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India Today
10-05-2025
- Politics
- India Today
In the time of war, may God give us the sense to stay ignorant
Some wars are just. All of them are terrible. They are also part of humanity, have always been and will always be. Yet, there is one thing they don't need to be -- sharpen an old adage: if information is power, then ignorance must be considered peace. Once, and who among us has not harboured such foolish thoughts when young, I used to consider ignorance a glitch. But over the years, and more so in the explosion of information in the last two decades, I have come around to realise that ignorance is not a glitch. It is a feature, a gift that evolution gave to the human a time when India and Pakistan are involved in a conflict, which looks likely to be heading towards a full-fledged war, I hope most of us - and by most of us I mean we who are living in our comfortable cities hundreds of miles away from the border - would choose to stay ignorant for as long as we can, for as long as the war doesn't drag us into it. This, I feel, will make life easier for everyone, including people who would be fighting to keep us safe. Wars, even the just wars, which this one would be for us if we end up fighting it, are terrible. They are terrible for everyone involved. But they are also a reality, something that Will Durant noted in his sweeping lessons from the history of mankind. 'War is one constant of history, and has not diminished with civilisation or democracy,' he once wrote. George Orwell, who fought in Spain in 1937 because he 'had promised himself to kill one Fascist', explained wars like a writer would. 'The truth is very simple,' he wrote in reminiscence, years after he had picked up the gun in Spain. 'To survive, you often have to fight, and to fight, you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.'advertisementIn other words, humans have always fought. Often unjustly, but also on occasions with a just cause. Every time we have fought, it has been terrible, sometimes necessary, but still terrible. Only in recent decades has war started becoming has always been the fog of war, but, in a manner of speaking, it is only in recent years that this fog has started to cloud our collective minds in a way that many would call neurosis. This neurosis, too, is the result of social media. A full war between India and Pakistan, if at all it starts this time, is still a few days away. But look around on X, aka Twitter, and the rest of the social media, and you will think that the world is ending. There is doom and gloom, there is misinformation and propaganda of all kinds. There is a collective frenzy, on both sides of the border, that would give the sanest and calmest people sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden times of conflict, it is quite natural that there would be a sense of unquietness, all around us as well as within our minds. Yet, it is this sense of unquietness that social media has aggravated in the last few days. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell didn't hate the actual war as much as he hated the chatter. 'One of the most horrible features of war is that all the propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting,' he propaganda and screaming, the emotions that smoulder thoughts, none of that is new. Conflicts also heighten certain emotions and behaviours, which then add to collective neurosis. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary while Germans bombed London in the Blitz, hated these feelings. 'I don't like any of the feelings war breeds: Communal, all sentimental and emotional parodies of our real feelings,' she wrote one day after going out and seeing people in the bombed and broken difference, nowadays, is that earlier the pace at which information would travel was measured in days. Sometimes, even in months. Now it happens within minutes, and our brain can't keep as the war looms ahead of us, I hope God, metaphorically because I don't believe in one, will give us good sense to stay ignorant. In the modern world, there is just way too much information. Research has started to show how this information overdose is forcing us to feel worse, it is making us look at the world and life in detail, which we are supposed to ignore and gloss over. At no other time in human history have we been forced to know so much. Nowadays, whether we want it or not, we end up making everybody's business our own is doubly troublesome during a conflict. Rumours used to exist earlier as well, but now their scale and sophistication are at a different level. Same with propaganda. Or with warmongering. Or with the talk from doomsayers. Or the assault on senses from emotionally charged exhortations. Now, every flashing red light in the sky, even if it is hundreds of miles away, has the potential to spark panic and anxiety attacks. Now, every clip of a tank rolling, or a burst of fire from some machine gun somewhere, can increase our heart rate and paralyse us with yes, as we gaze at war clouds gathering fast, I hope we will have the good sense to keep ourselves ignorant. In fact, short of going to the border and taking up an active fighting role, the best we could do in the time of war would be to go about our lives in as normal a way as possible. It will help everyone, including those who are actually fighting. But this will happen only if we wilfully, and deliberately, keep ourselves a little ignorant. Get off social media if that is what it takes. Switch off TVs if the news is making you paralysed. We don't need to know everything. Not even in the time of conflict and war.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Trending Reel
Epoch Times
21-04-2025
- General
- Epoch Times
Clio's Wars: How We Interpret Our Past Will Determine Our Future
In his Introduction to his 11-volume 'The Story of Civilization,' Will Durant Teacher and historian Wilfred M. McClay delivers a similar Like most historians, Durant and McClay recognize the crucial necessity for this passing of the baton from one generation to the next. Moreover, while they recognize that this exchange can take place through such venues as parental teaching, language and customs, literature, art, and music, both men would also likely argue the primacy of Clio, the muse of history, as the captain of our culture and the chief custodian of our libraries, museums, and liberal arts. 'Clio, Muse of History,' 1800, by Charles Meynier. Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public Domain Consequently, how we unpack and interpret the treasures and trifles of history, that most colossal of attics, is crucial for the survival of a civilization. History, with its wars and rumors of wars, can itself become a battlefield, just as it has today. The Battleground of History In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched the Women, men, and children stand in front of a church, possibly Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Tulsa, Okla., circa 1919. The '1776 Unites" project states that Tulsa became a famous African American entrepreneurial enclave by 1921. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Public Domain This attempt to steer the interpretation of American history away from such central icons as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution brought a swift reaction. Historians from across the political spectrum denounced the project for its faulty history, while others defended and promoted it. One of those opposed was Robert Woodson, a black activist and community organizer who founded the ' The Greenwood section of Tulsa, Okla. was popularly known as America's "Black Wall Street." It was common for residents, such as this 1929 photograph of Samuel and Eunice Jackson (L), to be 'dressed to the nines' and boast luxury motorcars. Little of early 20th-century black wealth is recalled today. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Public Domain More recently, conflict has flared up on a different front. On March 27, 2025, Donald Trump Related Stories 4/9/2025 9/15/2024 These and other interpretative battles over the meaning of the American past raise questions, such as: Can history in our museums and classrooms be presented in some pure, objective form? What are the costs and benefits of revisionist history? And should the American past depicted in museums, books, and classrooms aim to amplify patriotism? Historical Interpretation Is a High-Wire Act The short answer to the first question above is an absolute no. We can learn and disseminate facts about history—the dates of the Spanish-American War, the construction of a Conestoga wagon, the numbers of American soldiers who participated in the Normandy Invasion—but these in and of themselves are trivia, nice to know but with little real value in giving us an understanding of our country's heritage. Once detectives, otherwise known as historians, begin to examine these facts, human subjectivity comes at once into play. But there's a solution. Historians, museum curators, and teachers can consciously put aside their prejudices and strive for objectivity. They can enter into the past with their eyes wide open, fully aware of its nuances and cultural proclivities, and work these realities into their approach to historic figures and events. They may point to slavery as our nation's shame, but balance then demands that they call attention to the forces that eradicated slavery, which is one of our nation's great glories. The statue of Robert E. Lee, which has towered over Monument Avenue since 1890, was removed from its plinth in Richmond, Va., on Sept. 8, 2021. Pool/Getty Images Here's a recent case in point of the damage done to our past by ideology, imbalance, and lack of nuance. In the last few years, This is a classic instance of presentism—that is, the interpretation and judgment of the past solely through the lens of the present. Those demanding the removal of the statues, and those who acquiesced, knew little of Lee's personal history and nothing of nuance. This iconoclasm is also a prime example of revisionism gone amok. Edits and Rewrites The worst-case scenario of presentism is extreme revisionism or, in some cases, attempts to blot out the past altogether. The Cultural Revolution unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party in the mid-1960s is a classic case of erasure of the past to invent a particular present. The regime and its minions, many of them young people, waged war against the 'Four Olds'—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits—and sought the total eradication of China's classical civilization. This violent purgation of the past also saw up to 2 million people executed as well. In his article ' Shen Yun master of ceremonies Leeshai Lemish speaks at a press conference highlighting the Chinese Communist Party's transnational repression activities targeting the company, at Lincoln Center in New York City on March 26, 2025. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times On the other hand, valid reassessment is a necessary and ongoing part of historical interpretation. New evidence from archives or new methods for interpreting data, for instance, can in turn shed new light on past events, changing their meaning. Only when this revisionism becomes ideological or ignorant, unmoored from historical realities and common sense, does it pose a danger to culture and civilization. What So Proudly We Hailed And what of patriotism? Should our history books, museums, and educational institutions help build pride among Americans, or is teaching the love of country somehow a sellout? In his blurb on the back cover of McClay's 'Land of Hope,' prominent historian and teacher Gordon S. Wood writes: 'This generous but not uncritical story of our nation's history ought to be read by every American. It explains and justifies the right kind of patriotism.' By 'the right kind of patriotism,' Wood is likely referring not just to 'Land of Hope' in general but also to the Epilogue, titled 'The Shape of American Patriotism.' Here, McClay writes at length about this subject. After noting that some today regard 'patriotism as a dangerous sentiment,' which he calls 'a serious misconception,' he examines two different concepts of American patriotism. The first is made up of those universalizing ideals applicable 'to the well-being of the whole world,' an idea going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton in 'The Federalist' No. 1. The second is what McClay calls particularizing sentiments, which constitute such commonalities as history, tradition, culture, and the land itself. First edition printers' proofs for the sheet music to "God Bless America," 1938, by Irving Berlin. Library of Congress. Public Domain McClay then shows how these two ideas often blend together by pointing to Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America.' This popular song with its touching images—'Land that I love!' and 'My home sweet home!'—was composed by a Jew born in czarist Russia who immigrated to the United States and experienced firsthand the universal ideals of American liberty. The song and the man display both the universality of American ideals and a sentimental love of the nation that produced them. Moving Forward In Will Durant's earlier reflection, we see that he defined education as the 'technique of transmitting civilization.' If we wish our children to inherit American values and love of country, we must follow the example of those who came before us and ensure that the young are well-versed in our nation's history. After all, they cannot love what they do not know. Nor can they love their country if they are taught to belittle or ignore its accomplishments, to permit the blemishes of our past to smother its beauties. Here is where our museums, historians, teachers—and for that matter, all of us—must act as preservationists and promoters of that heritage and those ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that mark each one of us as Americans. What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers – from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more
In September 2015, I was unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad's caravan, wondering what the meaning of life was. Where was I going to find happiness, or purpose, or meaning? What was the point to all of this? Like any millennial, I turned to Google for the answers. I trawled through essays, newspaper articles, countless YouTube videos, various dictionary definitions and numerous references to the number 42, before I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932. I decided that I should recreate Durant's experiment and seek my own answers. I scoured websites searching for contact details, and spent hours carefully writing the letters, neatly sealing them inside envelopes and licking the stamps. Then I dropped them all into the postbox and waited ... Days, and then weeks, passed with no responses. I began to worry that I'd blown what little money I had on stamps and stationery. Surely, at least one person would respond? When someone finally did, it turned out to be a rejection. My heart continued to sink as I received a spate of letters returned to sender. Eventually, rather excitingly, replies started to drop through my letterbox. During the three months I spent living in the holiday park, walking the cliffs and trying to figure out my life, these responses greatly inspired me. Perhaps, as Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel alluded to in her answer, meaning had emerged through the practice of the quest. What follows is a small selection of the responses, from philosophers to politicians, prisoners to playwrights. Some were handwritten, some typed, some emailed. Some were scrawled on scrap paper, some on parchment. Some are pithy one-liners, some are lengthy memoirs. I sincerely hope you can take something from these letters, just as I did. My letterIn 1931, the philosopher Will Durant wrote to 100 luminaries in the arts, politics, religion and sciences, challenging them to respond not only to the fundamental question of life's meaning but also to relate how they each found meaning, purpose and fulfilment in their own lives. I am currently replicating Durant's study, and I'd be most appreciative if you could tell me what you think the meaning of life is, and how you find meaning, purpose and fulfilment in your own life? As Durant originally instructed, 'Write briefly if you must; write at length and at leisure if you possibly can.' I've had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: 'meaning' and 'purpose'. I don't think they're the same. I'm not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you. It's like alchemy. The alchemists were on a futile quest, we think. There wasn't a philosopher's stone, and they couldn't make gold. But after many years of patience exercised, the alchemist saw he had developed tenacity, vision, patience, hope, precision – a range of subtle virtues. He had the spiritual gold, and he understood his life in the light of it. Meaning had emerged. Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your anthology of views on the meaning of life. It's not something I can respond to, I'm afraid, because it's not clear to me how 'life' can have a 'meaning' in any ordinary sense of either word. It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut. Once we've got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a 'meaning', we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up. Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That's what I've learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it's shown me that it isn't until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive. Every life is a journey from innocence to wisdom. Fairy stories and folk myths, philosophers and poets all tell us this. Our innocence is chipped away, often gently but sometimes brutally, by what happens to us. Gradually, innocence is transformed to experience, and we begin to understand who we are, how the world is, and what matters most to us. The threat of having our very existence taken away by death brings a mighty focus to the idea of what matters most to us. I've seen it so many times, and even though it's unique for everyone, there are some universal patterns. What matters most isn't success, or wealth, or stuff. It's connection and relationships and love. Reaching an understanding like this is the beginning of wisdom: a wisdom that recognises the pricelessness of this moment. Instead of yearning for the lost past, or leaning in to the unguaranteed future, we are most truly alive when we give our full attention to what is here, right now. Whatever is happening, experiencing it fully means both being present and being aware of being present. The only moment in our lives that we can ever have any choice about is this one. Even then, we cannot choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond: we can rejoice in the good things, relax into the delightful, be intrigued by the unexpected, and we can inhabit our own emotions, from joy to fear to sorrow, as part of our experience of being fully alive. I've observed that serenity is both precious and evanescent. It's a state of flow that comes from relaxing into what is, without becoming distracted by what might follow. It's a state of mind that rests in appreciation of what we have, rather than resisting it or disparaging it. The wisest people I have met have often been those who live the most simply, whose serenity radiates loving kindness to those around them, who have understood that all they have is this present moment. That's what I've learned so far, but it's still a work in progress. Because it turns out that every moment of our lives is still a work in progress, right to our final breath. I've thought about this a good deal since you wrote. I think the meaning of life is to keep the remarkable game of being human going forward. In the past, this meant reproducing, above all. But, now, it means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game. And since we're now setting that board on fire, it's our job to put that fire out. In our time, that's the most important task we can undertake, since all depends on it. The best thing about the human game is that it, potentially, can stretch far out into the future – but only if we act now. In my study of happiness and human nature, and in my own experiences, I have found that the meaning of life comes through love. In the end, it is love – all kinds of love – that makes meaning. In my own life, I find meaning, purpose and fulfilment by connecting to other people – my family, my friends, my community, the world. In some cases, I make these connections face-to-face, and in others, I do it through reading. Reading is my cubicle and my treehouse; reading allows me better to understand both myself and other people. There never has been and never will be a scientific discovery as surprising, unexpected and significant as that which happened on 28 February 1953 in Cambridge, when James Watson and Francis Crick found the double-helix structure of DNA and realised that the secret of life is actually a very simple thing: it's infinite possibilities of information spelled out in a four-letter alphabet in a form that copies itself. In response to your letter, here are a few thoughts that assisted me to look forward in my youth after those bleak, horrendous times in 1944. I am a camp survivor from Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. I was totally dehumanised, fearful, distrustful, lost to contemplate the future, all alone, unable to comprehend the values for a life in a modern civilisation. Fourteen years old – unable to walk, to express the latent, suppressed anguish – the realisation I only speak Hungarian, no skills, no education, no finance, no support system, no knowledge. The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was the discovery that kindness and goodwill had also survived. When the British soldier lifted me up from the mud hole – seeing a twitch in my body – he gently placed me in one of the small ambulances. From that experience, miraculous goodwill is one of the guiding lights to this day. I often think of that moment and ask, 'What part of that goodness with your heart do you take from that soldier?' Kindness, generosity comes in small everyday events. Small measures of goodness have an enormous impact – to this day I take nothing for granted. I remember the effect and appreciation this first helpfulness had on my life – it gradually removed the heavy iron cover on me, and sparks of 'I can do' and 'I want to do' gradually came into my existence. In Sweden, where I was taken for recuperation for my devastated physical corpse-like being, one of the facilitators had a large collection of classical records. These he played every evening, and we sat around and listened in awe to Beethoven symphonies and other pieces. In my interpretation, I could feel the energy of the music, from sorrow and despair to the drive of supreme human effort to rise above those destructive memories. I must say not completely – personally, I don't want to let it go completely – but I am free of the chains which deprived me in the camps. Music, generally, has an enormous effect on my life. I moved on. I became a Samaritan helper for some eight years. I took a degree at the age of 60 and then a diploma in psychology. For me, life is full of possibilities, like a search engine – find your meaning for existence that makes me feel worthy – self-esteem is the reward. I was fortunate in having a family and could play with my grandchildren, reclaiming those years of persecution. I remember the doctor in Sweden who took me in his arms to teach me walking, and turned to me saying: 'I have a little girl like you.' What a discovery about myself – powerful words that still ring in my ears long after 70 years – I cherish kind words. These are the propelling force to continue our journey and many more small events that had a huge impact on my life. It is not easy to respond to this, except perhaps in the negative: life would have no meaning without family and friends, nor without an incentive for getting out of bed each morning. I could not be happy if I were idle, nor if the only things that motivated me were purely mercenary, with no personal interest or connection. We all need a purpose – large or small – and that, to me, is what gives life its meaning. I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we're seeking isn't a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive. There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are 'why I'm here' – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who've found liberation in something I have written. I would struggle, though, if I were to try to argue that any of these will 'mean something' in some kind of timeless way, for example, 500 years from now. What's changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That's all – but, then again, I think that is everything. And so I try, on a daily basis, to navigate more and more by that feeling of aliveness – rather than by the feeling of wanting to be in control of things, which is alluring, but deadening in the end. Yours is a big question, certainly, and one I have been thinking about a lot this year. Last spring, my niece Rosemary was born, squirming and healthy and pink, with my sister's big blue eyes and my brother-in-law's button nose. Nine days later, she died in her sleep. On the phone with my sobbing mother, I realised my sense of life's meaning had been undefined, or at least had never been tested. I'd been chugging along, untouched by capital-T tragedy, oblivion feeling blissfully abstract. Confronted for the first time with the Real Deal, I searched for meaning, and found none. There had been no warning, would turn out to be no cause, and of course it had not happened 'for a reason'. Something terrible had occurred from nowhere, and now our lives were changed for ever, and Rosie would not get to have one. I felt nihilism like a riptide, swirling around me and tugging at my ankles. It would have been easy to go under. But the days and weeks after the meaningless cruelty of Rosie's death also taught me about life's purpose, or at least showed me a way I might define it. I had anticipated a week of quiet mourning punctuated by a kind of depressed chaos as everyone scrambled to arrange a funeral and perform grim and foreign administrative tasks. I assumed tragedy on this scale would feel lonely. But my memories from that period are densely populated: old friends rallying, travelling long distances to hold my sister and her husband and look at pictures and remember a person they would never get to know; my long-divorced parents coming together to provide a soft place to land for their three long-grown children; distant relatives with stories we'd never heard about cousins we'd also never be able to meet; a cluster of colleagues surrounding my sister, huddling like a football team about to break for a challenging second half; the unlikely presence of my divorce lawyer with a box of homemade scones and clotted cream. Instead of numb or adrift, I felt almost painfully alive. We were surrounded, I realised, by Rosie's community, who were, of course, ours too. There were faces I hadn't seen in years – due to life and geography and the pandemic – and I saw then that they had not been gone, not really. We hadn't 'lost touch', we had just been busy, all of us, with work and children and the business of living, but now they were needed, and so here they were. Increasingly, I think this is the only purpose we have: to be in connection with each other, to batten down our collective hatches against life's many and various brutalities. To me, everything else that feels like purpose – making and consuming art, engaging in collective efforts to better society or the planet, listening deeply to loved ones – is really an avenue to connection, providing it and being enriched by it, too. In terms of happiness, many people more intelligent than I have suggested shooting for contentment instead, and I think they are right. Still, there are some things that make me reliably happy, and I have found much contentment in cultivating opportunities to experience them. These include: friends' laughter, reading at the bar, unrealistically flattering denim, good gossip, morning sex, coffee and a walk with a slight hangover, a sunny day experienced from a safely shaded area, cornbread, cats, the exhilaration of being bad at something new, boxing (relatedly), and making a sauce for three to five hours. There are more, of course – the list grows all the time – and keeping track of them feels important. I suppose happiness is knowing what is personally meaningful to you, and engaging with it, which is kind of a nice full circle to come to in this letter. A natural conclusion that returns to the beginning makes me happy, too. Another for the list. Life is, to me, a gift. You have to respect it. Appreciate it. Hold on to it for as long as possible. People who let go don't deserve it. Four and a half decades of my life have been in a hole, But I've still enjoyed it. I made it work for me. Coz I found 'myself'. [Overleaf] Never piss on a rattlesnake! If you add value to other people's lives, you'll never be at a loss for living a life of purpose. The purpose is what ultimately leads to happiness. Society emphasises success a great deal, and some people overreact to it by being overly harsh on themselves, on their perceptions of what success is. Rather, ask yourself, how can I add value today? And then do it. My learning is that you're going to fail. If you do anything at all in life that is noteworthy. On the other hand, if you play it safe you might not fail. But then you probably didn't reach your fullest potential, either. Failure is fine. It's how you respond to it that makes all the difference in the world. Don't blame anyone for the failure, least of all yourself. Simply acknowledge what has happened, note what you've learned and how you'd do it differently next time, and move on. Make no excuses. They are simply a waste of everybody's time. Worst comes to worst, you've learned something new that makes you a more multi-dimensional person, an interesting person. After all, it's not failing that matters, but learning from our failures. And if you don't try, how can you possibly fail in the first place? It feels strange to be writing to you about the meaning of life while my mother is struggling to hold on to hers. At the age of 89 she's had a long life by the standards of human history, but any human life is the briefest glimmer in the vastness of time. The inconceivable brevity of human existence brings questions about meaning, purpose and fulfilment into sharp relief. My mother was born in York in 1934, on Christmas Day, and grew up playing in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. She was a teacher, and later an artist and a landscape photographer. Lately, before her recent illness, she would wonder to me at the prospect of nonexistence. She knows she will die, as most of us do at some level, but she cannot imagine not existing. As the horizons of her life have contracted, she has been able to find contentment in simpler and simpler things: the rhythms of the garden, the play of light on the leaves of a tree. This flexibility suggests to me that meaning, purpose and fulfilment are not only different things, but moving targets, if they are targets at all. I've spent my career trying to understand more about the mystery of consciousness. About how the mess of neural wetware inside our heads can give rise to the everyday miracle of experience. Consciousness is intimately familiar to each of us. We all know what it's like to be conscious, and what it's like to lose consciousness when we fall into a dreamless sleep. The nature of consciousness is also endlessly perplexing, confounding scientists and thinkers for thousands of years. Some people worry that pursuing a scientific perspective on conscious experience might drain life of meaning by reducing us to mere biological machinery. I have found the opposite to be the case. There is no reduction. There is rather a continuity with the natural world, and with this continuity comes an expansion, a wider and deeper perspective. As we gradually pull back the curtains on the biological basis of conscious experience in all its richness, there are new opportunities to take ourselves and our conscious lives less for granted. We can see ourselves more as part of, and less apart from, the rest of nature. Our brief moments in the light of existence become more remarkable for having happened at all. A recognition of the precarity of consciousness can help defuse some of our existential fears. We do not usually worry much about the oblivion that preceded our birth, so why should we worry about the equivalent oblivion that will follow our death? Oblivion isn't the experience of absence, it is the absence of experience. As the novelist Julian Barnes put it, in his meditation on mortality, there is 'nothing to be frightened of'. I've come to think of consciousness as the precondition for meaning. An argument can be made that without consciousness, nothing would matter at all. Meaning, purpose and fulfilment can take many forms against this backdrop. The Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia best captures what I have in mind here. Eudaimonia means living well, flourishing, doing that which is worth doing. It is not about pleasure or hedonic satisfaction, nor is it about selfless sacrifice for some greater good. It involves realising one's potential through cultivating virtues such as reason, courage and wisdom. Fundamentally, it comes down to doing a bit of good and feeling good about doing so. For me, participating in some small way in the scientific and philosophical journey to understand ourselves and our place in nature, and communicating some of this journey to others, offers the promise of a slice of eudaimonia. In practice, frustration lurks at every turn. There is the risk of hubris when dealing with such apparently grand matters. And the dramas of everyday life get in the way. Which brings me back to my mother. Today she has rallied, unexpectedly confounding the prognosis of the doctors. I asked her what she thought the meaning of life was, from her now frail vantage point. She told me it was about relationships with other people, and who can argue with that. Sixty years ago, with a burgeoning career, on the verge of being a professional playwright and director, I would probably have readily answered your question. I felt, as they say, that the world was at my feet. These days, alas, I sense very much it is on my back. I have no idea why I write, nor indeed why I'm still alive. Probably the writing is as much a reflex for me as breathing. That's all I can say. Sorry, but you caught me at the wrong end of my existence. My brief answer: what the hell? What is the meaning of life? I can honestly say: I have no idea. But I write this in London, where I am visiting with my wife and two boys. And they are healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy, and there's joy in watching their delights: a clothing stall with a jacket they've long wanted; the way the double-decker bus carries us above the fray; a monument to scientific discoveries beside a flower garden and goats. I'm surrounded by evidence – of the blitz, D-day, colonies despoiled, JFK and MLK and 9/11 – that all could be otherwise. I hear about bombs falling on innocents, an uncertain election, a faltering climate, and many of us lacking the will (or charity) to change. Yet still I marvel that we flew here in under 12 hours – while my ancestors required months and tragedies to transit in reverse – and that I will send this note simply by hitting a button, and we can love whomever we want, and see and speak to them at any hour, and a pandemic did not end my life, did not kill my children's dreams, did not make society selfish and cruel. And, for now, that's enough. I do not need to know the meaning of life. I do not need to know the purpose of it all. Simply breathing while healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy is such a surprising, awe-inducing, humbling gift that I have no right to question it. I won't tempt fate. I won't look that gift horse in the mouth. I'll simply hope my good fortune continues, work hard to share it with others, and pray I will remember this day, this moment, if my luck fades . This is an edited extract from The Meaning of Life: Letters from Extraordinary People and their Answer to Life's Biggest Question, edited by James Bailey and published by Robinson on 3 April. To support the Guardian and Observer buy your copy from
