“For the meaning of life differs…from hour to hour” ~ Viktor Frankl
Fall always catches me by surprise. It starts with a leaf. Usually a dead leaf. This autumn began no differently. There we were sitting outside and a leaf just fell on me. As I picked it up I was moved by how un-dead it felt in my palms. The lines on my palm looked similar to the lines on this little leaf. I wondered about fate, the leaf’s mostly, how we end up where we end up and for how long. I was fascinated by it for several minutes and grateful for the company who didn’t find it at all idiosyncratic to be completely consumed by an autumn leaf. I liked how the two sides of the leaf were different, almost as if they belonged to two different leaves. I wondered if that is how it was by the time we died: at least two lives in a single lifetime. I think that is lucky, like the leaf, you end up adding more color to this world.
Today felt like two complete days in one, perhaps due to the equinox, 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night.
I spent the day in a quiet celebration because after exactly 4 years I had found a book that I couldn’t put down, a book I discovered without having read anything about it online, a book by an author whose name I didn’t recognize (although he is the recipient of the Mann Booker Prize), a book whose first paragraph moved me like I hadn’t been moved in quite some time. I am halfway done and the prize is indeed well deserved, the author is justifiably well known, the writing is exquisite, and most importantly, the story just flows and I couldn’t read as a writer but found myself reading as a reader. That doesn’t happen to me very often any more. It’s a good feeling. There is hope. It’s not all rubbish out there. Not everyone has sold out to celebrity and their publisher’s demands. I am disappointed in most contemporary literary fiction because it all seems formulaic and not from the heart, by this I mean that place which made the now established writers set out to originally tell their first published story or novel. If that is what being paid to write looks like I am quite content otherwise.
Anyway, the gem I was reading begins:
“We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, every day time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.” Julian Barnes, from The Sense of an Ending.
And I thought I was the only one who had that relationship with Time!
There aren’t that many books I re-read but the ones I do I continue to find something new in them each time. This quote deeply resonated with me and I share it here.
“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. […] One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” ~ Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning.
