The Guardian view on the meaning of life: Easter and the ultimate question | Editorial
CHristians must be envied Easter. The story of death, resurrection, suffering and childbirth is a beautiful and comprehensive story. For non -believers, it does not have a diet of chocolate and Snoooker from the wall to the wall, and the possibility of a perhaps a bank vacation, the same purpose logic. Religious narration gives the meaning of life. The idea that there is a plan and the purpose is very satisfactory.
The last line of Kenneth Williams is enveloped in the puzzle that we all face: “Oh, what is the bloody point?” The new James Billy book, The meaning of lifeHe sought answers to this annoying question from a variety of what Billy calls “extraordinary people”. Like a philosophical mile Henry RootBilly – “Unemployed, sadness and live alone in the convoy of my dead grandmother” – Send more than a thousand messages For well -known artists and philosophers, and for people who have suffered from some tragedy that, I think, believes, a special look at the goal of life and its meaning.
Some answered lengthy, and for many, the meaning of life was residing in love or small kindness. But the contributions of Pithier had had a greater impact. Writer Michael Fryen, gently ridiculed the entire exercise. He replied, “It may be an idea to start with something smaller, say a permeable nut.” “Once we make it clear how the pickled nut can have” meaning “, we may move on to something larger – the Harinji region, or influenza – and we work on our way.” A wonderful era, apparently, brings its dark wisdom. “Sorry, but you finally caught the wrong end to my presence,” the playwright Alan Aikborn nag. “I have no idea about the reason for writing, nor why I am still alive.”
Young people are looking for meaning and purpose. The old has no time for that. “Tutto Nel Mondo è Burla,“Falstaff sings at the end of the wild Verdi Opera. All the joke in the world, Verdi, was, at his tragic ends, has a small joke in the formulation of this Ebullient conclusion. Ayckbourn reaches the same Falstafian conclusion. “what the hell?” He concludes in his response to Billy. Many artists have followed a similar path – from the flowers and the purpose to reaching and solving. Fail again, failed better. Religion and art are often opponents: one feeds on certainty, and the other is suspicious.
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, It gives deep computer thought 42 As an answer to the issue of final life, the universe and everything. Adams’s work fans seriously asked the meaning of the number. “It was a joke,” is Insist. “It should have been a number, which is a normal, small number … I sat on my office, and I was stood in the garden and thought” 42. ” Decoding the meaning of life, Adams suggests wonderfully, is the game of mug. Cracking the meaning of pickled nuts may actually be more satisfactory.
If you celebrate this Easter from the divine plan, enjoy the great Sunday. If this is not the case, put your faith in Montin’s answer to the great philosophical Williams. “If you can examine and manage your life, you have achieved the largest task ever,” he writes in his final article, about experience. “Most of our glorious achievements are to live our lives appropriately. All other things – judgment, construction, and accumulation of wealth – are in most small pillars, and unnecessary accessories.” A life for her his own logic.
