Droll Thing Life Is

“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.”  Marlowe’s narration in The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Regardless of the depressing rhetoric, this may be the most profound explication of the paradox of humanity I’ve ever read. I’m going to try reflecting on Conrad’s thoughts translated through his character Marlowe here because I find them worthy of much consideration if we want to broaden our understanding of what it means to be human. Be aware that I’m doing this at great personal risk of chastisement because I have a close friend who is, unlike me, a true Conrad expert in a literary sense. So, I may fall short intellectually in my reflection. But Conrad is important enough for me on my list of writers and thinkers to take that risk. I need to spend time with his words for my own mental acuity and development.  

I am old. Many friends have passed away and the older I get, the more time I spend knowing I only have a little time left. It causes me anxiety some days and reminds me of how lucky I’ve been on some other days. We spend life trying to avoid death and knowing, as we try, that we never will. We feel joy and pleasure by living, but the effects of that are constantly blunted by the knowledge of how easily and quickly life can be removed. Just when we reach a point where we can come to terms with our situation, we find it all for nothing because the wisdom only comes to us during the process of growing old or into death by misadventure. This is a realization that brings a bit of dry amusement (drollness) to perceptive people. I like to think of it more as irony, which is a word very similar to droll.

This is a difficult concept for the Judeo-Christian tradition that I was raised in. If, as the Bible explains, a god exists who has four cardinal attributes—those expressed as a balanced perfection in Power, Wisdom, Justice, and Love—then why is it that only Power seems expressed perfectly by giving humans self-awareness. The other three can be argued from a maybe/maybe not perspective. Maybe it’s wise or maybe it creates more suffering. Maybe it’s just but doesn’t it also create a heavy burden of guilt. Maybe creating us self-aware allows us to experience a god’s love but also his torment because from the moment we’re born we begin facing the prospect of losing that awareness through death. While the existence of these paradoxes provides a perfect explanation for man’s creation of god as religion, or a hopeful belief system in a hopeless circumstance, they do not provide proof of our awareness of being alive as being a gift from a creator as many religious people are taught. The existence of religious tradition does not confirm the existence of a god. In my mind that is ironic and, quite droll.

So, I’m back to the original thought. “Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.” Our lives are arranged by being unarranged. The logic is one we create through attempting to understand that. There is no mercy in what we find as we become aware that life has no great raison d’etre other than living. We will die in the same way a dog dies, or a tiger, or a rose, except we will be aware of what is happening.

This may be the reason that the writings of Albert Camus appeal to me, especially his views on absurdism. And, my reasoning may not be at all what Conrad was attempting to convey when he wrote the quote that set me off on this reflective journey. But analyzing what an author means by writing something is not the only reason for reading it.

On the other hand, I have not reached the level of cynicism Conrad’s character Marlowe ponders in the passage I quoted. Why? Because the awareness of my impending death is exactly what gives my life some semblance of meaning. Knowledge of mortality makes me responsible for how I conduct my affairs. Death challenges me to live life in a way that proves how valuable it is. This is a good thing, I think. Humans can sense a dry amusement in a finite existence that is largely out of our control. We can sense irony in the fact that nature’s logic is merciless and amoral. It simply is. It will happen and there will be no great fanfare when it does. As the great poet W.H. Auden wrote in his poem “Musee de Beaux Arts” describing Icarus and his fall into the ocean.

“…how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

However, for me that is the penultimate form of wisdom human beings are capable of sensing. The ultimate form of wisdom rests in the knowledge that despite the inevitable, maybe because of it, we can choose to do more with the time we have than exercise the greed, corruption, hatred, racism, and violence that is exposed in The Heart of Darkness. We can choose to be better than that. Nature has given us that ability by making us self-aware. This is the area humanity seems to ignore much of the time these days. We elect fools and corrupt politicians to high office because we believe their rule will bring us material benefit or some type of superiority over others. We make decisions and judgments based on what we gain without consideration of what others lose. Maybe we should be more self-aware of living like Mark Twain suggests than Conrad’s statement about death. “Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”  It would make us feel a little better about what we can’t avoid.