True Life in La Bourboule

Since I am on holiday and with time on my hands, I read the International Harold Tribune each day cover to cover, and this includes bits I usually ignore.  In Tuesday’s edition there was a book review about ‘Every love story is a ghost story’, a book about the life of David Foster Wallace.  DFW was a writer who struggled with depression all his adult life, and hanged himself aged 46.

In ‘The Pale King’ DFW wrote that people need to be distracted from the deeper type of pain that is always there, namely the existential knowledge that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces, and that time is always passing, and that every day we have lost one more day that will never come back.

Occasionally when in an efficient mood I tell myself that I am wasting time doing a particular thing, and whenever that happens I ask myself, What could I do instead that would not be a waste of time, and why do I think it wouldn’t be?  The answer is always the same - ultimately everything is a waste of time, arguably.  But equally, ultimately we are alive precisely for this – to waste such time as we have, as joyfully and gloriously and magnificently as we can contrive.

For if I work hard, and get a good job, and earn lots of money, and marry well, and have children, how could this be said to be a good use of my time?  Does doing these things make me a better person, does it improve my character, does it bring me closer to God?  Or do I not simply pass on the light of life to the next generation, who does the same thing, equally without a point, ultimately speaking? 

Or if I spend my life helping other people, do I not in fact simply enable them to do the above, viz work hard, get a good job, have children, etc etc?  If this isn’t the purpose of my life, how can enabling others to do this be my life’s purpose?  If I find a cure for a disease, invent ways to abolish hunger, liberate the women of Afghanistan from male oppression – whatever noble purpose I can think of, it all leads to enabling human beings to lead the sort of life I am arguing against.

I believe that an hour spend looking at a cloud, or listening to a brook, or talking to a friend, or reading a novel, or walking in the park, or sitting in the sunshine, is less of a waste of time than all the other things we spend our lives doing.  Life is about living, about being gloriously, wastefully, joyfully alive with all our senses tingling.  The other things are necessary for survival, they are the price we pay for being alive, and I would not counsel against doing them – but they do not constitute what I call Living.

What I call living carries little awareness of the passing of the days, certainly no regret.  The regret comes from the soul, which, realising it is being cheated out of true life, bemoans the loss of what it never tasted.

My life in La Bourboule has more of real life than my life anywhere else.  As one day shades into the next, I laze my days away with breathing, walking, swimming, eating, reading, lolling in the sunshine, and watching the clouds go by.  And I consider my days well spend, and pride myself that I have materially aided the sun by bearing witness to his rising and setting, to quote Thoreau.

In La Bourboule, nothing I do  is a waste of time, except wrestling with non-functioning electrical equipment and intermittent internet access.  Like in ancient Egypt, here for me time is a state, not a continuum.  Time simply IS, and so am I, and even though one day I will die, time will still be there, waiting for me to return in another guise.  The ‘passage of time’ becomes an oxymoron.  Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and indeed like me in my own childhood, I am in a state where time stands still.  Of course I know that I eventually have to return to the other reality, just like I had to come home when the street lights came on when I was a child.  But even that only bothers me a very little bit.  When one day is like each other, it matters little whether one has hundreds or dozens.  And because of their very sameness they have burned themselves deep into my consciousness, each day re-enforcing the same image, the same mood, so thoroughly that I can conjure up a vision of them whenever I choose.

Sitting on a green-grass covered mountain, my hair warm with sunshine, watching white clouds drifting across a deep blue sky, while two or three gliders, in ever larger circles, patiently rise into the endless sky – if that isn’t Heaven I don’t know what is!

Perhaps DFW’s depression would have lifted a little if he had had the good fortune to spend a month in la Bourboule?  But I suppose to really experience life you must be willing to let go, to surrender yourself to the experience of Being, and cease all attempts of Achieving.

We tend to be afraid of this – what if we like it too much, and never return to ‘real life’, and sink into a slobbish existence of watching TV and eating junk food?  Isn’t that what ‘letting go’ means?

The sort of letting go I am referring to is the opposite of that.  Every night we surrender ourselves to sleep, and when we had enough we awake.  There is no fear that we may sleep eternally.  Similarly with eating, with thinking, with playing – when we are done, we stop.  That’s how it should be.  But if we lose trust in our own good sense and ignore its promptings we lose our instinctual knowledge of what we need and what is good for us.  If we watch a movie late at night despite being tired.  If we eat despite not being hungry. 

It is not easy to listen to our own good sense, because we are constantly told to pull ourselves together and do as we are told.  Of course often we have no choice in the matter – we all have to function in the society we are part of.  But because we are so often forced to go against our own good sense, we end up ignoring it altogether.  Just because we have to quickly respond to e-mails and ‘phone calls, sit all day long, smile at people we dislike, eat when we are not hungry, etc etc while at work doesn’t mean we have to do the same while on holiday and on the weekend. 

We are encouraged to think of ourselves as producers and consumers, that is the basis of modern capitalism.  But in reality we are creatures who are made to be playfully, joyfully, active in both body and mind.  We are not made to ‘hang on for grim death’ and battle life’s hardships with gritted teeth!  We are made to lightly dance across the abyss, trusting that we will somehow overcome all difficulties and safely reach the other side!

Here endeth the lesson.