Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2003

A thought started brewing in my head somewhere in the first part of October. I could claim that I’ve thought of nothing other than of this egg waiting in its nest since then, but this idea is one of those that hatch in phases. I’m only now, in the first part of December, ready to tap the other end of the egg in the hope that the whole truth will come screaming out of its shell.

My question last time around: Do I still keep a familiar template regarding my future in the back of my mind? I have already to a large extent written what I had wanted to say, and I am running the risk of regurgitating the same politics, to once again dish it up as something new I just needed to add.

I’ve been planning for quite some time now to wrap up this unpublishable collection of pieces, stuff all my cash in a small plastic bag and head back to South Africa. Having arrived, I’ll do this and that, print name cards that state who I am, why I want to spend my time in that particular town, and how I reckon I fit into the community – in terms that my fellow townspeople will understand. Within a few weeks, I’ll be a local resident recognised and greeted warmly every Saturday afternoon when I go to the local golf course to collect old balls from the rough to sell for bread and tobacco.

Long before I’ll start missing Taiwanese women and deep-fried octopus, I will sit down to dinner with the daughter of one of the town’s most prominent leftists. Shortly thereafter she will be most delighted that someone like me will want to get married to her, since she can only play five operas on the piano; she often loses her temper for social injustice, and her mother always says she’s way too smart to ever find a decent man and has much too keen a sense of humour to be taken seriously by any serious-minded poet or wealthy engineer.

And so my life will continue according to the conventional model. The in-laws will sometimes feel compelled to make excuses about my so-called lost decade, when “he went to the Far East to teach English and write and so on”. I will, however, be where most citizens of the Middle Cosmos once only dreamed they would end up – married, home, work, kids, lawn mower …

I know I make myself guilty of stereotypes. I know life in the middle stratum of society is no Scout camp or Sunday school picnic. I know all people, middle-class or not, desire a proper roof over their heads. I know everyone tries their best to scrape together enough money each month to keep their souls contained within their skins. And I understand, to hold your own child in your arms changes how you view things, in ways you would never have guessed.

Still I wonder: Is the ideal of a middle-class existence on the cards for every adult person in the developed world? What, to ask the inevitable follow-up question, are the alternative models of a successful, happy, fulfilling adult life?

One difficulty in answering this question is the definition of a middle-class existence. There are also factors that make an answer different for different people – social reality, cultural expectations, and perceptions of what it means to be a successful adult, all play a role.

Since this is not academic material and because I am not in a position to write about anybody else’s life, the axe once again splits the stump at my own front door. What then, would be the alternative for me, or at least for someone in my position? I am 32 years old. I own no property and I don’t even have a car. The few pieces of furniture I call my own fill up an apartment in Northeast Asia. I have the equivalent of a few thousand rand in the bank; I believe credit cards are diabolical; I have no documentation of a fixed income with which I can convince a bank manager to give me a home loan, and I have a stubborn tendency that drives me to write what I want to write regardless of whether it can be published, even when I should, in all honesty, be taking steps to earn more money.

What are my options if I do not qualify for the standard ideal of a middle-class family man? What are my options if conservative, middle-class criteria of what an “adult” ought to be doing with his life – as espoused by my own parents, my sisters, and friends whom I regard for various reasons as important – freely swing above my head?

TUESDAY, 9 DECEMBER 2003

To get married and have children is more than just a lifestyle choice – it is, and probably has always been, across all cultural divides and historical periods, the primary requirement to qualify as a full-fledged adult member of the community.

Obviously no one doubts your ability to make choices and take responsibility for your own actions if you are older than 21, and even more so if you have already reached the Big Three. But it’s one of those cases where people will say, “Yes, you’re old enough to join the conversation, but …,” and then they don’t know how to complete the sentence.

A friend recently asked me – unaware that it is also one of my current pet issues, when I think one’s parents regard you as an adult, as a fully matured “one of us”. My question is: when do not only your parents, but the wider community regard you as an adult one of them? A preliminary answer has already been offered – marriage and children (and if you qualify for a loan, you can add purchasing your first residential property).

Which brings us back to my question of last night: Let’s say marriage-and-children is not your choice, or it just doesn’t work out for you, then what? Will you get treated as a second-class adult until you’re eighty? Will adults who do qualify to be considered as such according to the above criteria become annoyed if you want to raise an opinion on “adult issues” such as children and the educational process? Will they cut you short with a “You don’t know because … you just don’t know”?

(Incidentally, the three things – buying property, getting married, and having children – are regularly mentioned in one breath as milestones that qualify one as an adult. But even if you don’t own property, even if you are divorced or have never been married, what truly matters is whether you know the responsibility of taking care of your own child. This, more than anything else, is the Golden Unwritten Requirement.)

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule; people who never produce and/or raise their own children who are well respected as full-fledged adults. The best examples I can think of is the Catholic Pope and the majority of Catholic priests. This group is, in fact, respected because they voluntarily relinquish the joy (and responsibility) of their own children so they may serve the Church and their faith community according to their doctrines. Same goes for the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks. One could almost say that full-time members of these religious communities and other similar communities have special waivers that allow them to be treated as full-fledged adults without having satisfied conventional qualifications for proper adulthood.

What about other adults who fall outside the conventional criteria? Where do the adults fit in who find themselves in mental institutions or those who sleep on the streets and are labelled, “homeless bums”? Nobody seriously expects adults in mental institutions to act or to function as adults (some are possibly even locked up in the fear that they do conceive children), and homeless people are in general not deemed good enough for any anything other than maybe a few coins and a short sermon in the parking lot. But do they still fit in, in a way, as adult members of society? They are not quite treated as children, and in some cases are expected to take responsibility for their actions, so … shall we settle it for the moment by calling them “semi-adults”?

To come back to my particular situation: If I were a homeless, mentally unstable priest calling myself “Pope”, I would have fallen in the semi-adult category, although I could still have claimed exemption from conventional qualifications because of my priesthood. But because I’m not mentally unstable, homeless, a priest or a monk, and because I also do not have children, I find myself in a special group: unmarried, single, working adults who according to the standards espoused by many do not qualify for full adult status.

Does it bother me? It annoys more than it bothers. I consider myself a full-fledged adult, but if the requirements of children and possibly property are taken into account, I am not necessarily going to be treated as a full-fledged adult by people who do meet these requirements.

I can throw this whole debate over to the other side and say that there are many adults who can write “Parent” on their identity cards, but who I would regard as … shall we just say, underdeveloped by my own measure of adult opinions and conduct.

Now that I think about it, shouldn’t there be something like a credit system? Should one not receive credit for well-worked out opinions about mature issues that are relevant to all adults; credit that will make up for the lack of credit others receive for intimate first-hand knowledge of parenting, even though they may not have so many well developed opinions on other relevant matters? The answer is probably negative. Parent-adults have the broad community on their side. Fair and well if you have worked out your version of the meaning of life and issues of identity and the role of belonging in one’s life, and if you’re able to express these things in mature vocabulary worthy of a full-fledged adult; what matters, though, is whether you have children or not.

How will it change my opinion if I do one day hold my own child in my arms? I would like to say that my opinion will not change. It will still annoy me when someone believes that I can now join in the conversation when it comes to children, “because you are now a father, yourself”. A person is a full-fledged adult because they have reached a mature age, because they know how to function as an adult, and because they take responsibility for their own actions in the community in which they find themselves. I do not need children of my own to be defined as an adult, and I don’t need children of my own to express an opinion on the subject of raising children.

(Are there people who, consciously or unconsciously, are motivated to have children just so that they can qualify as “real” adults in their community? I believe there are.)

This piece has made a few turns I had not originally considered. (I don’t plan my writing anyway. I mostly write what I would otherwise have been telling myself out loud, wait for a title to present itself and call the end result “a piece”). I think I originally wanted to know if I only have one option for the future, namely to go back to South Africa, earn money, buy a house, get married and have children.

I still wanted to mention alternatives at some point, like the guy who lives in Hong Kong for twenty years, who can speak fluent Chinese, travel a lot each year, who produces loads of literary material (both publishable and unpublishable), and who will be known as the “eccentric uncle from the East” by his nephews and nieces.

However, I believe the issue of how full-fledged, respectable adulthood is defined, was the deeper issue behind the original idea that had been brewing in my head.

POSTSCRIPT

The problem addressed in this piece was that people who qualify according to certain criteria are treated as “mature adults”. If you are old enough to qualify by default even though you do not meet these “benchmarks of adulthood”, you are still accepted as a fellow adult, but you are often reminded in subtle ways that you do not meet a few critical requirements.

It was only much later that I thought of something else. Is it not true that people will, in many cases, find anything to cast themselves in a better light? If the other adult is not married and/or has not produced any offspring, they will find it in that. Then they will keep pounding this issue into infinity. If it’s not that, then it will be about the other person’s job or career, or their children who make too much noise, or “astonishingly poor taste in home decor considering they have so much money”.

Surely it is naïve to expect that you will get the same response from other adults at the table when the conversation is about fighting crime in the local district, when the other adults reside in that area and you live in a crime-free enclave in Scandinavia. Or that your opinion will necessarily carry the same weight if the conversation is about the education of children when you don’t have any children. Same goes for a conversation about marital problems if you have never been married.

However, some adults will always keep standards, hand-picked and custom crafted, that cast their own lives in a better light. For this reason, adults who believe in their own value despite the sometimes biased opinions of other adults will find it easier to get on with making a success of their adult existence, regardless of their own relationship status and property portfolio, and despite a possible utter lack of desire or even inability to have children.

______________________

Okay, let me just write everything down again. It’s Thursday, 4 December 2003 at twenty minutes past eleven in the morning. I’m listening to Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, the winter sun is warming up outside, and I’m waiting for my pot of tea to cool off so I can take a smoke break. Life is all right. I have 67,000 Taiwan dollars in the bank, and about 11,000 in the drawer. I also have three tea bags in the can, and I would say about fifteen cigarettes.

Some time ago I put forth the “Middelburg Plan” with so much passion that my voice started cracking. I thought: sell a series of English children’s books for a million, or a quarter. Then I throw my 32 boxes and my 9 pieces of furniture in a 20-foot container, and plant my heels into a linoleum floor in Middelburg for R895 per month. Yippee, finally.

Then I browsed around on the websites of some local publishers of language textbooks. Lights that warned of naïve ignorance flashed like police sirens: Writers of English textbooks rarely march out of a publisher’s office with cash checks in their hands after overwhelming the publisher with the results of a few months’ labour. The process, unfortunately, requires a little more patience.

But now, am I a businessman or a writer? I’m a writer, but I would very much like to be a businessman because I need money to go home.

My question is, if I live in South Africa and I need to do five hours of work on the computer for my business, and I get back from the Shoprite with an essay in my head that would take me two hours to write, what would I do?

I want to be a businessman, and not just for the cash with which I can buy plane tickets and container space. I want to win a round against people whispering behind their hands, “Shame, he’s a writer – or at least he tries to be one. He doesn’t know about things like paying bills and credit cards and money like us grown-ups.” I know it’s a personal matter I’ve written to pieces to a large extent, but I still need to … prove to perhaps none other than myself that I can talk about money with the same skill as about “the meaning of life”.

Do I want my bread with peanut butter on both sides? I know it’s frowned upon … but if I can just make enough for a plane ticket and a little space in that container.

I am a writer. I know this, because I’m sitting here on Thursday, 4 December writing a note to myself, whilst knowing full well I have work to do with profit in the pipeline.

Time for a plan. I am currently executing the plan of early August when I thought it was a brilliant idea to cancel two-thirds of my classes and just focus on “Business!” and Chinese studies. Then I moved to an even older apartment, wrote another million pages on “identity and place” and thought up business ideas (read: other types of writing) that can make me a ton of money as soon as possible.

Nightmares about perpetual exile, and dreams of barbecues and people who speak Afrikaans and Zulu opened my eyes to a combination of Plans A and B: continue with what I write, and teach enough classes for single-digit months to go home in single-digit months. If it is with profit from some business idea, fine. If not, then with money from another source.

The struggle will continue. My sword is sharp enough for any challenge.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 3 DECEMBER 2003

I am, at the final count, not from another planet. I’m to a large extent just an ordinary guy. I sleep, eat, go to the bathroom several times a day from all the tea I drink, and laugh when something is funny. I like to watch movies. I enjoy sports every now and then, and I read the newspaper every other day. As a heterosexual man I sometimes marvel at the physical beauty of women, and I have normal desires. I have to pay my bills, and from time to time pay a visit to the dentist. I catch a bout of flu about once a year, feel cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.

So if I say this is my literary project and no one else’s, I am only half right. What I experience, many people experience. What I fear is feared by others. What annoys and angers me has the same effect on many other people.

Still, I am not just the next guy with a different name and different lines on my face.

Early in my life I became aware of the greatness of things, and with that an intense awareness of my own insignificance. I initially tried to neutralise the inevitably associated anxiety with religion, until it lost its effectiveness for several reasons.

The difference between me and you is perhaps that I am aware of the fact that I won’t really matter at the end. I have accepted this to a certain extent.

Yet, complex as life sometimes is, you still try your best to mean something to someone else in some small way. My choice, considering this hope or desire, is to write.

Other people do other things to mean something to someone else. Maybe you – the reader of this text – does something specific in an honest and sincere effort to give more value to your life. Maybe I don’t do those specific things. May you also write. Perhaps we even write about the same topics … which would mean the only differences between you and me are our names and the lines on our faces … Oh, whatever. Actually quite a shitty piece, but what does it matter …

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 3 DECEMBER 2003

My morning yielded several faces: the first was my own in the haze of a blotchy bathroom mirror; the second was the young face of any of the children in Number Nine Crooked Village; the third was that of the old man that looks like Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Min, behind his desk at the school at Number Nine; the fourth face belonged to a baby boy on the train back to Fengshan. This collection of portraits got me thinking.

I myself am a child of the early seventies. While I too had my daily portion of food then, as now, and breathed, and from time to time had something to say, I can’t remember much about that time. I need to consult history books and old newspapers to fill in the rest of the story of a time when most of what happened never infiltrated my consciousness (or that made little sense to my underdeveloped brain). Only later did I learn, for example, that BJ Vorster had been Prime Minister of South Africa during this period; Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford the presidents of the United States; the pompous Leonid Brezhnev Comrade One in the Soviet Union; and Pol Pot Brother One in a country I would only discover two decades later on a world map. In other areas, as I would also only discover much later, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had already left for the afterlife, Bruce Springsteen had jumped on a table and was the next day revered as the future of Rock & Roll, and the British Lions under one Willie John McBride had sown tears and sadness everywhere they touched a rugby ball.

I know all these things now because I read about them. It could just as well have been history of the Middle Ages if it weren’t for the fact that I was also on the planet at the same time.

The seventies was my spectator decade – even though I didn’t understand much of what was going on on the proverbial playing field. I spent most of my days during that decade in sandpits, locked in an old wreck in our backyard (my own fault), and at or near kitchen tables eating my body strong enough for the next decade.

I was still unaware of most goings on outside of my immediate environment during the first part of the eighties. By the end of the decade though I was old and smart enough to understand concepts like “The Cold War”, “Apartheid”, “The Communist is Satan” and “Nelson Mandela will become the first black president of South Africa”. My reading and writing skills had developed enough by 1989 for me to leave school, and I tried to sound clever when people asked me what the next step of my life was going to be.

In the nineties, I became a more active member of the community, and remain so in my own way during this first decade of zero. I am now old and bald enough that it’s not unheard of for other adults to ask me, “What do you think?” I am also wise enough to marry and have children (or wise enough to not do it), and to throw my two cents in the purse of Polite Society.

Now, the above is useful as a short biography of myself, but it is somewhat limited as a larger view of the proverbial “us” that live out our existences during this time. Although I like to think of the last decade and the current one – the years of my late twenties and early thirties – as my time, that is just a fraction of the truth. This is also the time that the children in Crooked Village feel the same sun on their cheeks as I do on my half-bearded face. Same with the baby boy on the train, and the grandfather who owns the kindergarten. We all live in this time.

Five hundred years from now it won’t matter that I was 32 on this particular day, the children 5 or 6, the grandfather 75, and the baby boy 6 months old. This time belongs to all of us, even though some of us can barely write our names, and others have signed their names so many times that they’d prefer if someone else does it on their behalf.

We tend to be very focused on our own age, and to classify ourselves according to a growing number of groups and labels. There are Toddlers, Pre-teens, Teens, Young People, Early Twenties, Late Twenties, Early Thirties, Middle Thirties, Late Thirties, Mid-forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Retired, Elderly, Really Old and Old Enough To Be In The Guinness Book of Records.

I myself fit in the early thirties compartment, and some days I’m relieved that I am not yet in my mid-thirties. I have friends in their mid-twenties (or as I like to point out to them, almost on the “wrong side” of 25). I also have friends in their late thirties, and some of my best friends are in their mid-forties (the so-called mid-life). I can honestly say that I am happy to be 32. I am glad that I am not a teenager now. I am also very grateful that I am not yet elderly.

The question is, what does it matter? Of course there’s a difference between 15 and 75, and between 25 and 55. But let’s look at everyone who is now, say, under 35. This includes myself, my two sisters, a few friends, the teens of today, but also the many snot noses at the nursery school. It even includes the 6-month-old baby on the train. Where will we stand in relation to each other in thirty years’ time (or those of us who will make it that far)? I will be 62; not exactly young anymore, but not yet elderly. My one friend who is now 25 will be 55. My two sisters will be 56 and 64. The lot at the school will be between 34 and 36 years old, and the baby on the train would have just turned 30. Although this last group will be the youngest of those who felt the sun on their cheeks today, even they will not be children anymore. Some boys will have more hair on their faces than on their heads; some of the girls could have their own teenage sons and daughters.

Sixty-two, late fifties, mid-thirties … we’ll all be adults of the Time and World of 2033. It is possible that I will conceive children that will be younger than the children of the kids who had their little arms around my leg this morning. But at this moment we all have our feet in this time – here and now. If it rains tonight, we’ll all feel it. If there’s an epidemic of some sort, it will affect all of us.

I am tempted to say I am only weaving this essay together to make myself feel better because my own years are relentlessly advancing. Or because I felt like Grandfather Ho Chi Min this morning when I looked at a two-year-old in a thick coat dancing on stumpy legs, his nodding head not much bigger than my knee. Or because I was reminded how far I’ve already gone down the road of average life expectancy when I noticed the baby on the train, sleeping blissfully, unaware of anything but the warm cosiness of his mother’s chest. But none of these things will change the fact that a difference in age between two people blurs as the years advance for both of them. It also won’t change the fact that institutions, conventions, and the external evidence of our existence will probably survive all of us.

The fact is that other people were here before us. Democracy, free markets, modern labour relations, cities that look as if they’re about to burst out of their seams, and people who don’t know what a cave or a patch of vegetables look like exist not only because of our own actions. We inherited this world. And it is our duty to do what we can to leave something to those who will reflect on the meaning of their existence 200, and 500 years from now.

Not I, my two sisters, my almost-on-the-wrong-side-of-25-friend, my middle-aged and late-thirties friends, the toothless in the kindergarten and on the train, or any of the toothless old men with long white beards will still be here in 200 years’ time. This – this is what binds us all of this time together. None of us lived in the time of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte or Beach Walker X (disregarding theories of reincarnation or time travel for the time being). Likewise, none of the people who lived during the time of the French Revolution or during the Golden Years of the Roman Empire made it to Tuesday, 2 December 2003. They all died. All of them. With no exception.

It will therefore not be inappropriate to end this piece – for the sake of illustration – by asking what it matters today that a particular woman was on the later side of 25 in December of the year 1541, or what it matters today that an old geezer was in his seventies. And does it still matter today that a three-year-old child danced on clumsy legs to a forgotten tune 462 years ago?

Historical footnote:

“And,” someone asks 462 years from now, “what does it matter today, Wednesday, 2 December 2465, that a 32-year-old man was brooding over the value of his own existence late one afternoon in December of the year 2003?”

______________________

SUNDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2003

This year has yielded a few good things. Among others, I realised none of my plans is ever going to work out and that I’m probably going to be trapped in an “Exile” essay for the rest of my life. I’ve also learned a few things about life and have written some pieces about it. However, the development that has led to this particular piece of writing is that I have started playing tennis again. This delightful hark back to the days of my youth was due to my friend O. – always on the lookout for someone who can join him in some athletic undertaking.

So it happened that my energetic friend and I were chasing old tennis balls last Thursday afternoon. In the middle of a double fault, I took notice of the people on the court next to us. Anyone who has ever played tennis anywhere in the world would have recognised the spectacle – a coach, and a teenage boy who was sending one perfectly executed forearm after another over the net.

The forearm action was not what impressed me the most. The youngster was dressed in the most perfect tennis attire that one could desire from any tennis magazine. Expensive tennis shoes. Expensive, proper tennis socks. Shorts that were a proper fit, and an expensive, high quality T-shirt with some or other sporting logo. The young tennis player looked good. He would have been able to attract the attention of any teenage girl in the district as much for his impressive forearm action as for the fact that he was a paragon of success: attractive build, athletic abilities, and of course financially successful parents – who else could afford such a perfectly assembled tennis kit?

This young man looked the way I wanted to appear to the world ten, fifteen years ago on the courts of tennis clubs in Stellenbosch and in suburban Pretoria. Then it mattered, because at that age you’re eager to compare yourself with others in the area competing for the same spots in the sun. And if you weighed yourself up and found yourself to be a little light in the pants, you usually chucked your hairless tennis balls in your plastic shopping bag, straightened your racquet’s strings, and headed home.

However, there I stood, ten years later, on court number four of the Yang Ming Tennis Club in Kaohsiung. I had on a pair of shorts two numbers too big for me, a white T-shirt with a dragon motif in black, and on my feet a pair of old school socks and a pair of running shoes with worn-out soles. As I was smashing another ball into the net, I thought how gratifying it was that it no longer mattered that I looked the way I did, while the guy on the other court looked like a fledgling Pete Sampras.

Why does it not matter anymore? Because I have something now I had thought a decade ago the best tennis outfit would have given me: I feel good about myself. Why? Because I have found what I like to do; something which I figure I’m at least not worse at than playing tennis. I’m a writer, who runs around on a tennis court for an hour or so once a week with a friend. I’m not a tennis player who at the age of thirty wish I had gone to a foreign country instead, to write essays about the meaning of life. I feel good about myself, and I don’t need expensive tennis shoes and a professional coach anymore to give that to me.

And that’s where this piece would have ended if I could have it my way. But just as I was finally sending the ball with a beautiful backhand down the right line, the internal argument hit:

“So you feel good about yourself because, supposedly, you’re a writer?”

“Well, yes. I write, and I know I don’t write short stories or material for any well-known magazines, but I write.”

“Is it important to actually produce decent literature in order for you to feel good about yourself?”

“I suppose for the formula to work one must certainly not be too lousy at it. You have to be honest. And your identity must be rooted in credible external reality. So, yes. I think if you call yourself a writer, your material should at least be adequate.”

“And your material is adequate?”

“I’m not the best writer of my generation. I’m not even terribly original. I don’t necessarily say what others are not saying. But I say what I want to say, in the way I want to say it. And if I’m going to fail as a writer … well, then it’s something that still has to happen.”

“So you would agree the fact that you feel good about yourself nowadays is possibly based on your own misconceptions and illusions?”

“It’s possible. But life is a struggle, and I’m still standing. So I can’t be doing too badly.”

My friend O. and I finished our game. We wiped the few grains of salt off our brows, finished our sodas and walked away. On the way to our modes of transport I shared with him my thought about how a certain class of tennis player always looks the same, doesn’t matter whether you’re in Taiwan or South Africa.

We laughed about the children of rich people, solo tennis with wooden paddles and hairless tennis balls and how you eventually shake off the feelings of dissatisfaction about yourself after years of torture comparing yourself with people who look so much better in the sun than you.

I mentioned how it sometimes appears as if we spend years constructing our own worlds in such a way that we can eventually feel good about ourselves, so that we don’t have to feel ashamed anymore about the things we couldn’t have had better in our younger days. And, O. added, to be able to laugh about the things we were once so embarrassed about.

But I have never been satisfied with an unfinished argument, and I know the standard for a “good point” is high. After all, I can still get away with a debatable point if my opponent was of flesh and blood, but my differences of opinion these days are mostly with the Internal Man of Steel. He does not tolerate partially assembled arguments, and he does not rest before an issue has been resolved.

“What does it mean to feel good about yourself?” the Man makes his reappearance as I’m starting to pedal home. (“Damn this!” I wanted to shout.)

“Among other things, it comes down to you going through a process by which you identify what is not important to you,” I replied to my own question. “Or you go through a process by which you come to understand that some things are not as important as you once considered them to be. So, you distance yourself from things that don’t matter so much anymore, and the end result is that you feel better about yourself.”

“You mean things like expensive tennis shoes and flawless forearm shots to your professional coach?”

“Yes, to name one example. The process also involves that you identify the things in which you are truly interested, things which are important to you … your talents, your strengths; things you can use to make a success of yourself. The idea is you go through this process, and you emerge at the other end with a better idea of who you are and what you should do to be happy. To eventually …”

“… feel good about yourself.”

“Yes.”

“But what does it matter if you feel good about yourself?”

Dear reader, it’s quite possible that you consider this material to be boring. You may think I constantly harp on the same points. You may think I’m keeping this project artificially alive because I am too much of a coward to confront a more ruthless world in my own country. You may even feel like putting this material down to watch TV instead or maybe going outside to hit a tennis ball hairless yourself against a brick wall.

However, I politely implore you to do me a favour: Imagine what it must feel like to be me.

I cannot take anything for granted. I have to question everything, and at least make an attempt to understand everything. And not even to slide in behind my computer at home to write an essay about it. I must understand in order to function – in this world, in this particular period of the history of human existence, on this planet!

By now I have actually managed to develop an adequate understanding of the world and historical period in which I live. (Don’t have much of a choice: We all know what happens to people who fail to function properly in Polite Society.) I will even be so presumptuous these days as to claim over a cup of tea that I know what the “meaning of life” is, that I even deserve to know, or that I have spent enough years pondering the question to have at least a reasonable idea by now. Other people my age have houses and cars and credit cards and children. I should, after all, have something to say at a social occasion! (“Hello, I’m Brand. I don’t have a house, a car, a credit card or a child, but I do know what the ‘meaning of life’ is …”)

Of course, it’s always possible that everyone knows what the “meaning of life” is, that I’m simply far behind everyone else, like being late for a party and blaming the traffic. And as friends and family share glances I know everyone had to deal with the same traffic to be on time. It was only me who had to stop at every corner to take a smoke break, to survey the landscape and take everything in. And just maybe the so-called meaning of life was never such a big secret from the beginning.

However, why on earth do I ask these questions? And I know I’m not the only one! It does sometimes feel like I’m on a solo mission when I stare out my kitchen window night after night, but I know everyone wonders about these things – or maybe I just hope they do.

Have people always asked these questions? And I’m not talking now of the Greek masters and writers of ancient Rome and Confucius and the Buddha. I’m talking about the peasants and innkeepers and market women and maids and sailors and soldiers from a few centuries ago. Did they know the answers to the important questions of life? Did they wonder about it? How about miners and factory workers in the present day and age, and mothers with curlers in their hair and a baby on the hip, and street sweepers, teachers, tradesmen, lawyers and engineers, and professional tennis players and their coaches?

If serious questions challenge us, how many of us are ready to recite an answer in which we truly believe?

______________________