Every person’s life should be filled with meaning and should be structured by his or her calling, aims, wishes and ambitions. The person who does something he or she does not like for a living just because it is necessary to, will never be happy and will never achieve anything worthy in life. Life requires spiritual filling as well as satisfaction with certain material needs and wishes. The sense of life is to do a bit more than others wait for you, more than you yourself have expected – here comes the genuine satisfaction and success in life.
However, all these elevated words are nothing more than words, as the true meaning of life built up according to a set of firm, integral principles have been left on the pages of classical literature, in the words of outstanding people who despite any challenges managed to achieve this and left their experience as an example for others. It is a pity to realize that such people are a rare species being born once in quite a long period of time and still being not understood by their peers and dying forgotten. The humanity is rusted by excessive pleasures, by duality of moral principles being fitted to some particular situations, thus degrading and losing the true thirst for life, for the truth and for achievement.
Many writers and great thinkers of old times and modernity have been devoting their works to considerations of why this happened and what reasons lie within the degradation of the world population. They call people to be genuine, explaining that only this way they will achieve eternity – they should not betray their ethical standards, they should pursue one common goal for their whole life and should become great people by introducing something new, by bringing their tiny contribution into the world they live in. Why it is not so is left to be considered, and in the present paper the works relevant in the discussion are the article of Ralph Waldo Emerson “Man the Reformer” and Henry David Thoreau “Life without Principle” as well as the short story of Herman Melville “Bartleby the Scrivener” is said to be influenced by the trend of Transcendentalism.
The first work to be discussed, the one of Thoreau, is devoted to the inner integrity of a personality, of the human character, philosophy of life and the life way everyone chooses for him- or herself. At the beginning of his article Thoreau gives an example of the lecturer who failed to interest him in the lecture he gave because of lack of enthusiasm, lack of interest in his subject himself. Thoreau sees the discrepancy in this fact – the author believes that a man can do his business well only in case he is happy with it, he believes what he says and he is himself interested in his activities. A person should be the real fan of his activity – otherwise the results will remain miserable and probably unachieved. All people who do their work on an average level, just for the sake of providing for their living, will remain average personalities without anything worthy done by them in the whole course of their lives.
Thoreau sees the social conflict in the fact that people are so heavily occupied with the work they do while they are entitled to the treasures of the Earth from their very infancy, from the moment of their birth. He states that the genuine truth of life created by God was that all people have to provide for their living with the help of their hands and brain, because all facilities for doing so had been created by God for the humanity. But someone in some way managed to substitute this truth with a miserable replica creating the social injustice, making people suffer and struggle for the loaf of bread they have to earn – this is what Thoreau despises in the contemporary political system. He cannot understand why people have been fooled and made to work so hard doing senseless, exhausting work for the sake of others’ success or their seemingly profound success. These people, according to the opinion of Thoreau, do not understand that they live according to fake principles, according to the perverted virtues and ethical standards, while the true standards are hidden from them by those who are not interested in their understanding thereof. for this reason Thoreau despises the code of morality, artificially created stimuli, motivations and aspirations for people to conquer their will and ruin their striving for the truth:
“We are provincial…because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end” (Thoreau, 1863).
Thoreau stresses the cognition of humanity being narrowed by the superficial things that have no practical value and would be of no value for any of people living according to them if they were not propagated with such a force. In this respect Thoreau researches the example of gold-diggers and compares them to gamblers because their labor is worthless no matter how much effort they made to find that piece of gold. The outstanding Transcendentalist thinker explains that there is nothing better than true, honest and humble physical labor that constitutes no lie, no fake, no pretense and allows a person to have anything he or she wants by achieving this manually and decently. Thoreau believes that the hunger for easy profit kills people, making them degrade and finally ruins themselves. People have to know the truth about life and labor, and they should not have any misguiding thoughts about success. However, people just do not think about these things.
The true purpose of Thoreau has always been to show people that life is much easier and much more understandable than all people are used to perceive it. In particular, it is as plain and intelligible as every tiny thing in the world – but the way a person perceives it depends on the way of thinking developed by the social environment in which people are brought up. At times this social education is aimed at dissuading people to think and adapts them to extreme complications of life, eliminating any wish to get deeper into the matter. This is the prime vise Thoreau sees in the society – by saying that “a little thought is sexton to all the world” he calls the humanity to think critically and understand that they have been misguided in the present world, thus needing a change.
People have become less demanding, they do not strive for achievement and improvement, which is the rust of humanity. This is the prime reason for Bartleby’s denial to help the lawyer and to do anything else but sitting and staring. He lost his faith in the meaning of life because of the specificity of life – his beliefs, his hopes and wishes were all ruined by the unfulfilled wishes, by the broken hearts, important news that would never reach the eyes they were intended to; the words of love will never be read by those for who they were written:
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:–the finger it was meant for, perhaps, molders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:–he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities (Melville, 1853).
These dying emotions, unfulfilled promises, untamed passion and incurable pain were the daily routine of Bartleby – he lived surrounded by a truly dark side of our life, being unable to understand that this is not what should kill the wish to live, but should potentially open up new horizons of understanding for every person. It gives enormous power in realizing what you may not have time to do, what you may lose or may fail to recognize, thus giving a good chance to change the life and make it a bit better.
However, the majority of people do not understand this and continue living their shallow lives, “rubbishing” their heads with shallow thoughts: “surface meets surface”. This is the saddest fact Thoreau admits and calls people to a change. He despises gossips, shallow talks which have been nurtured as a normal way of living by the government and politicians, legislation giving no ground for patriotism and killing all initiative. Thoreau cannot understand why these senseless and worthless things occupy human minds while they should be thinking about other, greater and more important things that happen in the world – about what they can give to their world and to their nation.
The need for change has been long ago recognized by everyone speculating over the topic of the true meaning of life for a personality and the way to make it better, more worthy and maybe remembered by others in the future. The topic of meaning of life can also be found in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson “Man the Reformer” which is focused not only on the need for reform but also on the reasons for the impossibility of doing this for some people.
Emerson sees the key to reform for people in nurturing spirituality, in confining oneself to moral enrichment and active work on their souls and minds rather than on their purses and bodies. He calls people to be more critical, thoughtful and restless in the pursuit of truth, honor and respect. His speech begins with the assumption that surely everyone wants to be respected and honored, but not every person knows how to achieve this success and how to obtain wisdom and greatness. The author admits that every sphere of human life seeks change, is “threatened by a new spirit, thus showing that the time of change has come, but at the same time he shows that reformers tend to idealism whereas there is nothing ideal in the human lives and all people have pitfalls, drawbacks, bad habits and weak sides, and this is what ruins the reform.
“Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution of property, until our laws which establish and protect it, seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness” (Emerson, 1841).
All human actions have become dirty, corrupted and polluted. Trade has turned into theft and fraud, and even after leaving this activity the person may not consider him- or herself clean. This is the reason why people who were unlucky to be born honest, decent, kind and thoughtful are simply excluded from society, being urged to look for the ways of self-realization somewhere else. They simply cannot function in the modern world because their souls are too pure to stand the evil dominating human lives and the ways they conduct their regular activities.
Emerson condemns human selfishness in the principles of possession that have been nurtured by the rulers of the nation for centuries – he states that a human being becomes a prisoner of his property as he has to constantly take care of it, nurture it and repair it, protect it from the forces of nature thus being not the beneficial side in the relations of possession but the sufferer. From this point Emerson sees the evil of commerce and commercial life worshipped by modern people – he understands that there is no sense in possessing things and appreciating this so highly because it brings no spiritual growth but only degradation and spiritual blindness. People have paid so much attention to material things and their own welfare that they have forgotten about their morality and spirit:
“Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out” (Emerson, 1841).
The way Emerson assesses the tendencies taking place in the contemporary reality logically brings him to a conclusion that, to his surprise, people fail to learn the lesson of self-help and they fail to be independently thinking and acting creatures, thus having no present and future, only the past that will be continued by no-one.
The topic of despair and absence of the meaning of life is clearly, vividly described in the short story of Herman Melville “Bartleby the Scrivener”. The main character, Bartleby, has nothing to do with the real world, he wants nothing and does not understand what he lives for because of the world in which he lived while being the employee of the dead letters post office. At the time of being employed there he lived by very strong emotions of people who never accomplished their goal, whose intentions were lost unfulfilled and thus he saw the real emotions, real passions, grieves of people he never knew. After being dismissed, he realized that this truthfulness killed his wish for life as he was overfilled with grief and deadly sorrow. He did not have a sense in life as every day he saw other people losing it, and he appeared to be too weak to make the correct conclusions from his work and live a happier, more worthy life than others managed to. Bartleby did not understand the true value of life even when speaking to the lawyer who told him:
“And to you, this should not be so vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass” (Melville, 1853).
For this lawyer even such simplistic virtues as having the grass under his feet and the sky above his head was happiness. These were the signs of true life, of real existence of a human being. But Bartleby was dead inside – he did not want anything and died just because the superficial life was the way of living he did not manage to get accustomed to, and the real grief of so many people was too hard for him to bear.