When I was young it crossed my mind to wonder what the purpose of life was, so, thinking that it might help, I bought a copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.
Not only that, I also bought a notebook to record the words in the book that I didn’t understand and look them up in the dictionary. I soon abandoned the latter exercise, but I got to the end of Russell’s weighty tome, introducing myself along the way to a few thousand years of Western musing, from the pre-Socratics to the philosophy of logical analysis.
In this way I learned that the philosophers, viewed as a group, were as clueless as I was.
Looking back, it strikes me that the desire to improve my vocabulary was more on the money than any hope that philosophy might provide a ready meal-type solution to one of life’s more interesting questions.
I’m still a bit shaky as to the meaning of epistemology or hermeneutics, and unsure as to why French thinkers, in particular, seem prone to daft philosophical ideas.
But at the risk of sounding like a swivel-eyed denizen of the Parisian Left Bank, I have come to the view that one of the reasons young people worry about the meaning of life is that humans are hard-wired with a capacity for language. Because our brains demand that a properly crafted sentence makes sense, we have a type of analogous expectation in relation to life generally. You should be able to say what the sentence means.
Our capacity for language – to state the obvious – involves a capacity not just to understand, but also to invent words, which is something we should take time to consider.
Life can be truly rotten, but words are among the consolations available to us. We spend a lot of time marvelling at works of art, how inspired and clever they can be, how they can express something essential about human existence, have a poetic quality, enrich our lives, etc.
Words have all of these, with socks on, and can be viewed with the same sense of wonder as a framed painting on a gallery wall. Pernicious. Bountiful. Baffled. When you encounter a word being properly used, it informs you that the person who chose to use that word shares your familiarity with the concept or experience described. How cool is that?
Sometimes, in conversation, we can use a word to express something we are trying to convey, only for the other person to come up with a more apt or enlightening word for what is being explored. Often, and for good reason, we experience this process with a sense of reassuring pleasure.
And it is worth remembering that all these marvellous words have been invented by countless strangers who died years, decades or centuries ago. To be human is to be part of an ongoing babble.
Apart from their utilitarian function, the very voicing of words can give pleasure. People from this island can get a particular pleasure out of Irish words – sneachta, codladh, sliotar – imagining, perhaps, that the language contains an embedded link with past generations.
I like to think the same can be imagined or presumed in respect of other languages and humanity generally. Désespoir (despair, in French), hakuna matata (no worries, in Swahili), kalinýchta (goodnight, in Greek). Words connect because they are a shared repository. They’re a sort of dispersed Unesco World Heritage site.
Around the same time I bought Russell’s History of Western Philosophy I bought my first classical music LP, Blanc et Noir, a collection of piano music by Claude Debussy that was on sale in a used-record shop. It included a series of pieces called Six Épigraphes Antiques, all with delightful names. One was called Pour que la Nuit Soit Propice (That the Night May Be Propitious).
Not only did I have to look up the French but, having done so, I had to look up propitious (it means favourable, or giving or indicating a good chance of success). In all the years since, I don’t think I’ve once used that word in my work as a reporter. I have now.
