“The modern version of hell is purposelessness.”
—page 53
The quote above is Fowles’s conclusion to a longer passage in The Tree that arises from his consideration of Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (as Wikipedia calls him).
Is purposelessness hell? What do you think? Can you find examples in your own life to support or counter that idea?
Here’s the entire paragraph from Fowles:
“I come now near the heart of what seems to me to be the single greatest danger in the rich legacy left us by Linnaeus and the other founding fathers of all our sciences and scientific mores and methods—or more fairly, left us by our leaping evolutionary ingenuity in the invention of tools. All tools, from the simplest word to the most advanced space probe, are disturbers and rearrangers of primordial nature and reality—are, in the dictionary definition, ‘mechanical implements for working upon something.’ What they have done, and I suspect in direct proportion to our ever-increasing dependence on them, is to addict us to purpose: both to looking for purpose in everything external to us and to looking internally for purpose in everything we do—to seek explanation of the outside world by purpose, to justify our seeking by purpose. This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives —and become effectively synonymous with pleasure. The modern version of hell is purposelessness.”
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I don’t know if purposelessness is hell, but being purposeful IS some kind of addiction. Or is it simply a necessity these days? Over the winter I realized that my life had gotten screwy when in an old journal I found entries such as “sit still” (as if!) among lists of tasks like “return movies” and “clean tub.”
The passage makes me think of a quote from Walden that made a big impression on me in college: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
I hadn’t overtly compared Thoreau’s worldview with the one Fowles presents in The Tree, but now I’m curious to give it some thought. (Especially in light of the fact that the New Yorker’s “Book Bench” recently cited another book by Thoreau, Walking, as a worthy companion to The Tree.)
My immediate sense, having read The Tree, is that the more destructive impulse Fowles can’t abide in contemporary behavior is our drive for control. Purpose, in itself, doesn’t seem to be his archenemy.
For example, sometimes I purposefully relinquish control over a situation and consciously bow to larger forces at play. This could mean, to use the example from Theresa’s comment above, sitting still—in the outdoors, say. In such instances, often my “purpose” is to achieve a deeper understanding of or a more meaningful connection with the world around me; and in no way does this effort “disturb and rearrange primordial nature and reality.”
It’s our selfish will to work upon the environment that Fowles abhors. Those damn tools! Not all purpose is created equal. (Or is my refusal to kill time just one way of “looking internally for purpose in everything we do”?)
I found the comment about Thoreau interesting. I think that Thoreau (and Fowles) would have argued that an unwillingness to always be purposeful is not the same as ‘killing time’. There are several passages in ‘Walden’ that make it clear that Thoreau thought one should savour the moment, the ‘bloom of the present’.
Thomas M. Wilson quotes one such passage in ‘The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles’, Rodophi, 2006, page 234: ‘There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present to any work, whether of the head or the hands. I love a broad margin to my life.’ (Wilson argues that Thoreau ‘renounces an instrumental attitude to his natural surroundings’ and the Protestant work ethic.) Fowles marked in pencil the sentence ‘I love a broad margin to my life’ in his own copy of ‘Walden’, which I consider myself very fortunate to possess.
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