happy life, what the Greeks called eudaemonia, was one lived ethically, guided by reason and dedicated to cultivating one’s virtues. Soon after, the Epicureans would connect happiness to pleasure. They argued that a good life should be devoted to whatever brought pleasure. They were no hedonists, though, and preached a strict regulation of desire. To be happy, Epicurus himself said, he needed no more than a barley cake and some water.

The Stoics gave no elevated status to pleasure, arguing that a person had the capacity to be happy no matter how daunting and painful the circumstances of life might be. Much later, Christianity, as preached and practiced throughout the Middle Ages, shunned pleasure altogether and regarded pain as the more useful path to, if not a happy life, then a sort of divine union in the afterlife. That desired state could not be attained in life on earth, but only as a gift from God, in heaven.

Thoughtful observations on why we read from Gary Saul Morson

Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/why-college-kids-are-avoiding-the-study-of-literature/

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Go to just about any English department at any university, gather round the coffee pot, and listen to what one of my colleagues calls the Great Kvetch. It is perfectly summarized by the opening sentence of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book: “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” She is not speaking of looming environmental disaster or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. You see, those are threats we can discern. The danger Nussbaum is highlighting “goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government.”

When a writer invokes the insidious progress of a cancer, you know she hopes to forestall the objection that there is little visible evidence to support her argument. What is this cancer threatening democracy and the world? Declining enrollments in literature courses. Her book is titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

And why is it, in Nussbaum’s view, that students are choosing to study economics or chemistry rather than literature? When I was growing up in the Bronx, the local Jewish deli owner, whose meats smelled vaguely rancid and whose bagels seemed to start out already a day old, attributed his failing business to the vulgarization of Bronx tastes. As her title indicates, Nussbaum arrives at the same self-serving answer. Students are interested in profit and therefore care only about pre-professional degrees. Another answer popular among literature professors is that students spend so much time on Twitter that they have the attention span of a pithed frog.

But can it really be that students are more materialistic now than in those proverbial eras of backwardness, the 1950s and 1980s? And why did those Twitterized adolescents once immerse themselves in seven volumes of Harry Potter?

Could it be that the problem lies not with the students but with the professors themselves?

Why Take a Literature Class?

One reason I wonder at the Great Kvetch is that my experience has been so different. For well over a decade, I have been teaching the largest class at Northwestern University, with an enrollment of about 500 students. The course is about Russian literature. Students are generally not aware that there is such a department as “Slavic Languages,” which teaches “Russian literature.” For them it’s all “English,” which is the shorthand for studying novels and poetry, and so it is only by word of mouth that the course manages to perpetuate itself.

The material isn’t easy. We read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and I devote another course entirely to War and Peace, attended by 300. Now, Northwestern is supposed to be the model of a pre-professional school. So why, of all subjects, should these students be attracted to Russian literature?

I speak with students by the dozens, and none has ever told me that he or she does not take more literature courses because every moment at school must be devoted to maximizing future income. On the contrary, students respond by describing some literature course they took that left them thinking they had nothing to gain from repeating the experience. And when I hear their descriptions of these classes, I see their point.

Examining life through poetry

Poetry offers us a powerful vehicle for pursuing a deeper examination of life and its meaning.  Poet Mary Pinard has compiled this list of particularly relevant poems. Pinard teaches poetry and literature at Babson College; the latest collection of her own poems was published last year (Portal, Salmon Poetry, 2014).

Alexie, Sherman:  “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” and “The Facebook

Sonnet”

Auden, W. H.:  “Musée Des Beaux Arts”

Bishop, Elizabeth: “The Fish”

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor:  “Work Without Hope”  (sonnet)

Collins, Billy:  “Questions about Angels,” and “Nostalgia”

Dickinson, Emily:  “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,”

Dolin, Sharon:  “For I Will Consider the Overlooked Dragonfly”

Heaney, Seamus:  “Digging”

Hudgins, Andrew:  “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead”

Hughes, Langston:  “Harlem”

Kavanagh, Patrick:  “Epic”  (sonnet)

Kinnell, Galway:  “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” and “Blackberry Eating”

Keats, John:  “To Autumn”

Komanyakaa, Yusef:  “Facing It”

Kunitz, Stanley:  “The Round” and “The Layers”

Levertov, Denise:  “Witness”

Oliver, Mary:  “The  Kingfisher” and “Wild Geese”

Pinsky, Robert:  “Shirt”

Shelley, Percy Bysshe:  “Ozymandias”  (sonnet)

Stafford, William:  “Traveling Through the Dark”

Strand, Mark:  “Keeping Things Whole”

Swenson, May:  “Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another”  (sonnet)

Whitman, Walt:  “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

Wilbur, Richard:  “The Writer”

Yeats, William Butler:  “The Wild Swans at Coole,”

Another voice added to the examined life project. Although some indict Brooks as "hypocritical and sanctimonious", it's hard to dismiss his quest for meaning.

What Is Your Purpose?  by David Brooks, NYT May 5 2015

Every reflective person sooner or later faces certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? How do I find a moral compass so I can tell right from wrong? What should I do day by day to feel fulfillment and deep joy?

As late as 50 years ago, Americans could consult lofty authority figures to help them answer these questions.

Some of these authority figures were public theologians. Reinhold Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about everything from wonder to sin to civil rights. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote a book called “On Being a Real Person” on how to live with integrity.

Other authority figures were part of the secular priesthood of intellectuals.

John Dewey advocated pragmatism. Jean-Paul Sartre and his American popularizers championed existentialism. Hannah Arendt wrote big books on evil and the life of the mind.

Public discussion was awash in philosophies about how to live well. There was a coherent moral ecology you could either go along with or rebel against.

All of that went away over the past generation or two. It is hard to think of any theologian with the same public influence that Niebuhr and Heschel had. Intellectuals are given less authority and are more specialized. They write more for each other and are less likely to volley moral systems onto the public stage.

These days we live in a culture that is more diverse, decentralized, interactive and democratized. The old days when gray-haired sages had all the answers about the ultimate issues of life are over. But new ways of having conversations about the core questions haven’t yet come into being.

Public debate is now undermoralized and overpoliticized. We have many shows where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. In fact, we now hash out our moral disagreement indirectly, under the pretense that we’re talking about politics, which is why arguments about things like tax policy come to resemble holy wars.

Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.

The shift has meant there is less moral conversation in the public square. I doubt people behave worse than before, but we are less articulate about the inner life. There are fewer places in public where people are talking about the things that matter most.

As a result, many feel lost or overwhelmed. They feel a hunger to live meaningfully, but they don’t know the right questions to ask, the right vocabulary to use, the right place to look or even if there are ultimate answers at all.As I travel on a book tour, I find there is an amazing hunger to shift the conversation. People are ready to talk a little less about how to do things and to talk a little more about why ultimately they are doing them.

This is true among the young as much as the older. In fact, young people, raised in today’s hypercompetitive environment, are, if anything, hungrier to find ideals that will give meaning to their activities. It’s true of people in all social classes. Everyone is born with moral imagination — a need to feel that life is in service to some good.

The task now is to come up with forums where these sorts of conversations can happen in a more modern, personal and interactive way.

I thought I’d do my part by asking readers to send me their answers to the following questions: Do you think you have found the purpose to your life, professional or otherwise? If so, how did you find it? Was there a person, experience or book or sermon that decisively helped you get there?

If you have answers to these questions, go the website for my book, “The Road to Character,” click on First Steps and send in your response. We’ll share as many as we can on the site’s blog called The Conversation, and I’ll write a column or two reporting on what I’ve learned about how people find purpose these days.

More Thoreauvian counsel on the art of living

Thoreau on What It Really Means to Be Awake by Maria Popova

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you,” Jackson Pollock’s father wrote in his beautiful 1926 letter of advice to his teenage son. But how does one become fully awake to the world, especially in our world, through which we increasingly sleepwalk on autopilot, in a trance of productivity? (How awake are we, really, when we’ve stopped bowling over in awe at the everyday miracle of clouds? Or the unexpected glory of wildflowers on the city sidewalk?) Wakefulness — that embodied attentiveness to life as it lives itself through us — seems as mysterious as our nocturnal escape into dreams, and often more elusive.

That’s what Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) explores in a beautiful passage from Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (public library) — another timeless treasure from the same Penguin Great Ideas series that gave us Seneca’s indispensable The Shortness of Life.

Thoreau — a man of great and enduring wisdom on subjects like the spiritual rewards of walking, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the best definition of success — extols the gift of the awake imagination:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the wakening hour. Then there is at least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance fills the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. 

Will more information help us find meaning? The Borgesian Library of Babel has already alerted us to the futility of this search. But here's another exposition on the subject...

In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive 

By J. PEDER ZANE       NYT MARCH 19, 2015

Jonathan Haber majored in philosophy at Harvard University. And Yale. And Stanford. He explored Kant’s “The Critique of Pure Reason” with an Oxford don and Kierkegaard’s insights into “Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity” with a leading light from the University of Copenhagen.

In his quest to meet all the standard requirements for a bachelor of arts degree in a single year, the 52-year-old from Lexington, Mass., also took courses in English common law, Shakespeare’s late plays and the science of cooking, which overlapped with the degree in chemistry he earned from Wesleyan in 1985.

Here’s the brilliant part: Mr. Haber didn’t spend a dime on tuition or fees. Instead, he gorged from the smorgasbord of free courses offered by top universities. He documented the project on his website, degreeoffreedom.org, and in a new book exploring the wider phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. He didn’t earn a degree — the knowledge may be free but the sheepskin costs dearly — but he was satisfied.

“I wouldn’t call myself a philosopher,” he said, “but I learned as much as most undergraduates.”

Mr. Haber’s project embodies a modern miracle: the ease with which anyone can learn almost anything. Our ancient ancestors built the towering Library of Alexandria to gather all of the world’s knowledge, but today, smartphones turn every palm into a knowledge palace.

Should an author's intentions matter?

If a text can mean anything the reader wants it to mean, then why read it in the first place?  Adam Kirsch offers an opinion (NYT 15 March).

No book could announce its author’s intentions more plainly than “Paradise Lost.” John Milton declared his purpose in the opening stanza: “That to the heighth of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” And that is how “Paradise Lost” was read for the first century and a half of its existence: as a vindication of God’s justice. Because the sacred drama of the Fall will conclude with the salvation of humanity through the sacrifice of Jesus, Adam comes to realize that all his suffering is divinely ordained for the best: “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good!”

Then, in the late 18th century, something changed. Readers like William Blake and Percy Shelley opened the same poem that pious Christians had been enjoying for generations, only they discovered something surprising: The hero of the poem is not Adam, or Jesus, or God himself, but actually Satan, the incarnation of evil. Because all the other characters act out of obedience to a divine plan, they can’t be said to possess the characteristics of heroism — boldness, daring, pride. Only Satan, who acts in opposition to God, has those traits, and as a result, he gets the best speeches — as when he declares, after he is hurled into hell, that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield.”

That is why, to Shelley, “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is . . . far superior to his God.” Yet how could it be that Milton, who was a deeply pious Christian and who explicitly said that his poem was meant to promulgate Christian truths, was actually, as Blake said, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”? This could be possible only if the author was not actually the master of his own intentions. Perhaps Milton was ensnared by the false piety of his own time, and it took the antinomian insight of the Romantics to liberate him — to make him the poet of revolt that he secretly wanted to be all the time. Or perhaps the Romantics were simply imagining Milton as they wanted him to be. Either way, they permanently changed the way later readers would approach Milton’s epic; in a sense, they rewrote “Paradise Lost.”