Book by Book (17 page)

During this period of the deity's withdrawal the Bible also shows us how human beings, once the sullen, rebellious children of the Lord, gradually grow up and start taking charge of themselves and their world. The birth of Christ itself emphasizes the growing power of humankind: Once God formed man in his own image; now he forms himself in man's image (remember too how Jesus always refers to himself as the “Son of Man”). God has left us, say theologians like Robert E. Friedman, so that we may stand on our own feet, and we must consequently learn to accept a certain spiritual loneliness. That does seem the natural human condition, one that we assuage through useful work, family and friends, community service, art. And, of course, through religion, for those with the gift of belief.

Through much of its history Christianity promoted the mortification of the body and the supreme importance of the soul. Chastity, continence, the Paulist doctrine that it was better to marry than to burn—from the beginning Christianity, like virtually all other religions, has turned madly about sexual questions. Matters only start to alter in the Renaissance, when an ethos of self-denial was replaced by one of showy self-fulfillment in art, politics, and war. After the Reformation the inner life of a sinner grew intensely important, requiring frequent examinations of conscience and a daily moral bookkeeping. As a result, the church's yoke of obedience to dogma gave way to the agonizing and unending dilemmas of personal choice.

Yet overall, during the first 1,500 years of the Christian era, the relationship between the spiritual and the corporeal might be crudely summed up as: “How shall I live my life on this Earth so that my soul will be saved?” For the orthodox, the answer rested on the belief or hope of an afterlife in heaven. Complexity arose when Christian thinkers tried to fathom just where the soul was located in the body, or just how the body and soul were linked. Ancient medicine suggested that “animal spirits” might function as “bridging media” between the two seeming opposites, while the Incarnation itself—God in Man or God as Man—made literally manifest the everlasting and apparently insoluble mystery of how the material and immaterial might become one.

In the seventeenth century, everything changed (see Roy
Porter's various books, especially
Flesh in the Age of Reason).
Rene Descartes claimed that “mind was what distinguished humans from all other earthly beings,” going so far as to locate the soul in the pineal gland; Thomas Hobbes went drastically further and proposed that man was wholly physical and talk of the soul was simply vacuous or deceitful. Once the author of
Leviathan
discarded the spiritual, the entire supernatural realm went with it. Soon John Locke asserted that we learn everything through our senses (starting life as a tabula rasa, or blank slate) and that experience of the world was sufficient in itself to develop our sense of self. Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) promulgated the notion that individual identity was simply a kind of stream of consciousness. We would feel essentially ourselves, no matter what our physical form, if we maintained this “fine thread” of personal awareness.

As is true today, once belief in the existence of a soul withered away, health and long life became the new piety. The body itself was reconceived as a machine or an elaborate network of plumbing; as the eighteenth-century German philosopher, scientist, and aphorist Georg Lichtenberg noted, “Everything that matters in life flows through tubes.” What counted was “generous input and unimpeded outflow.” Stagnation was death.

Even more than Locke, David Hume got rid of any surviving remnants of “the ghost in the machine”: The genial Scots philosopher maintained that when he looked within he found only a “flux of perceptions.” Hume further urged—contra all Christian and classical thinking—that reason should bow to feeling, since emotions were the actual motive forces that determined how
people behaved. At heart, pleasure alone counted, whether bodily or—better yet for this bachelor—intellectual. Many of Hume's notions influenced his friend Adam Smith, who in his moral theory of sentiments stressed that the glue holding society together was our ability to sympathize and identify with other human beings. That sounds about right.

Throughout history moral essayists have sought to answer the basic question of how a person should live his or her life in this world. Here are some of the central books of that great tradition.

1. Job. This Old Testament book examines the central mystery of earthly suffering and the apparent indifference of God, without giving any clear-cut answer.

2. Ecclesiastes. All is vanity, saith the Preacher, in this most despondent—yet oddly comforting—book of the Bible.

3. Plato's dialogues, especially
Symposium, Apology
, and
Republic.
Socrates, the great questioner of the ancient world, explores love, the good life, and the ideal community.

4. The Gospels. Follow the example and teachings of Jesus Christ, love your neighbor as yourself, and there awaits for you a life beyond death.

5. Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations.
Be indifferent to earthly troubles and retreat mentally to an interior citadel, above life's disorder, uncertainty and sorrow.

6. Horace,
Odes.
Seize the day, and enjoy the passing moment to its fullest before the darkness closes overhead.

7. Saint Augustine,
Confessions.
The model for all spiritual autobiographies, a formidable thinker's journey toward God. “Our soul is troubled till it rests in Thee.”

8. Cicero, selected writings and letters. In his dialogues with friends, this most civilized of all the Romans, and a model to humanists for centuries, quietly propounds a life of measure and learning. Happiness is a library in a garden.

9. Boethius,
The Consolation of Philosophy.
Imprisoned and awaiting execution, Boethius discusses life's purpose with Lady Philosophy. An immensely influential book, translated by King Alfred and Chaucer, among others.

10. Michel de Montaigne,
Essays.
His essays are works of interior exploration, laced with learning and common sense. The humanist skeptic's
“Que sais-je?”
—What do I know?—was his motto. “And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own rear.”

11. Baldassare Castiglione,
The Book of the Courtier.
Courtly love hoped to produce flowers of chivalry, but the Renaissance really showed how a gendeman should comport himself in society.

12. Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince.
To succeed in this secular world neither holiness nor service to others counts so much as Realpolitik and the manipulation of man's essentially fallen and corrupt nature.

13. Blaise Pascal,
Pensees.
“The condition of humanity: inconstancy, weariness, and disquiet.” “Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”

14. John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim's Progress.
An allegory of Christian progress through a world of temptation and sin. “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

15. François, due de La Rochefoucauld,
Maxims.
We are bottomless lakes of egotism, and society is built on lying to others and oneself. “One is nearly always bored by the people with whom one is not allowed to be bored.”

16. James Boswell,
Life of Samuel Johnson
(and Johnson's own works). Avoid cant in all things, and practice Christian charity. “Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate / Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?”

17. Marquis de Sade,
Writings.
The “Divine Marquis” laughed at traditional morality and insisted that we live for pleasure and sometimes for pain.

18. Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
A manifesto and a clarion call—women deserve equal entitlement with men and lives of their own.

19. Stendhal,
Intimate Writings.
Deeply perceptive and kind, passionate and tender, a man of the world who is also a man of heart.

20. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays
and
Journals.
Pith and vinegar from an exemplary American thinker. “The loves of flint and iron are naturally a little rougher than those of the nightingale and the rose.”

21. John Henry Newman,
The Idea of a University.
From a liberal education “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life,
of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.”

22. Sigmund Freud, papers and case studies. Our interor selves are strange, elusive, and fundamentally childish, yet we must somehow live with them. Even when wrong, he cast light upon darkness.

23. Simone Weil, selected writings. About suffering she was never wrong. Arguably the most intelligent and unsettling Frenchwoman of her generation, she relates an unflinching spiritual journey toward God and death.

24. C. G. Jung, selected writings. In dreams we glimpse the drama and secrets of our inner beings. Once past forty, says this great analyst of the crises and possibilities of middle age, a person has “a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.”

25. Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus.
In the mid-twentieth century, the existentialist Camus found in Sisyphus—condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill, over and over again—an image of human life as absurd yet still allowing for the possibility of happiness.

This short list leaves out as much as it includes. Where's Epictetus? Schopenhauer? Readers will also want to look for the religious poems of George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot, as well as the fiction of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad, and Proust, all of whom have much to say about life and our journey through it.

To God, the right kind of human life looks well-meant but incompetent. Zeal is more important than technique. —
w. H. AUDEN

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.—Leon Trotsky

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day
—Isaac Watts (“O God, Our Help in Ages Past”)

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.—Vladimir Nabokov

No sooner do men despair of living forever than they are disposed to act as though they were to exist for but a day. —Alexis de Tocqueville

If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?—Cormac McCarthy

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what? —William Saroyan (on his deathbed)

Perhaps we will die knowing all the things that there are to know in the world, but from then on, we will only be a thing. We came and were seen by the world. Now, the world will continue to be seen, but we will have become invisible.—E.M. Cioran

A man's soul is like
A train schedule
A precise and detailed schedule
Of trains that will never run again.
—Yehuda Amichai

We learn only in old age what happened to us in our youth. —Goethe

Soon you will have forgotten the world, and the world will have forgotten you.—Marcus Aurelius

Tell them I have led a happy life.—Ludwig Wittgenstein (last words)

But, Lord Crist! Whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. —Chaucer (from “The Wife of Bath's Prologue”)

The farce of dustiny.—James Joyce

1. Exercise. You don't need to become a bodybuilder or supermodel, but do try to run, swim, lift weights, do yoga. To hear a
friend call out “Lookin' good” will brighten anyone's mood.
“Mens sano in corpore sano”
—a strong mind in a strong body—is as worthy a motto as any.

2. Brush and floss. The young, especially, can hardly imagine the expense, pain, and trouble of dental care in later life.

3. Be cool. Find your own style. Discover the clothes that make you feel like a million bucks, whether it's a tailored suit or a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. Being well dressed, a woman once told Ralph Waldo Emerson, conveys a sense of satisfaction that religion itself is powerless to bestow.

4. Dine well. “Good dinners,” said the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, “have been the greatest vehicles of benevolence since man began to eat.” To converse with friends, share a meal, sip a glass of wine—there are few better moments in life. Just don't overdo it.