By The Landlord
“Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?” – Bob Marley
“The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Life is wasted on the living.” – Douglas Adams
“He not busy being born is busy dying.” – Bob Dylan
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.” – Maya Angelou
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” – Charlie Chaplin
“We live in a rainbow of chaos.” – Paul Cezanne
“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.” – Marcus Aurelius
“I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere.” – Keith Richards
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.” – Groucho Marx
“Me. We.” – Muhammad Ali
What is it? How do you do it? How do you describe it? And what's the point of it all? Is it tangibly a thing, an abstract idea, or a practical method?
Is it an egg? Fragile and a puzzle, one only truly discovered when finally broken?
Or an onion? Something with layers, and quickly makes you cry?
Or a river, beginning with a trickle, pure and full of promise, then quickly building in strength and momentum and direction, then filling with fish, but peopled with pollution, and then ultimately just diluted back into the great anonymous ocean wash?
Or like that of a butterfly? Brief, but strangely beautiful?
Perhaps it’s all all simply eating, shitting and chasing a stick?
Perhaps it’s all cycles, repetition, work and debt, heartbeat and breath, ending in death?
Perhaps it is mostly framed by forgotten boredom, and perspiration, with just occasional inspiration? And in that, it’s an obsessive, pointless but fascinating game, like cricket, most steady graft, non-event, strategy, occasional synergy, suddenly interrupted by, and living for, momentary flashes of skill, luck and excitement?
Perhaps it’s a journey filled with wrong and random turns, heroism and failure, semi-successful attempts to make a better version of yourself?
It’s all of these things of course, and perhaps it’s also attempting, to define and refine what it all means, in whatever way you have to express yourself, in this case, through the ever magical mass process of playlists.
So then, welcome to this week’s rather big theme, one that may touch on philosophy as well as practicality, how do it as much as what it is, decorated with morality and vice, the nasty and the nice, and oodles of theory and advice. “Life is …” lyrics might be a starting point, but there’s much more under the surface that might make it more interesting.
But finding the meaning or method may not be easy. In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, Arthur Conan Doyle recounts how even his great detective character, the man who could solve anything, struggled with this question: “What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
But help is at hand, Holmes. No surprises that this theme has prompted a cavalcade of visitors to the bar to offer inspiration. They’ve all certainly done ‘it’. Are there life themes within life themes? Of course there are.
Some like to sum up life in as compact way as possible. EM Forster announces that “the main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
But’s hard to beat for concision, the no-nonsense and rather baldly factual definition of biotechnologist Craig Venter who says: “Life is a DNA software system.” In many ways that is true. Life is for many living things, about DNA being passed from one generation to another, but surely there’s more than that when you see the poetic, tragic, heroic, life cycle of, for example, the monarch butterfly, which in a cycle of metamorphosis from egg to caterpillar to pupae to beautiful winged insect, migrates from Canada to Mexico, but selflessly takes four generations to make the full journey. It’s a generational achievement bigger than any individual. When they amass in thousands on their journey, it is resembles, very much as Paul Cezanne describes life, “a rainbow of chaos”.
But beyond that, does life really have a definition? First up, let’s hear from a group who regard life as essentially meaningless when taken as a whole question.
Meaning in meaningless? Socrates
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer,” says Joseph Campbell.
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person,” writes Anaïs Nin.
“All I know is that I do not know anything,” says Socrates.
Is life a search for happiness? If so, Albert Camus reckons we’re wasting our time. “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
But in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the world is perceived through the perspective of Asperger’s affected teenage mathematician Christopher John Francis Boone and his numerical prism who uses this metaphor: “Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”
But in terms of seeing life as numbers, there’s no bigger one than 42, the calculation answer made by Deep Thought, the super computer created by a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It takes 7 and a half million years for this answer, but then the problem is, no one knows the question. Additionally we hear from the narrator that: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.”
If that doesn’t make everything disappear into a puff of logic, then let’s see what other life philosophies are brewing in the Bar this week. As well as number theories, many seem to define life by proportions. “Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it,” says the great composer Irving Berlin.
“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it,” adds Lou Holtz.
And Woody Allen, never to be left out, comes up with a different fraction. “Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.”
Life of course, and talking about it, would be empty without humour.
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure,” chips in Mark Twain, with more than a glint of irony too.
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive,” adds American 19th-century travelling salesman and writer Elbert Hubbard with a smile.
“Yeah! We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can,” slips in vaudeville performer Will Rogers.
Comic actor Jim Carrey simply can’t stop living. How come? “Energy is what I believe all of us are. We're just conscious awareness dancing for itself for no other reason but to stay amused.”
But now Stephen Hawking who lasted longer than all predictions, and whose life of the mind burned brighter than most, is back with us, and slips in this wry comment with his robot voice machine: “Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.”
Death of course must make an appearance in life meanings. Is that what it’s all about, then? It’s time to go over to the bleaker section of the Bar and see what this crowd have to say.
“Life is a horizontal fall,” says Jean Cocteau, rather poetically if also tragically.
“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself,” say Albert Camus. Ouch. Hello darkness, my old friend, Albert.
Albert Camus: always look on the dark side …
“Yes, life is hard. After all, it kills you,” adds, Katharine Hepburn, not wishing to be outdone on the dark side.
“The goal of all life is death,” announces Sigmund Freud, getting inside our minds.
“Hmm. Yes. Life is a constant process of dying,” adds Arthur Schopenhauer, philosophically.
“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it,” says Socrates, broadening out the grim picture.
But can we add any colour to this dark perspective?
“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get,” attempts H. Jackson Brown, Jr, but no one is completely convinced.
“Every man dies. Not every man really lives,” says Scottish independence icon William Wallace, who met a very grim end, but at least you could say he also executed his life with energy and purpose, one defined by struggle.
“Any idiot can face a crisis – it's day to day living that wears you out,” adds the bleakly humorous Anton Chekhov. You can always count on a Russian for a laugh.
Thomas Hobbes famously said that without society, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
And that can often be the case, so is it time to get some useful perspectives to escape the sheer fatal black hole of it all? Let’s turn then to a group who can give us some practical advice, and what a strange and varied group they are, sitting together at one of our biggest tables.
After all this talk of death, Vladimir Nabokov inverts the idea of dying with an enormously radiant glow. “Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
“It is not length of life, but depth of life …” says Ralph Waldo Emerson, before Dale Carnegie chips in to enlarge on it:
“Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.”
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death,” says Leonardo da Vinci, who you could say had quite a few hobbies.
Only here inside Song Bar might you find Leonardo da Vinci enjoying a drink with Gza from he Wu-Tang Clan. The two are getting on famously. Gza adds: “Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.” Leonardo nods.
And next to him, Albert Einstein, who has just arrived on his bike, adds a bit more genius. “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
Einstein’s theory of momentum …
“I agree” says Australian playwright Kenneth G. Ross, “live each day as if it were your last, for one day, you're sure to be right.”
But what if there are difficulties along the way? “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced,” adds philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
But to what purpose? “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life,” thinks Robert Louis Stevenson.
“For me life is just continuously being hungry,” says a loud voice, calling for our bar menu. Who is it? Arnold Schwarzenegger, that’s who. “The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer!” he adds.
Perhaps all of these very full lives are fuelled by a realisation of how fast time can pass, or at least in our we perceive it, as comments now bring an ironic twist to proceedings, with all this sudden talk of food.
“There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last,” continues Robert Louis Stevenson. It might break a life rule, but can you really have your pudding first? Hell yeah! Why not?
“Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen,” adds mischievously inverting Mark Twain, whose comment may have inspired the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story and film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a life going backwards in time.
These heavyweight writers in turn inspire actor Matthew McConaughey to point out that “life is a series of commas, not periods”.
But however long life’s sentence, or paragraph might be, it often still reads far too fast.
“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else,” says Emily Dickinson.
“Life is half spent before we know what it is,” agrees George Herbert.
“Yeah,” says Jimi Hendrix, tuning his guitar. “The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.”
Life’s very short, so … Jimi Hendrix
Few put this point across more elegiacally than George Eliot: "The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”
So if we need to live life to the full, and time passes so quickly, how might we spend it? Creativity seems to one big answer. Check out the next table of artistic punters:
“I am an artist... I am here to live out loud!” shouts Emile Zola.
“Art is the proper task of life,” adds Friedrich Nietzsche with even greater volume.
“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself,” says George Bernard Shaw, who has the loudest voice of all.
And here’s Terry Pratchett reading from one of his numerous novels: “Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.”
But how do you find your ‘gift”?
“Well,” says The Muppets creator Jim Henson, “Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson, with another spin on creativity, joined by Samuel Butler, who adds that “life is not an exact science, it is an art.”
But shall we hear from some musicians? “Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it,” says Tom Lehrer with a grin, but whose songs talk better.
“Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise,” suggests George Gershwin.
Life improvisation with George Gershwin?
But let’s leave it to David Bowie to underline what the most vital ingredient to creativity is:
“Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out…”
Very true, and this is all very well, but what if you lose your way trying to achieve any of this? “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire,” says the cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
Many see the big L as an answer. “Life is a game and true love is a trophy,” says Rufus Wainwright. Life being all about love seems a bit of a cliche and all too easy to say, but not to achieve. But how do you win at both?
Could calmness and kindness be the answer?
“Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life,” says Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people,” advises author Roy T. Bennett.
“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” says George Eliot, moving across to the table of kindness.
“The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love,” adds William Wordsworth, happy to see her arrive.
“Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious,” says Thomas Aquinas, getting another round it for everyone.
“Yes my friends. In order to lead a meaningful life, you need to cherish others, pay attention to human values and try to cultivate inner peace,” says the Dalai Lama, as a hush reverence, pervades through the Bar. Tea, anyone?
Dalai Lama
So then, how to achieve that inner peace that is one of life’s great purposes? By slowing down? Perhaps. “There is more to life than increasing its speed,” adds Mahatma Gandhi.
And here’s the actor Morgan Freeman, who seems to mix in very comfortably with this company. “Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance.”
The crowd of life-definers and advisors continues to swell. Where can we leave it? Let’s have a little song about the big question, one to start proceedings, and can also be nominated, courtesy of those Pythons, and in particular Eric Idle, who reaches from the microcosm to the macrocosm:
So then, it’s time to bring your own life definitions, philosophies and advice, all source within song suggestions. Making sense of all this, I’m delighted to announce, and taking care of this task is this week’s Professor of Song Perspective, the omniscient Uncleben! Place your songs in comments below for deadline on Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. Er, so that’s … life.
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