The Consolation of Meaning.

I keep coming back to this. Maybe I should call it “The Compensation of Meaning.” Tragedy is un-tragiced by meaning. Human beings are never content to be. They must always mean. There are of course religious traditions that advocate for and in practice enforce being. But the fact that this practice is a religious practice and must be enforced and with great effort maintained serves to reveal how deeply seated the impulse to meaning is.

Literature and life agree on this. The hardest thing for 20^th century literature to do was to take the consolation of meaning out: Becket and all those French writers tried hard. But even when there the works approach success, there must, at least, always remain hope. Even an undefined hope is superior to hopelessness. Hope is the last, long breath of meaning. We should at least be able to debate whether some hope remains. But that’s literature and literature is composed of sentences and sentences, though they can be many things, are always (or always also) units of meaning. One sentence baldly declares meaning. Another sentence presents meaningful material inviting a declaration or debate. Nonsense as meaning. Literature invites “interpretation.” Meaning declared or meaning begged for.

But this an effect of or part of the more general and fundamental impulse toward the consolation of meaning.

When things go wrong in life, we right them by reading them, interpreting them, declaring their meaning or by making them meaningful. Children should not die. Only old people should die. And only after a long meaningful life. If a child dies something went wrong and we can make it right by insuring it will never happen (in this way) again! We get laws changed if we can, or if we cannot we set up foundations or trust funds or institute scholarships. When nothing else will do we name buildings and ball fields. (Memory is not meaning and yet it is meaningful.) We feel better when we can say, “This happened because…” or “At least this will not have been in vain.” Something meaningful must be substituted for the meaningless event. This something never makes things all the way better, but at least consoles well enough, long enough for the calming effects of the slow process of forgetting to get established. (I think of how a fire lights slowing and precariously until at last it catches and the maintenance becomes quite easy.)

We are programmatically resistant to meaninglessness. Meaning erases the effects of sad events, but 

only as an eraser erases a pencil line—never quite. And yet, the death of a sick old man after a long, productive and meaningful life is also a tragedy. Why not? If life is inherently meaningful, all death is inherently tragic always. The great formula for tragedy, “It should not have to have happened,” the formula the distinguishes the merely sad from the tragic applies—though not in the trivial sense in which the news reduces the impact and meaning of the word by calling the death of every baby tragic: it is tragic but not because it is wrong for a baby to die but because death itself is wrong.

Unless the world is meaningless and words like “wrong” just don’t apply. If so meaning erases Meaning: meaning means I don’t have to face the meaninglessness of being, which is the saddest and scariest thing of all.

Unless the impulse to meaning is of spiritual significance built into being. This is the real debate isn’t it? Not whether Jesus Christ is Lord or Muhammed is God’s prophet, but whether the most apt response to existence is to learn through excruciating practice and imperfect maintenance to be or to pursue meaning without hope of success.