The meaning of life

Evolution wants us to solve things. It's why our brains get that hit of dopamine every time we experience that aha moment.

A.J. Jacobs, The Puzzler

A.J. Jacobs above is trying to explain the universal appeal of puzzles, but I think he has hit upon the meaning of life.

I differentiate between the "meaning of life" and the "purpose of life." The latter I see as more individual We may see the purpose of our life as being to serve God, to care for our family, to benefit mankind, to protect the environment, to create art, to design great buildings, or whatever. Most of us find multiple purposes that make our lives worthwhile.

The meaning of life, on the other hand, I view as universal. All life, plants as well as animals, must solve problems to survive. A tree in a drought solves that problem by sending its roots deeper into the ground. When in the shade of other trees, it solves that problem by growing taller or sending branches out farther to find patches of sunlight. Some trees simply wait as long as necessary, a century or more, until older trees die and they can find their own place in the sun and then grow to maturity.

All animals must find food, shelter, water and a mate. They raise their young and hide from danger. Their entire lives involve trying to solve these problems.

We humans confront problems from the moment of birth. As babies the solution to every problem is always the same: we cry until until someone, usually our mother, solves our problem for us. As we grow older problems became more challenging, but we also develop skills to solve more of these problems by ourselves. Instead of crying about that toy across the room, we learn to crawl to fetch it ourselves.

Eventually we are old enough to get a job, where we are paid to help solve somebody else's problems by mowing lawns, babysitting children or making french fries. We devote our entire careers to problem-solving.

Our lives are so wrapped up in problem-solving that, as Jacobs observes, we devote our leisure time to problems, as well. Thus we do crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles. We play games, where the problem consists of beating other players. Or for entertainment we simply observe others solving their own problems. The novels we read, the movies and situation comedies we watch, the sporting events that occupy us all make problem-solving a spectator sport.

Many of us daydream of that island paradise or that cabin by the lake where there is absolutely nothing to do but relax. But after a day or two of doing nothing, we start yearning for problems to solve. And so we take a 15-mile hike or climb a mountain or try to catch the biggest fish in the lake or reorganize the cabin cupboards or whatever.

Without problems to solve, our lives would be empty and, in fact, meaningless.

Puzzled

In the middle of The Puzzler (2022), A.J. Jacobs writes, "As a kid, I suffered from mild OCD and I had many strange rituals." That explains a lot. Maybe Jacobs hasn't entirely outgrown that obsessive-compulsive disorder. That may, in fact, be the secret of his success.

Jacobs has written a series of popular books that perhaps only someone with "mild OCD" could have written. In The Know-It-All he describes his experience of reading through the entire Encylopaedia Brittanica from beginning to end. In The Year of Living Biblically he tells of trying to follow every law in the Hebrew Bible, including all those dietary ones, to the letter. And so on.

Now in The Puzzler, he writes about all the major forms of puzzles, from crosswords and sudokus to jigsaws and Rubik's cubes. More than that, he seeks to obtain and solve the hardest of them. He participates in an international jigsaw puzzle contest. He tackles nearly impossible mazes and purchases a puzzle that, even if a person knew what he was doing and worked at it nonstop, would take billions of years to solve.

Yet it is the author's immersion in these puzzles that makes his book so fascinating. His sense of humor also helps.  He interviews puzzle creators and the best puzzle solvers. He even interviews the great chess champion Garry Kasparov about chess puzzles.

One need not be either obsessive or compulsive, or even enjoy puzzles, to find pleasure in this book.

History on the move

The past never stays still. It changes, which is why the task of the historian changes with each generation.

A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Perhaps there is a reason our history teachers seemed to focus so much on dates — 1066, 1492, 1776. Dec. 7, 1941, etc. Dates are just about the only bits of history that never change. All the rest is subject to different interpretations by different historians with vastly different points of view.

We say we can learn from history, yet one thing we learn is that history is as open to interpretation as a Charles Dickens novel.

A.N. Wilson is writing about a Charles Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, when he makes the comment quoted above. The novel was inspired by his own history, his own difficult boyhood, yet the author gives his life an interpretation from his own middle-aged and upper-middle-class point of view, his own twist, as it were.

In Florida, where I now make my home, controversy swirls over proposed standards for teaching slavery. Was there any silver lining at all about the black cloud of slavery? And even if there was, should students be taught about it? Did slaves learn anything at all that benefited them after they won their freedom? The slaves themselves seemed to think so, but some modern interpretations suggest they were wrong. Slavery was 100 percent bad and absolutely no good came out of it, they insist, apparently not even Louis Armstrong, Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey.

Another question, usually ignored, is that if Florida schools give so much attention to teaching about slavery, as both sides of the argument seem to agree they should, how much of the rest of American history is going to be ignored completely?

The past never stays still, especially in American schools.

The potency of the unreal

A.N. Wilson

In his book The Mystery of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson uses the phrase "potency of the unreal" to describe not just the power of Dickens's fiction but virtually all fiction — novels, movies, TV shows, folk tales, whatever. 

Why do stories we know to be untrue impact us as they do? Why do they stir us emotionally, bring tears to our eyes, make us want to re-experience them even if only in our minds? Perhaps it is because fiction concentrates life, bringing it into sharp focus, leaving out the routine.

For most us, one day tends to melt into another, relatively few days in a lifetime of days worth storing in our memories for very long. Even if our lives have been interesting to us, they usually soon bore others when we start talking about them.

Fiction, if it's any good, leaves out the boring parts. Characters in stories rarely stop to eat meals, brush their teeth, mop their floors, work eight-hour days or even go to bed (unless with a new lover). Meanwhile fiction gives us sparkling conversations, sinister villains, intense confrontations, dramatic love affairs and other experiences that, even we have them in our own lives, happen only rarely.

Thus, when we find a chance to relax, we open a book or turn on the television and allow the unreal to overpower the real.

Man of mystery

The life of Charles Dickens was as convoluted and as mysterious as any of his novels, which should not be surprising given that his novels were in many respects inspired by his life. A.N. Wilson explores all this in his 2020 book The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Dickens, Wilson tells us, was in many respects as fictional a character as any he created on the page. He was, in other words, often a hypocrite, not always practicing the values in his own life that he so often preached in his fiction. His secret affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan, which did not become public until years after his death, is Wilson's prime example, to which he returns again and again. (Dickens wasn't alone in his deceit. After his death, Nelly lied about her age, pretended she had been just a little girl when she met Dickens and then married a clergyman.)

The great author hated his own mother and, after fathering 10 children, despised his own wife. He much preferred his wife's sister, who faithfully served Dickens for much of his life.

In successive chapters, Wilson writes about the mystery of Dickens's childhood, the mystery of his marriage, the mystery of his charity and so on, always paying close attention to the author's fiction to see what it reveals about each subject.

Sometimes Wilson can be as convoluted and as mysterious as anything relating to Charles Dickens, yet Dickens fans will find his book full of fascinating insights into both the man and his works.

Stories without stories

Việt Thanh Nguyen

Literary fiction, says novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a genre that pretends not to be. The very fact that we have the term "literary fiction" and know what it means suggests he is right. There are romance novels, westerns, thrillers, mysteries and science fiction novels, and then there is literary fiction, a separate category and thus a separate genre. Popular fiction might be another genre.

The Vietnam-born writer goes on, "My beef with a lot of literary fiction is that there's no plot." He describes a plot as fundamental to a novel. How can you have a story without the story?

His complaint is common among readers, most of whom ignore the kinds of novel he complains about, those lacking a plot or having plot so obscure that discovering it requires too much work. Yet these are often the very novels that win the literary prizes, even if very few people read them and even fewer enjoy them.

The plotless novel was primarily a 20th century phenomenon that still holds power in literary circles. Yet this certainly does not describe all literary fiction. Before the 20th century writers like Austen, Dickens, Hardy and Twain gave us literary fiction with plots even ordinary readers, not just the elites, could enjoy. The popularity of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck during the 20th century demonstrated that even during the age of Faulkner and Woolf plots and literary fiction were not exclusive.

More recently we have seen novels like Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins win over both literary critics and readers.

So perhaps literary fiction is not just one genre but two — those with vivid plots and those without.

Haunted by Dad

When first-person narration is discussed in literary circles, the subject of unreliable narrators often crops up. Should you believe everything the narrator tells you or not?

In Matt Haig's 2006 novel The Dead Fathers Club, there is no question but that the narrator is unreliable. Philip Noble is just 11 years old, and how many 11-year-olds really understand everything that is going on around them? His father has just died in a traffic accident, making the boy emotionally unstable. As the story unfolds it appears Philip may have psychiatric problems in addition to the current stress.

Told in a stream-of-consciousness style, the story finds Philip haunted by his father's ghost. The ghost, part of a dead fathers club in the spirit world, tells Philip he was murdered by his brother because Uncle Alan wants both the boy's mother and the pub the dead man had owned and where Philip and his mother live. The ghost tells Philip he must kill Uncle Alan within 77 days.

Philip's struggles to obey his father's ghost against his own conscience. The fact that Uncle Alan quickly moves into his mother's bedroom and takes over management of the pub strengthens the boy's commitment to actually commit the murder. Yet how can an 11-year-old boy kill a man and get away with it?

Readers may find a hint of Shakespeare's Hamlet in this novel, yet Haig's work remains strikingly original.