“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates.
When I was no more than twelve or thirteen the feeling grew in me that it was important not simply to live life day by day but somehow to give greater meaning to it by recording what was happening every one of those days and by planning how I should shape and what I should make of my life in the future.
This may seem strange in one so young but it was so. It could very well be viewed as an impulse which would stunt and spoil the spontaneous enjoyment of a young boy’s life which should be free of such careworn concerns. To a certain extent this was so in the time spent planning what I should be doing and achieving in the next month, year, five years, longer rather than getting on with seizing the day and every precious hour in it. Ambition in one so young is a stone in the heart. Yet, even in this respect, there was value in this strange preoccupation since it gave a focus to what I was doing at school, in sport and tournaments, in acquiring skills and gathering knowledge, in shaping the aims of a lifetime to earn the credit of the world. And when objectives set were achieved life was sweetened. But looking back I see I went too far in this near obsession. Better, on the whole, especially when one is young, let life happen and revel without too much thought in the unfolding marvels.
However, in regard to the other mental approach I developed when quite young – that life as it is lived is given greater substance by recording at least some lively impression of it as it is experienced day by day – there I have no reservations. An extra and more lasting dimension is given to passing time and life itself. I am only sorry that throughout my life I have again and again lapsed in keeping such a record. To the extent that I have failed to keep a daily journal my life has vanished into the vast and misty recesses of an inadequate and faulty memory. For sure, life is wonderfully enriched when it receives the benefit of being twice lived in writing about it. Every young person, young writers especially, should keep a journal. I have kept mine on paper with fountain pen at first then ball-point but I know the young can find a way to do the same thing on the computer.
Now at 87 it still seems worthwhile to give life this added dimension by contemplating what is happening to me and in the world and recording what I notice. Not in the same way at all as when I was young – different perspectives, lesser intensity in the living, altogether quieter dealings with the world at large, a more accepting outlook, an increasing disposition to delve into mysteries that never can be solved – but what is noticed remains as vivid and fascinating as this great journey has ever revealed. Here are entries from my notebook:
Water seems gentle in a tree-shaded pond or shadowed forest creek. But that is not the truth that governs it. I still remember so well our Great Flood of 2005. And I read a book about Leonardo da Vinci and find this observation by the great artist, philosopher and scientist:
“Water wears down the high summits of mountains. It lays bare and removes the great rocks. It drives the sea from its shores, for it raises its bed with the soil that it brings. It shatters and destroys the high banks. No stability can ever be discerned which its nature does not bring to naught.”
● Since the Second World War, which ended in 1945, by far the most cruel and bloody conflict has been the civil war in the Congo which goes on interminably below the surface of the world’s headlines. 6 million people have died in that hideous war. Here is what the Congolese novelist Sony Labou Tansi, beside himself with fury and anguish, wrote in the Foreword to his book The Seven Solitudes of Lusa Lopez:
“To be a poet nowadays is to want to ensure with all one’s strength, with all one’s body and with all one’s soul, that, in the face of guns, in the face of money (which in its turn becomes a gun), and above all in the face of received wisdom (upon which we poets have the authority to piss), no aspect
of human reality is swept into the silence of history.”
● I am astonished to read in a biography of General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Western Allies against the Nazis in the Second World War, how much he hated war. In a speech after he became President of the United States he reckoned up the cost of war which every single Leader in the world should remember:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
● Thinking about the infinite – in Mary’ garden or up the Essequibo on a moonless night: spangle of stars and beyond them unseen, countless more in billions of galaxies expanding endlessly. And this all emerged, we are assured, 13 billion years ago from a “singularity” a billion times smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence. The mind drifts into a dreamlike reverie. There is the celebrated poem by count Giacomo Leopardi, the great 19th century Italian poet, entitled L’infinito which sings in my mind:
L’infinito
“This lonely hill was always
dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off
the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing
I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye,
unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and
depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches,
I begin
comparing that endless stillness
with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and
the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this
and foundering is sweet in such
a sea.
The central idea of this poem is that the mind finds rest not in knowledge, which is always restless for more knowledge, but in everything it cannot know but only imagine. No wonder this night under the stars is so peaceful.