The Meaning of Life

When I was younger, I never understood why people wanted to know the meaning of life so much. I thought it was a stupid question – we lived our life, plain and simple. Why did it matter what our purpose on this earth was?
I can acknowledge, now, that it is a question worth seeking an answer for, though I don't by any means claim to know what that answer might be. What I do know, is that what the novels we read in CIS this year have done – what good books and stories everywhere do – is attempt to provide an answer, of sorts, for us. The very first myths were creation stories, told to explain how we came to be and give us some sort of insight into what it means to be human. Stories provide us with a reason for our existence and push us to seek an explanation for what humanity is. They ask us to wonder at what, exactly, our purpose in life should be, and how we should seek to fulfill it.
Part of the reason Never Let Me Go is so truly tragic is because we see ourselves in the characters’ lives: our own missed opportunities and confusion about life. At first, these characters may appear to have more of a sense of their place in the universe than we do: they have an ostensible reason for their lives, one that seems to make sense. They live and die to save others. But this is really the original question, disguised as a new one: why are these human lives worth more than their clones? What makes us human, and why is being human so important?
The answer to this question cannot be expressed simply, and many of these novels reflect this idea. Instead, it must be approached sideways, in a roundabout way, through stories. Many of the novels focus on the idea that the world is made up of grays, a mix of black and white. The most obvious example is Going After Cacciato, but it is a theme that returns, over and over. In the end, it all comes back to what I says to Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water: “There are no truths…only stories.” There are many, many stories; enough stories for every person, so that every person can build their own truth. In the end, everyone needs to decide for themselves what their “raison d’être” is. We all must find our own personal reason to live, and stories are there to show us how.
To do this, they must not only make us question our own humanity, but must also remind us of it. Some of these books moved me to tears, others to laughter; nearly all of them have led to some sort of love. And in the end, what could be more human than these emotions, love especially? It is love, in all its forms, that I find to be the most compelling argument for our humanity. One of the most important lessons these books have to teach us is how fragile life is, and thus, how important it is to find and hold onto love.
We will all die, and just because our time frame is less obvious than that of the characters in Never Let Me Go doesn’t mean it is any less concrete. Whether you believe in fate or chance, destiny or choice, death has no escape. This is not a reason to despair. “The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again…You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t,” (God of Small Things); we all know the ending to life is death, but what matters is not the destination, but the journey. We may live to be one hundred; we may die before we are thirty. The point of life is not how long you can go on breathing, but what you do while you are breathing. “We are only ever given just so much. But it is always, all we need,” (I Wrote This For You). Our time may be short, but if we use it to live life as fully as we can, it is as long as we could ever need. And because we may not be here very long, it is even more important to seize love when it comes around and express it when we feel it.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary… Here is the point I’ve been trying to tell you, Oskar. It’s always necessary,”. When I read those words, I wondered: how often do I tell my parents I love them? What about my sister? I watched a video recently, and the man in it talked about how hard we all find it to say "I love you"; to parents, even more to siblings, and probably worst for friends. How do you tell a friend you love them, even if you do? How do you show it? We all forget how miraculous life is, how easily it can be taken away, and we all forget how easily everything can change: “It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that,” (Never Let Me Go). It’s easy to let love go, to assume that there will be another chance for us, but that’s never guaranteed. Death, which features in every book we read, is the only constant of life, and if we want love and meaning in our life, we have to make an effort. We cannot allow life to pass us by. Even more importantly, we cannot be like the many people in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close who shut themselves off from the world in an effort to escape from pain and death. “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age,” (Dubliners). Better to risk death or pain, like Michael Furey, than to live on, without pain, yes, but also without true happiness.
(And if to be "human" is to love, what does this mean for animals? What about elephants, which, as Oskar pointed out, will gather around a recording of a dead elephant - a dead friend? What about the stories of dogs who wait for their masters to come home - stories like Hachi? Who are we to say that these animals cannot love, and how does this affect our treatment of them?)
Love is just one meaning of life though. In A Mercy, Florens finds happiness in freedom and independence, as do most of the women and men in Green Grass Running Water. The meaning of life, different for every person, can be found in stories, if one looks hard enough. It can be rooted in love, in the stories which reveal the truth of that love more than any final paper ever could. Or it can be rooted in something else. There are more than enough stories to go around.

(I have pretty much been using this blog for updates on shit I watch, and I feel like that is unfair (unfair to who, exactly, I have no idea, but whatevs), so I proudly present, above, the English paper I wrote about the meaning of life. Sort of. I edited the bits that were filler and/or boring and/or referenced the novels we read too much, and added in some stuff - for example, I obviously didn't turn in a final paper that had a paragraph in parentheses. I actually like this version more than the one I turned in - yet another instance where I probably should've written it, then gone back and edited, instead of doing it all in one go)