Life is meaningless?

Many people think that reading makes you a better person. Or at least wiser.

Well, nothing is necessarily true.

It all depends on the reader. The books give you information. It gives you power. How you USE that information is upto you. How you apply this power is within your discretion. The books give you knowledge but not wisdom. And understanding this point could be considered as the first step towards wisdom, towards freedom from the chain of black letters. In fact in many cases 'education' which is supposed to educe or bring forth our latent talents actually inhibit our growth as a person. Our whole being gets eclipsed and we remain an un-germinated seed, an un-blossomed bud. We die intellectually under the heavy stack of books. And it happens more often than we realize. Reading is no substitute for thinking. We cant expect others to think for us and give us the ready-made wisdom.

I am not against reading. Nor I am planning to quit it. It is a nice habit provided we appreciate the possible side-effects of it.

To quote Paracelsus, the Greek philosopher-

Every substance is a poison. There is none which is not. It is the dose which determines whether it is a poison or a medicine.

We MUST understand that an author writes for himself and not for the reader. For him, his interests are supreme and not others'. As I have already mentioned in my last post, the reason could be economical or political or even therapeutic. The plots are made to prove a point, a perspective. Every piece of writing is more or less tendentious.

Camus and other proponents(Samuel Beckett etc) of 'absurd theatre' indefatigably drone on the absurdity of life. If you read 'Waiting for Godot' you'll realize how bleak their world is made and how often they use the metaphors which draw nothing but dull and dreary pictures of decay before your eyes. They create a colourless world mortally chased by monotonous buzz of the flies hovering over rottening bodies of starved people. If the books of self-help and management touch one extreme of senselessness and stupidity where everybody wears a mask of smile like a cureless moron these books too, in the name of depicting reality, present an absolutely distorted view of world which is no more true than the former ones. The meaninglessness of life is the central theme of these writers. Though these writers are great and their thoughts are quite profound but that does not give us a reason to forfeit our common sense, to surrender our rationality in their possession. This is not the pre-requisite for reading. In fact reading should be dynamic and interactive. The more interactive we make it, the more we extract out of it.

If we cease to ask questions, if we suppress our curiosity to dormancy, if we stop to doubt then we render ourselves ineligible for reading. Then indoctrination takes place and not education. And it invariably results in fossilization of the mind. The very purpose of reading is defeated.

So we must ask questions. For the sake of it. Asking new questions is more important than even finding the answers of old ones. Sometimes the writer is skilled and persuasive and thus it becomes very difficult to find out the specious arguments or unfounded premises for an ordinary reader. But we can always question his intentions, the motivating force behind the choice of the topic and behind the side he chooses to take. Many a times he just speaks the voice of his time. And all the works of fiction, I believe, is directly or indirectly autobiographical. And for that matter even the work of non-fiction, even painting, even photography and even journalism! Why would a person choose a topic to study ignoring other thousand ones? Definitely he is emotionally attached to his purpose but he tries to hide it behind the veil of reason. Every man, and writers are no exception, is full of biases on the basis of his various experiences. And we tend to generalize our biases also. We even forget the difference between bias and fact, even the most learned writers too. We often deliberately propagate our biases and opinions to others too. A reader, before he credulously adopts everything he reads as the ultimate truth, must be aware of this truth.

Lets talk about the title of this post: Life is meaningless. While I was reading 'Of human bondage' by Somerset Maugham, I was absolutely enchanted. My mind was apparantly being regulated to think in a particular direction (Ayn Rand readers, you have gone through the similar experience. Havent you?). It is true with all the great writers who powerfully influence our mind. They make plots conducive to their purposes, a world where characters are mere puppets who live only to prove their point of view. They are hardly real. And we are tangled in the larger-than-life characters and extreme situations and worse than that, we tend to confuse those things as real and try to map and project the unreality of the world of fiction onto reality. And here we make mistakes. Big mistakes. Ok granted, Maugham hypnotizes our faculties of thought and reason for a while. Accepted. It is also understandable that all of us are not able to see the inconsistencies and the overpowering effect of rhetoric and other literary tools like exaggeration but the least which should strike the attention of a careful and sincere reader is the stark contradiction between the content and the motive of the writer. If these folks really believe in the meaninglessness of life then why do they take so much pain to write this at the first place? What accounts for their painstaking purpose of making this available to his readers? How does it matter anyways if noone reads this? Do they want to make us more informed, more evolved? Or do they want to earn fame? But after all everything is meaningless and valueless. So what for?

I have serious doubts on the sincerity of these fellows who sell death by depriving life of its meaning. They say life is meaningless. It has no significance, no importance. The obvious question is: for whom? For a nameless fellow objectively observing the earth from mars or venus? My life is most meaningful to me. The smallest details of my life is significant to me. My life is important to all who love me or hate me or try to ignore me. I will fell helpless and hopeless if the people I love lose their interest in their live by reading these trash. It would be painfully meaningful to me.

This poisonous concept of meaninglessness strips the life of its vitality. I am sure it is a conception of the most vicious minds humanity has produced. Their skills I repeat might be awesome and they might earns accolades in the world of arts and aesthetics for themselves but by divesting others of their spirit and gumption they do no service to the world.

Life is beautiful and as meaningful as we make it.