What really matters in life? Sorry to be vague, but I am having trouble thinking of something specific to blog about today. We are primed from an early age to emulate successful adults we see around us in real life, or in movies, or on TV, or on the stage, or in books. A good job, a spouse, a family, a home, a car, vacations, and a plump 401(k).
But for some these objectives, as laudable and fulfilling as they can be, are not the be-all-and-end-all, as they say. People have animal desires, yes, but most also want to be good, to make the world a better place. This is complicated. One of the perplexities of life is that it is impossible to really, fully know the repercussions of your actions. Did something you did that seemed a minor slight or even a neutral act to you scar someone else for life? Did something that seemed like simple decency change the world for the better in ways you could never know? How much can be attributed to “the fog of war” and how much is a matter of personal responsibility? I think this is why some moralists say principles are more important that ethical judgments that are based solely on consequence–because all the consequences of our actions are beyond human understanding.
The novel Middlemarch ends with the observation that its heroine Dorothea had a checkered reputation in her home town for marrying an older man and then, following his death, marrying his much younger cousin. But it finds that she was more and better than what her society–what the author, George Eliot, calls “an imperfect social state”–thought of her. The final sentences are: “her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
British Romantic poet John Keats died at 25, some think partly as a result of the stress caused by negative reviews of his work. His gravestone, written partly by his friends, reads: “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821. ” Of course, Keats, despite his premature death, had an enormous influence on literature from Emily Dickinson to F. Scott Fitzgerald and on. Dickinson was hardly published at all during her lifetime, and Fitzgerald, who titled his novel Tender is the Night after a line from Keats’ poetry, went to the grave prematurely (ravaged by alcoholism) thinking his work was forgotten and irrelevant.