Still Crazy After All These Years

Two related questions have nagged at me during one of those inescapably bad weeks.  To wit:  1) Does an individual life have any pattern, theme, or meaningful narrative?  2) Does anyone ever really change their basic nature?  These are eternal questions, posed by thinkers from Saint Paul to Pogo.  I ask myself these things as I inexplicably continue to make the same kind of mistakes I have always made.  Has living a long time taught me nothing?  Sometimes it seems so.

Our culture has a penchant for Bildungsromans, stories about the coming of age of young people. These youngsters (usually lads) go through scrapes and adventures and learn lessons along the way.  One might think of David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye in this regard.  But these books often end when the protagonists are young adults (and usually with marriage if the character is a young woman), and I doubt anyone that young has ever learned anything really important (look around).

Then there are the less common Vollendungsromans, tales of the coming of old age and death.  Again, lessons are learned, the principal one being how to die.  One might think of Robinson’s Gideon or Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  The point of all these life stories – young or old – seems to be that life has some kind of meaningful narrative and we discern patterns and “better ways” as we gain years and experience.  And yet in my old age, I – like Saint Paul – sometimes wonder why “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).   There are certainly times when, at three in the morning, I cannot help but think that my life is not a meaningful narrative, but simply a vicious rerun of my most egregious character traits.  (As I said, it has been a bad week.)

One person who pondered the nature of the life story was Arthur Schopenhauer.  He authored an essay with the weighty title: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”  (Maybe it sounds more interesting in German.)  It is, nevertheless, a fascinating piece of work.

Schopenhauer starts out by admitting that almost everyone believes that:

…the course of an individual’s life, however confused it appears to be, is a compete whole, in harmony with itself and having a definite tendency and didactic meaning, as profoundly conceived as is the finest epic.

He finds this true in almost all cultures.  In some societies, this “course of life” is ascribed to fate or providence; in others, it is seen as the inevitable result of maturation, education, and goal setting.  But, in the end, Schopenhauer thinks that it is mainly a matter of inborn character:

The systematic arrangement, here mentioned, in the life of everyone can be explained partly from the immutability and rigid consistency of the inborn character which invariably brings a man back on to the same track.

What is not determined by character is determined by outside events – which then interact with character.  Some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus observed that “character is destiny.”  Schopenhauer seems to agree.

As a person who keeps a journal and believes writing one’s life “story” is therapeutic, I find this unsettling to think about.  Maybe Schopenhauer was right.  What, perhaps, we are trying to discover in our life review, are simply those permanent traits of character which make us keep playing the same scenes over and over again.  Rather than living out a comprehensive life plan, these traits might simply keep us, as Paul Simon puts it, “still crazy after all these years.”

Or maybe I’m wrong.  Ask me again when things in my life are going better.

Meanwhile, I also drafted a short story on this subject, provisionally entitled “Life Stories.”  Don’t take my chatter too seriously – I am as capable as the next person of seeing my life as an ongoing epic (or soap opera).