This post, and my column in general, is intended as a father’s letter to his son. But it is a letter to all lonely sons, a letter I wish my own absent dad (and perhaps yours) had penned to me (you). All of us crave connection, including paternal connection. The fathers we crave are less “masked” when speaking to a beloved son, and my aim here is to be that raw, candid, and truthful voice. Growing from boy to a clumsy manhood, I found many “fathers” in the seminal books of literature, philosophy, poetry and history. They, and their authors, have been organized for you by themes that touch us all: individuality, solitude, self-reliance, relationships, sexuality, suffering, adversity, death, spirituality. This column will slowly touch upon each of these and many other themes.
Today, I will open with the introductory topic of addressing a timeless topic: why we seek meaning.
“Dear son, in the crawl toward building resumes and fitting in, it occurs to us in flashes that there is something artificial to conventional versions, something perhaps even corruptive. I’m not Thoreau in the woods…nor do I wish to imply shame in following the American Dream (even from our home here in France).
Nevertheless, the amount of men and women living what that same author described as “lives of quiet desperation” is increasing, and I intuit that the cravings for more essential options—alas more “meaning” — are not otherwise satisfied by the standard fare of Netflix inflation and Starbucks-flavored comforts.
As the poet, Jane Mayhall sighed: “Don’t let me dream/doze and deny like/ a TV slob.” We deserve, in short, a more radical directness, we deserve candid and legitimate avenues to living better – from voices like Ernst Stadler’s, iconoclasts not afraid to push away the chair, rise from the table and demand: “Man! be substantial.” –Mensch! werde wesentlich.
But how? The lessons of our schools don’t give the widest education, at least the kind James Salter described as one “more elevated, with a view of how to endure, how to have leisure, love, food and conversation, how to look at nakedness… and other matters in a different way.”
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The modern curriculum doesn’t provide programs to aid us through the proverbial – that is, what it means to be alive, like Sapho’s description of the “sweet, bitter, impossible ache” of erotic desire, the painfully-won generosities of loving or the art of navigating the responsibilities of family, office, God and personal angst.
In these human, all too human domains, there are few guides; we are all, as Rilke warned: beginners. Yet many of us seek meaningful suggestions, time-tested signposts. No MBA, JD or BS from Yale, for example, satisfies a broken heart or prepares us for the death of someone irreplaceable, just as the time spent in 24-hour gyms or 20 screen cinemas cannot substitute the joy felt when a new idea or apostasy lodges in our soul and inspires an unexpected elevation of our spirit.
For those who have made income the measure of things, a slow disenchantment follows. The home, the pool or the shiniest car doesn’t shield us from what Saint-Exupéry described as the shadows of life’s inevitable “cyclones”– be they the finality of friendships, marriages or the stronger gales of deeper disunion. Where, in such moments, do we turn? How do we prepare? React or fine meaning in our pain or joys?
For those wanting to face such questions, is the self-help rack at Barnes & Nobles enough? Many do not even look that far, seeking click-thru distraction rather than Heidegger’s call to inner-directedness, and distraction is becoming the modus operandi of modern America. There is something inherently wrong with an environment that guarantees each of us the same downloadable answers, the same franchises to fill our growing paunches, but no qualified source to fill our thirsty souls.
This letter, and those to come, were written because I am worried the American Dream does not generate enough nourishment to sustain the human spirit, one which yearns to move passionately yet supported by guides through the variant aspects of being natural men, a movement that eventually demands the full allotment of our tears as well as our laughter; a movement, indeed, that requires the playfulness of children and the seriousness of the cemetery.
I sense, as others do, a world increasingly alienated from art, including what Montaigne described as “the art of conducting a life.”
And who am I to presume such an arrogant art? I am, as you know, anything but an exemplar. I am, as you know, many things, good to bad. Why listen to this father or the many other “fathers” I quote?
Saint-Exupéry felt that as long as a man has not become a god, truth will be expressed through contradictions, and from contradiction to contradiction, he reaches the truth. These letters, ironically, are a noble fool’s attempt at some form of truth, and they are written one disarmingly honest contradiction at a time.
I am this father. This contradiction. This everyman.
I am not a face on any cover. I, like you, am a face in the crowd. And I am not alone in these letters, for it’s not I who is furnishing the insights, but rather some 300 selected minds of the last 3500 years. Somewhere in the zigzag journey of my days, I was blessed with an exposure to exceptional books, ideals, institutions and individuals.
Again, I offer no easy answers – no one-line solutions to life’s challenges. Nietzsche, Weber, James, Montaigne and countless others…warn that each of us must face our own version of an abyss, and we each owe ourselves a responsibility and commitment to creatively structuring meaning, solutions and values that are hard-won in the wake of experiences unique only to ourselves.
And to open, I am asking you to consider why and how to seek meaning in your life. The simple answer, supported by millennia of great minds, comes down to this: you will only find meaning in yourself, and if you fail to find this, as Nietzsche warned, it doesn’t matter what else you find.
The letters to come will address how this self-knowledge and self-meaning can be arduously examined and won. It will require much pain, pleasure, candor and self-sufficiency—deep self-honesty and a movement away from crowds. But this is not easy.
Today, I see us scrambling in a world where individuals are effaced by an ever-growing mass culture. Even our “sages” shovel out advice en mass rather than one soul at a time, as if what works for one works for all. The pitfalls of materialism or the habits of measuring a man by his profession rather than his person is nothing new to our times, yet the degree of such forces is rising, making us more connected by iPhones yet less connected by substance, and, hence, lonelier…
Look around.
We see it in the faces of those in lines, and crowds of all types, from polo matches to match.com, individuals silently craving union and words as sweet as Neruda’s: Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano. (Rise to be born with me, brother.)
We seek meaning because (and as the great minds like Alejo and Lorca remind us) we seek connection. And there is no greater connection, be it at the hips, the heart or the mind, than to connect with another. But to do that well, more gracefully and with less humiliation, you must, my son, first connect with yourself.
The letters that follow will address this theme next: knowing yourself.”
Matthew Piepenburg is father to an exceptionally special daughter and son. He is the founder of the Emerson Circle and author of What Matters, a collection of insights from over 3000 years of daring thinking in world religion, literature, philosophy and poetry.
