Figure it out for yourself!

Tolstoy does not have any firm bottom-line on the meaning of life.  As I raced towards the final pagess, the nebulous ending  to the essay was just as I had always suspected; recall that I wrote this in the post where it began:

Of course I don't expect Tolstoy to give me a one sentence answer to that question. It is something for me to figure out.

So, there!

You are perhaps thinking (but are too polite to say it): "if you knew you would not find a cut and dried answer to the question, then why spend time reading it?" And why torture the few readers who are sticking with this blog, right?

I have been convinced for a long time now that it will be a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of my existence.  All I know for certain is that the scientific route keeps uncovering more questions as it tries to explain the different pieces, and the other route will force upon me questions that will be way complicated for my tiny intellect.  Yet, not to examine my life does not appeal to me.  Not to examine the meaning of my existence seems like a wasted life. Reading Tolstoy and others adds that much more to understanding my own existence.

That examination includes, of course, running into situations like what Tolstoy describes:

At that time as a consequence of my interest in faith I became close to believers of various denominations: to Catholics, Protestants, Old Believers, Molokans, etc. And among them I met many people of high morality who were truly believers.  I wanted to be a brother to these people.  And what happened?  The teaching that had promised me to unite all in a single faith and love, this very teaching in the person of its best representatives told me that these people were all dwelling in falsehood, that what gave them life was a temptation of the devil and that we alone were in possession of the one possible truth.  And I saw that the Orthodox consider all those who do not profess a faith identical to theirs to be heretics, exactly as the Catholics and others consider Orthodoxy to be heresy.

If a religion, or a denomination within one, claims it has the truth, then people who live following other religions and denominations are living in falsehood, right?

Tolstoy continues:

And I, who supposed truth lay in the unity of love, was involuntarily struck by the fact that this very Christian teaching was destroying what it should be producing.  

And:

You say to yourself, "It can't be that it is so simple and that still people do not see that if two affirmations contradict each other, then neither one nor the other can hold the unified truth that faith must be.  There is something here.  There is some explanation."

He puts it bluntly with:

Why is the truth held not by Lutheranism, not by Catholicism, but by Orthodoxy?

Of course, we can add a whole bunch to that: why is the truth held not by the Wahhabi, not by Mahayana Buddhism, not by Shaivism, ... To any believer, the other is an infidel.  We are all infidels then!

As much as an infidel, atheist, that I am, I understand that religions have comforted and assured the believers with meanings to their existence.  I am an atheist in the camp of the likes of Camille Paglia, who respect the value that religions have added to the human condition, and not in the militant camp from where the intellectual atheists wage their crusades as if atheism is a religion of its own.  I have always believed that that it is such an approach to atheism that has allowed me to be friends with believers and them with me, and to even be invited to weddings by believing students.

I am at peace with knowing that I do not know the meaning of my life, and I will continue to examine it.  It is up to me to figure out the meaning of my own life.  Merely chanting Om and "अहं ब्रह्मास्मि" (Aham Brahmasmi) won't do it!

Visit with me as I am dying and I will let you know if I figured it out by then--about twenty-four years from now ;)

Going round and round and round and ...

I noted tongue-in-cheek that maybe I should not call my parents because of updates from them about yet another death in the extended family.  Sure enough, there was another.  She was eighty years old.  Some of you regular readers might recall this note from six months ago, where the rambling thoughts were triggered by my visit with her.

"Those who come have to go sometime" my mother said.

The fact that we all have to die sometime is well known to every one of us.  Which was the point of departure for the series of posts that has apparently driven quite a few readers away from this blog! ;)  Isn't it amazing that you and I and the billions of humans continue on despite this definitive ending?  Tolstoy writes:

"But I have lived, I still live, and all mankind is living and has lived.  How can this be?  Why does mankind live when it is able not to live?

Maybe someday science might tell us that even cows are aware of their mortality.  For now, it is safe to assume that only we humans are conscious of our existence and our own death.  Fully knowing that it could all be futile, we continue to live what we think is a "full life."  How can that be?  In such a living, what meaning do we make of our lives?

Of course, asking such questions is not anything new; humans "went on living, giving life some kind of meaning":

Ever since some kind of human life began, people already had that meaning for life and they led that life, and it has come down to me.  Everything that is in me and around me, all of that is the fruit of their knowledge of life.  Those very tools of thought with which I discuss this life and judge it, all those have been made not by me but by them.  I myself was born, educated, grew up, thanks to them.  They mined iron; taught us to fell trees; tamed cattle, horses; taught us to live together, brought order into our life; they taught me to think, to speak. And I, their creation, fed by them; nursed, taught by them; thinking their thoughts and their words, have proved to them that these have no meaning!  "Something is wrong here." I told myself.  "Somewhere I have made a mistake."  But I could not find out where the mistake lay.

My grandmothers lived lives that made meaning to them.  And I question their meaning.  The meanings that people constructed in the past do not often make sense to us now, even though we, our lives, and our thinking, will not be possible without their meanings.

Tolstoy is playing with me by tossing out such ideas.  And he has enough material for me to blog one more post--readers be warned!  Tolstoy has set me up for what is coming with these:

I began to understand that the answers given to faith enshrine the most profound wisdom of mankind, and that I didn't have the right to deny them on the grounds of reason, and that, most importantly, these answers do answer the question of life.

What a strange coincidence that the translator was himself terminally ill when he worked through all these.  In her introduction, Mary Beard writes:

It is a poignant irony that Tolstoy's translator, Peter Carson, was much closer to death and dying when he was working on The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession than Tolstoy himself was at the time he was first writing them.

Beard adds later:

The final manuscript was delivered to the publisher by his wife on the day before he died in January 2013.

Such is life.

What the heck is this life all about?

Having been conditioned in recent years by online reading, and that too reading pieces that are not too long, and where we skip around saying "tl; dr," I was worried that I might have lost whatever ability that I had to read lengthy and deep essays.  Online, I am always tempted to click on a hyperlink, which takes me elsewhere, from where some other hyperlink leads me to something completely different from where I began.

Worry no more for me.  I am doing just fine reading Tolstoy.  But then, it is perhaps a credit to Tolstoy's writings--he has drawn me to a subject that has always been a fascination.  To questions that have always dogged me, for which I am explicitly and implicitly always seeking the answer. Tolstoy writes:

The question is this: What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow--what will come from my whole life?
Expressed differently, the question would be this: Why should I live, why should I wish for anything, why should I do anything?  One can put the question differently again: Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?

It took me only a little bit of exposure to the world of math and science to sense that those subjects would not give me the answers.  On the other hand, there is no definitive answer via the humanities and the social sciences--at least science gives precise answers for precisely defined narrow questions.  Thus, over the years, I have come to conclude that it will be a lifelong struggle to figure out the meaning of my existence.

I suppose I am really, really enjoying Tolstoy because he is delivering sentences full of ideas that only validate my own jumbled views and writes as if I am undergoing the very experiences that he went through!  Consider this, for instance, that he notes about the sciences:

[They] are precise and clear in inverse proportion to their application to the questions of life, the more precise and clear they are; the more they attempt to give solutions to the questions of life, the more and unclear and unattractive they become. ... These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.  They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers."

Yep. I quit engineering!  I could not figure out the big and fundamental questions via electrical engineering.

What about something like philosophy?

And if it keeps firmly to its subject, then to the question, "What am I and what is the whole world?" it can give no other answer but "Everything and nothing"; and to the question, "Why does the world exist and why do I exist?" just the answer "I don't know." ...
[Although] all the theoretical work is directed precisely toward my question, there is no answer, and instead of an answer one gets the same question, only in a more complicated form.

Yep, only more complicated questions.

This is all exhilarating.  There is so much "life" in trying to understand my existence.  I will end this post with Tolstoy quoting Socrates:

"We will come near truth only inasmuch as we depart from life" said Socrates, preparing for death.

Looks like it will an interesting quest over the remaining third of my life ;)

No wonder Tolstoy became a vegetarian! Will Pope Francis become one?

Last night, I started reading Tolstoy's Confession.  He writes in this highly praised translated version:

My loss of faith happened in me as it happened then and does now among people with our kind of upbringing.  In the majority of cases I think it happens like this: people live as all other people do, and they all live on the basis of principles which not only have nothing in common with Christian teaching but also for the most part are in opposition to it; Christian teaching plays no part in life; one never comes across it in one's relations with others and one never has to deal with it in one's own life; Christian teaching is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independently of it.

I was like, damn that is so right!  My loss of faith began that way, the difference being that it was "Hindu" in place of Christian and "Hinduism" in place of Christianity.

Tolstoy then goes for the jugular:

Then as now the open declaration and profession of Orthodoxy were found for the most part in stupid, cruel, and immoral people who think themselves very important.  Intelligence, honesty, uprightness, goodness of heart, and morality were found for the most part in people declaring themselves to be unbelievers.

Ouch!  It does not surprise me anymore that Tolstoy was excommunicated from the church.

I began to read a great deal and to think very early on, so my rejection of Christian teaching became a conscious one very early on.  From the age of sixteen I stopped saying my prayers and of my own volition stopped going to church and fasting. 

Right from a young age, I had a very difficult time reconciling the wonderful ideals that the religion advocated with the reality of every day life lived by the believers.  I am immensely happy to find that I am walking along the trails that Tolstoy (and others) have cleared for me:

Religions and religious leaders have always had profound ideals for all of us.  But, we humans seem to intentionally choose to ignore them.  Thus, Christians have plundered and killed as much as Buddhists have plundered and killed, even though the founders of both the faiths championed peace and love.

In his latest op-ed, the philosopher Peter Singer tackles one of those aspects of Christian--specifically Roman Catholic--teachings: "man's dominion."  Singer writes:

Mainstream Christian thinking about animals is rooted in the Book of Genesis,where God is said to have granted man dominion over all the animals. St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted that verse as implying that it simply does not matter how man behaves toward animals; the only reason why we should not inflict whatever cruelties we like on animals is that doing so may lead to cruelty to humans.
A few Christian thinkers have sought to reinterpret “dominion” as “stewardship,” suggesting that God entrusted humanity to care for his creation. But it remained a minority view, favored by environmentalists and animal protectionists, and Aquinas’s interpretation remained the prevailing Catholic doctrine until the late twentieth century.

Tolstoy wrote that "Christian teaching is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independently of it."  Singer points out that what that teaching is has been interpreted in many ways.  The latest interpretation is from the current Pope:

Francis has now come down decisively against the mainstream view, saying that Christians “have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures,” and insisting that “we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.” Our “dominion” over the universe, he declares, should be understood “in the sense of responsible stewardship.”
Against the background of nearly 2,000 years of Catholic thinking about “man’s dominion,” this is a revolutionary change.

How did Tolstoy deal with his own views?  Were they always the same?  Did they change?

I continued to live only professing my belief in progress.  "Everything is evolving and I am evolving, and why I am evolving together with everyone else will be made clear."  That was how I then had to formulate my faith.

In this evolving faith, Francis has gone one more step, Singer writes:

Now, in Laudatio Si, Francis quotes the passage in the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus says of the birds that “not one of them is forgotten before God.” Francis then asks: “How then can we possibly mistreat them or cause them harm?” It is a good question, because we do mistreat them, and on a massive scale.
Most Roman Catholics participate in this mistreatment, a few by raising chickens, ducks, and turkeys in ways that maximize profit by reducing animal welfare, and the majority by buying the products of factory farms. If Pope Francis can change that, he will, in my view, have done more good than any other pope in recent history.

This summer of deep reading is turning out to be wonderfully rewarding.  Life is beautiful, indeed!

Ivan Ilyich has his Rosebud moment

Ivan Ilyich died last night.

As death nears, Ivan Ilyich goes through various thoughts and emotions.  Tolstoy is phenomenal in being able to imagine the plight of a dying man and this thoughts.  But then, hey, that is why we value Tolstoy's writings, and will continue to treasure them, whereas everything in this blog will be mere ones and zeros of the cyberworld.

"Maybe I have lived not as I should have"--the thought suddenly came into his head.  "But how so when I did everything in the proper way?" he said to himself, and immediately rejected this solution of the whole riddle of life as something wholly impossible.

After the number of posts in which I have tried to convince myself (and this guy too!) about the urgency to figure out the priorities and to then accordingly shape our lives, I, of course, agreed with those thoughts that Ivan Ilyich had.  I would rather be mindful about my life's priorities when I am able than to regret about them later when I am dying.

Ivan Ilyich asks himself through his mental sufferings:

But what if in fact all my life, my conscious life, has been "wrong"?

I want to make sure I am able to echo in my own way Non, je ne regrette rien.

As Ivan Ilyich recalls his life, he feels that there was more "real" life of happiness the further back he went, to his childhood:

The more he moves through the memories from his childhood to the present day misery, the more the experiences are darker and darker.  As I read the sentences, I remembered many of my own blog posts, including this one in which I critiqued the fad of the "bucket list" of places to go to before one dies, in which I wrote:

 Imagine this: there you are lying on your deathbed.  You think not having been to the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall will be your greatest regret ever?  That your life was incomplete because you didn't visit that one place?  Given that the final thoughts can be incoherent, like theRosebud moment, let us advance that a tad to when we are not quite there, yet (though, there is always that probability of death striking us any second, like when I am blogging!)  The question still remains: life feeling incomplete because of not having been to the Taj Mahal?

 Even in that post, I had mentioned the Citizen Kane Rosebud moment.because I have been convinced for a while, and reinforced by talking with many older people, that some of the most enjoyed and precious memories are from our childhood.  Perhaps that connection is a reason why dementia leads people only to recall their oldest memories--it is nature's way of easing us into the end.  A couple of years ago, I wrote in an email to an old school friend that perhaps my own Rosebud moment will be me whispering the word "Neyveli" and nobody around would understand what that meant!

Dying is the last solo journey that we will take.  Nobody will come with us.  Ivan Ilyich finds that he is all alone on his deathbed:

In that lonely state, whatever he tries, his mind keeps going back to this childhood days.  Perhaps that is also why Tolstoy has Ivan Ilyich interact with his son, who is a schoolboy, before death arrives.

Now he felt someone was kissing his hand.  He opened his eyes and looked at his son.

And when death arrives, Ivan Ilyich thinks, "Such joy!"

"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more."
He breathed in, stopped halfway, stretched himself, and died.

They're here, they're here

"It is still more than 40 degrees every day" complained my father.  I quickly did the mental math for converting it to the Fahrenheit scale that I am used to now.

As I talked with him, I enjoyed the gentle breeze through the open window.  The high temperatures of 100 and 101 and the string of 90-plus days--all way above normal for this time of the year--have yielded to cooler temperatures and clouds in the sky.

After the phone call ended, I checked the mail. Yes, the books--the ones that I hope will make me wiser--are here.  It won't be the books' fault, nor the authors' fault, if I continue to be the global village idiot ;)

I decided to go with the same order in which I had listed the books.  The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first one.  Death has always fascinated me, as the readers of this blog know all too well.  The fact that we will all die at some time is, I think, one of the truths that I came to understand early on when I was a young boy, especially after my grandmother died in the backseat of the car as we rushed her to the local hospital in the industrial township where I was raised.  Thus death, as much as it interests me, does not worry me one bit; it is the pain and suffering that I hate, and life is full of pain and suffering.

As I noted in that earlier post, the deep reads are the atheistic ways in which I attempt to arrive at an understanding of a simple question: if we are all going to die, then what is the point in living?  Why do we do what we do?  Which also easily explains why I had for a while wanted to read this work of Tolstoy's; in a review essay a while ago, I came across a quote from The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?

Life, as I understood it even back when I was a teenager, which is why I continue to march to my own drumbeats, is not anything like veni, vidi, vici.  But, what the heck is the meaning in my life?

Of course I don't expect Tolstoy to give me a one sentence answer to that question.  It is something for me to figure out.  All Tolstoy, and Nabokov and Steinbeck too, can do this summer is to guide me with their thoughts, similar to how others did in the past.  Hopefully, as I continue along this path, I will be able to answer that question as I lay dying.

Apparently, that is what Tolstoy also had in mind, writes Mary Beard in her introductory remarks:

If only Tolstoy's friends had remembered to ask him all those questions! I am sure the businessman will keep track of it and might even monetize those words of wisdom from my deathbed ;)

Thirty-eight pages have provided me with enough and more to think about.  It is time to get to the real world issues of shopping and laundry and cleaning and everything else--after all, they, too, help me understand what my life is all about.

My summer formula for acquiring wisdom

This has already become an unforgettable summer: two consecutive days of 100-plus temperature even before the Fourth of July, which is when normally the warming trend begins in this paradise.  The head aches, the body is tired, and the prospect of more heat is not thrilling.

The cooling down to the low 90s next week, which will still be way higher than normal, is not the only reason that I am looking forward to the days ahead.  It is also because the books that I have ordered for my summer time deep reading will arive.

A few years ago, I decided to read some of the great literature pieces, including some that I have already read.  As I recall, the list has now included Fathers and Sons, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Invisible Man, The Sun Also Rises, Catch-22, A Farewell to Arms, Sartre's plays, The Time Machine, Kafka's short stories, 1984, ... I am lazy to look up my blog-posts and list them all ;) The re-reads were as exciting and humbling as were the new ones.

I am mentally salivating when thinking about the list this time around:

I read Lolita when I was way young.  I am sure I missed out on a great deal of understanding about the world when I read it before I experienced the world.  Further, re-reading is good, as Nabokov himself said:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Why do I read these classics that have stood the test of time?  Simple: they help me arrive at my own understanding of what it means to be human, and how I fit into this universe.  How does that happen via great literature?

It is really quite remarkable what happens when reading a great novel: By identifying with a character, you learn from within what it feels like to be someone else. The great realist novelists, from Jane Austen on, developed a technique for letting readers eavesdrop on the very process of a character’s thoughts and feelings as they are experienced. Readers watch heroes and heroines in the never-ending process of justifying themselves, deceiving themselves, arguing with themselves. That is something you cannot watch in real life, where we see others only from the outside and have to infer inner states from their behavior. But we live with Anna Karenina from within for hundreds of pages, and so we get the feel of what it is to be her. And we also learn what it is like to be each of the people with whom she interacts. In a quarrel, we experience from within what each person is perceiving and thinking. How misunderstandings or unintentional insults happen becomes clear. This is a form of novelistic wisdom taught by nothing else quite so well.

It is an awesome experience because "Empathy is not all of morality, but it is where it begins."  I still remember how devastated I felt as A Farewell to Arms came to an end.

Many disciplines can teach that we ought to empathize with others. But these disciplines do not involve actual practice in empathy. Great literature does,

I begin to understand that we humans are complex beings.  Cultures and histories and genders and everything else matter.  

We all live in a prison house of self. We naturally see the world from our own perspective and see our own point of view as obvious and, if we are not careful, as the only possible one. I have never heard anyone say: “Yes, you only see things from my point of view. Why don’t you consider your own for a change?” ... We grow wiser, and we understand ourselves better, if we can put ourselves in the position of those who think differently.

You can see why I am looking forward to the deep reads for this summer.  I am sure I will blog about them, too.

Tolstoy was correct that we are unhappy in our own ways. Yet, most are happy

Many years ago, when I read Anna Karenina, I was struck by the profound message in the simple opening sentence: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I hadn't quite graduated from my teenage years when I read that Tolstoy masterpiece. My mental maturity was nowhere near the levels required to understand that complex narrative of humans and their emotions.  But, I read that book, nonetheless, primarily because the opening sentence was such a hook.

Since then, as I lived and experienced life, the more I have come to appreciate the idea that unhappiness comes in many forms. 

I have even reached a state where I now question the very idea of the existence of happy families. 

It is not that happy families do not experience unhappiness--they do.  Happy families are those that are able to be happy despite their own versions of unhappiness.

This understanding of life was further reinforced at the high school reunion. 

Over the thirty years, we transitioned from the families into which we were born, to creating our own families.  From the few conversations that I had where were went beyond the "hi" and jokes and onto more serious topics, the more it seemed that happiness comes despite all the unhappiness. 

In fact, I am now more inclined to believe that happiness comes through unhappiness.

Tolstoy's Anna saw and felt way too much unhappiness.  Could she have created happiness out of all that?  I think so. Perhaps a high school reunion would have given her a better perspective on the world, and her own life?  Her life wouldn't have ended horribly then.

Best lines of the day :)

On Monday night in Ohio, a 62-foot-tall statue of Jesus got hit by lightning and burned to the ground. (The adult bookstore across the street was unscathed.) 

Those were the opening lines from Gail Collins' column in the NY Times.
Pretty good.  Not Dickens, or Tolstoy, or Melville.  But, pretty good :)

Do the "humanities" serve any purpose at all?

Yes they do.
But, if taught and learnt with a certain approach. Certainly not the way we torture students with the humanities now. If I were an undergrad, I would hate taking anything in the humanities! Why? Because, the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students. No wonder then students are left wondering why there is a focus on some strange abstraction and theory when all they want is to "get the gen.ed. out of the way." So, that is what we have at the end of the undergrad experience: that the humanities are to most students something to endure if they want to get a college degree.

That is not how it ought to be. I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ..... I am so glad I read them and reflected on them on my own time and not in a choking classroom environment. The Grand Inquisitor by itself was a profound experience. I am willing to bet that most humanities departments rarely guide students towards the Grand Inquisitor.

The trigger for these thoughts came while reading this essay in Wilson Quarterly. In it, I liked this part the best (I don't agreee with everything in that essay):
[Many] of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate.