I once took a tour of the Centre Pompidou led by an older man, about fifty or so, with small blackened teeth and old clothes that snowed ash. He led us past every Chagall, Duchamp, Herring, and de Kooning in favor of the lesser known artists of the expressionist movement. In a cadence vaguely resembling that of Slavoj Žižek, he asked us: “What, of the primary colors, is the deepest?” To which the murmuring consensus of the tour group was blue, then red, then yellow. He rejected this, and proceeded to evade further discussion by talking about the invention of paint tubes. The museum suddenly felt more like a dumpster than a vault — I was wading through unanswered questions and the metabolic byproducts of human emotion. We hang them up for each other.
The idea of a vain search for meaning made me think of when I first read J.D. Salinger’s classic “Franny and Zooey.” Franny, an intellectually precocious, self-absorbed college student under mental duress, becomes obsessed with the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me” — and what it means to “pray without ceasing.”
Franny is criticized by her brother, Zooey, for her motive in becoming obsessed with the prayer, as he accuses her of misunderstanding its importance. She says to Franny, "The religious life, the Jesus Prayer, is not meant to be used as a defense against the world, but as a way of fully entering it with more compassion and understanding, not less."
I think everyone at Brown should read “Franny and Zooey.” It is very easy to believe that what you do is unimportant, and to use your wonderful brain and your favorite philosophical cronies to chew on ideas and ultimately evade assigning them meaning for the fear of undermining their complexity. Although it seems fruitful, this is ultimately apathy and it is easy. It is much harder to truly “pray without ceasing:” to never shy away from identifying the purpose in what you do.
In the face of a search for meaning, there is the constant fear that there is none. If you scroll through the comments on YouTube channels that explain experiments in quantum mechanics, you will be convinced of the fact that we are all very scared of this being true: amateur poets and bad scientists gushing over how two photons being linked across vast distances must prove that we are all connected, that we can communicate with inanimate entities. How we all live in a simulation, and heartwarming tales of how a commenter and his wife took shrooms a couple months ago and were talking about this “exact thing.” As humans, the draw of being able to relate to a photon, even if it is a gross misunderstanding of the science, is that there is a way to prove that we have purpose under the guiding light of empiricism.
On a nine-hour plane ride I sat next to a man who was furiously punching numbers into Excel. He had a memory foam neck pillow and excellent quarterly endings. There was nothing fire and brimstone about him on the surface. Here at Brown, we love to scoff at the idea of a nine-to-five desk job, of an “average” life. We are smart enough to believe we are above the mundane, but maybe we are not smart enough to understand that we have no right to decide what actually is mundane. I see how this Excel Warrior is scrutinizing his screen like it's a religious text. His posture is immaculate. He doesn’t need quantum physics. Maybe he is finding the elusive “purpose” we dream of with every digit he enters and he is better than us for it. Maybe.
Pray without ceasing.
It means to never stop confronting God and meaning. It means to hold the Excel Warrior in silent reverence instead of contempt, to comment on Physics but Awesome’s video and say “Have you ever been in love before? Greetings from Brazil!”, to beg the Parisian man for a concrete answer, or at least his opinion. It is the opposite of apathy.
I often resented my parents for having come from nothing and become successful and done the whole American Dream thing because I knew I would never have a choice but to live up to the sacrifices that they made for me. Textbook. But I’ve learned that that is a beautiful thing. I have had the pleasure of meeting people who have never felt they had to do anything, people who are immune to any kind of a sense of duty, and they are miserable! They have had the freedom of choosing their life, discerning what they “want” and “do not want” to do, and although this seems enviable, they have been robbed of a valuable impetus and fallen into the trap of apathy. And it's funny, because I’d like to say, “Well, just pick the thing that does the most good,” to which I’m met with a pretentious murmur of, “Well, I don’t really believe in prioritizing good because it's just hard to define what that really is.”
Not defining your motivation through intellectual escapism and then struggling with a feeling of purpose or identity is like being an army that has fired its marching band. You are on the worst museum tour of your life.
So define good for yourself. Get it wrong! Piss off Plato. Redefine it. Piss off Kant. But I’ve realized that Zooey was undoubtedly right: it isn’t enough to retreat into the comfort of cleverness and ambiguity if the ultimate goal is to find fulfillment, we must at least try to define meaning. Praying without ceasing is no burden, it is an invitation to a fuller life.
