Individual results will vary
The routes one takes in life can be (and are) generalized, often to make rhetorical or political points about their unevenness. Luck plays a big part, but some argue that the dice are loaded. Social movements aim often to end situations that are tipped for or against categories of humanity, yet they exist. Other situations arise that are, in retrospect, what Robert Musil saw as singular, unrepeatable experiences, separate from ordinary life yet attached to it, consequential for it. Poems and fiction draw on them.
Rilke’s comment, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final,” speaks to Musil’s observation.
The Decalogue sets out rules and Zen Buddhism has others. Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He was also known for expelling devils so people could be our neighbors again, which seems significant. The maxims of François de La Rochefoucauld —“There are few cures for love, and none of them are sure” is one—are pertinent to experiences of that nature.
Retrospect, the belvedere later life affords, looks out over vistas as hazy as any Renaissance painting. Specific memories are clearer in a film-like way, yet also fragments to be assembled and reassembled as they well up. Was there a route? It’s more like the Zen idea of barriers. Confronted by life’s oxymoronic nature and its tendency to feed our delusions, we finally, often painfully, get through them. “Beauty and terror” are apt and even paired.
There’s no instruction manual, rules and maxims notwithstanding. We’re like inexperienced drivers approaching a curve and seeing a sign. We slow down, but it feels like we could go faster. And maybe we can. Or can’t. We never quite lose the immunity we felt as toddlers within time and space.
We make our way pragmatically, that dispensation evolution gives us if we’re lucky. Honesty forces us to acknowledge how much luck plays a part. But pragmatism injects realism, enabling us to do the math, to look ahead and weigh our present options in light of those possible futures. We learn how to live in the present yet, as E.M. Forster put it, “work as if immortal.”
Tradition is helpful as a generality, but it’s also the accumulation of living, a process to which every living person contributes as an actor and exemplar. Commedia dell’arte’s stock characters, like the traits of the enneagram. are a catalogue of our potential to go right, wrong, or off the rails. At crucial moments, life asks us to choose among conflicting aims and desires, and how we choose reflects everything we’ve managed to learn to that point. Then we live with our choices, admired or vilified in turn depending on who’s asked. This appears to be true of saints, as well.
Last summer, I wrote a novella that’s become a family saga that goes back a century in time. Fiction makes possible a displacement that real life doesn’t afford. Retrospect gives us distance from events. While we can reinterpret them, especially as they involved others, they’re still grounded in the reality of our experiences. In fiction, events like them happen to someone(s) else, and this frees us to reconsider them. Whether it’s worth reading or not, it’s better than memoir or straight autobiography for sorting things out.
It also leaves a record of the sorting. I think this is what La Rochefoucauld had in mind when he wrote his ambiguous, worldly-wise maxims.
