What’s Life For?
(Inspired by the movie Before I Fall)
“As each plant grows from a seed and in the end becomes
an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought
to get there but most get stuck.”
—C. G. Jung
Quantum physics theorizes that
parallel worlds exist, and if they do exist so too would parallel lives, something
that the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) posited as a central concept
in his most popular book Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and which the writer and student of Gurdjieff’s teaching P. D.
Ouspensky explored in his novel Strange
Life of Ivan Osokin, as well as the contemporary novelist Kate Atkinson
with her novel Life After Life; but
what if this theory were true? This is the conceit of the movie Before I Fall, a fascinating story of eternal
recurrence and self-redemption that is worth exploring…
It was Boxing Day, and Penny and
I watched the Netflix movie Before I Fall,
based upon the best-selling eponymous novel by the prescient 26 year-old Lauren
Oliver, a movie based upon the principle of eternal recurrence not unlike the
movie Groundhog Day when Bill Murray
keeps waking up to the same day, only in Oliver’s story her protagonist
Samantha (Sam) Kingston not only wakes up to the same day for seven straight
days, but she explores her life with moral impunity and then finally comes to
the realization that to give her life meaning
she has to improve and make her life better, a captivating story of
self-redemption that called for a spiritual musing on parallel lives and the
Sisyphean struggle; but where did the mind-boggling idea of living our same
life over again originate?
This idea goes back to the
pre-Socratic times, but the idea of living our same life over again came to
Nietzsche in a moment of inspired thought on August 1881 while out on a walk alongside Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland, and which
he creatively introduced as aphorism 341, entitled “The greatest weight,” in
Book IV of his book The Gay Science:
“What,
if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived
it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will
be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to
you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this
moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal
hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it,
speck of dust!
“Would
you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke
thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have
answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more
divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as
you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do
you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your
actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become
to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this
ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
For Nietzsche, this inspired idea
became a thought experiment that he made central to his prophet-like figure Zarathustra’s
teaching, a philosophy of amor fati
(love of one’s fate), a life-affirming yae-saying to life as opposed to
Christianity’s life-denying nay-saying ethos because Christianity sees this
world as inferior to another and this life as mere preparation for a life in
paradise; but in the mind of imaginative writers like Ouspensky, Atkinson,
and Oliver one can change the recurring
pattern of one’s life and move on to a more perfect life, which opens up this spiritual musing to the terrifying issue of
moral relativism that haunted me for years, because for the life of me I could
not see where society was going given that modern man was now free to posit his
own personal sense of right and wrong, a ticking time-bomb that keeps exploding
in the terrorism on social order and decency; but I finally brought this issue
to personal resolution in my spiritual musing “The Stupidity of Moral
Relativism,” which I’ve included in my book The
Armchair Guru and need not explore here.
Suffice to say that moral
relativism resists the teleological imperative of our destined purpose, which
is to realize our wholeness and completeness; this is why the omniscient guiding
spirit of our creative unconscious has introduced the principle of redemption through
the concept of eternal recurrence in the medium of literature and movies, with
the anti-Nietzschean twist that we can change the soul-crushing recurring
pattern of our same life if only we are willing to heed the redemptive principle
of our destined purpose.
Our destined purpose is to become
who we are meant to be, and I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the motto
BECOME WHO YOU ARE was shown on a
poster in the high school student Kent’s bedroom in the movie Before I Fall, which caught Sam’s
attention on one of her recurring days (and which quite possibly sparked her
desire to improve her life and become who she was meant to be), and neither do I believe it was a coincidence that the high school teacher in
the classroom that Sam keeps returning to on the morning of the same day writes
on the blackboard the word HISTORY
in caps (implying that history repeats itself) and the word Sisyphus underscored, and then says
to his class: “Sisyphus. Not an STD (sexually transmitted disease). What’s he
like? What does it mean when something is described as being Sisyphean? Does it
mean pointless? Brave? Late? (Kent just walked into the classroom late.) What’s
his character like? Does he learn from pushing that boulder—” (just then three
girls walk into the room delivering roses for Cupid’s Day, the day before
Valentine’s, and the story now has its theme of eternal recurrence that Albert
Camus made famous by allegorizing Sisyphus’s fate with the drudgery of man’s
daily struggle in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the theme of Samantha
Kingston’s recurring daily struggle.
Was there a point to Sisyphus
rolling that rock up a hill only to have it roll back down of its own weight where
he was fated to rolling it back up again, for eternity?
Albert Camus couldn’t see the point.
The gods that condemned Sisyphus “thought that there was no more dreadful
punishment than futile and hopeless labor,” wrote Camus, presumptuously
comparing Sisyphus’s fate with man’s daily struggle, and he brings his iconic essay
to ironic resolution with philosophical opprobrium, arrogantly thumbing his
nose at the gods: “There is no sun
without shadow, and it is essential to know the night…The struggle itself
toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy,” which I could never do, because life for me was neither pointless nor
absurd; it was the way to who we are
meant to be, which Samantha finally figured out as she returned to live the
same day over again, and she broke the pattern of her recurring life and was on
her way to becoming who she was meant to be, her true self whole and complete,
thereby resolving the conundrum of the Sisyphean struggle that she faced every
morning of her recurring life.
But the question arises: why did
Samantha want to redeem herself? What inspired her to change her recurring day
into one that improved her life? Why not continue to live the same day over
again doing whatever she wanted? Why improve her life, which she finally ended
up doing, and by improving she meant becoming a better person?
Lauren Oliver answers this
question in a letter that she wrote for the special enhanced edition of her
novel Before I Fall; but before I
reveal her answer, let me say something first about the creative spirit of a
writer’s life, the all-knowing daimon
of one’s creative unconscious that is infinitely wiser than our cognitive mind
which Lauren Oliver makes clear in her inspiration for her novel Before I Fall, an inspiration that came
from a childhood and adolescent ritual of putting herself to sleep when she had
trouble sleeping by going over in her mind what made for a perfect day, a
ritual which engaged the redemptive principle of life that seeks to reconcile
one’s existential outer life with one’s destined inner purpose of realizing
wholeness and completeness of self, a playful nighttime ritual that evolved
into the idea of living one’s life over and over again to improve and better
one’s life, which became the dynamic theme of her refreshingly iconoclastic,
life-affirming novel Before I Fall.
Upon reflection on her novel
years after she wrote it, Lauren Oliver came to realize that Samantha Kingston
(her fictional self) was looking for personal meaning, what really mattered to her and what she wanted to be
remembered for when she died, and she found this meaning by improving her life and becoming a better person; that
was the driving aesthetic of her imagined but essentially autobiographical novel
Before I Fall; but why meaning? Why not happiness and
well-being? Material comfort, good health, pleasure, fame? Why meaning?
“Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is
vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” asked Ecclesiastes, essentially
the same question that Samantha asked as she relived her same day over again,
and the answer that she came up with was that she had to improve and perfect
her life because this would give her life the meaning for which she wanted to be remembered; but why?
That’s what the Preacher in the Book
of Ecclesiastes was trying to figure out, and every other person who asks the
question, “What’s the point of it
all, anyway?”
The philosopher and Nobel
Laureate Albert Camus couldn’t figure it out, (he came close in his novel The Fall) and he relegates life to an
absurd fate not unlike the futile and hopeless labor that Sisyphus was
condemned to by the gods. But Lauren Oliver came to a different conclusion, and
she did so by allowing her daimon, the
wisdom of her creative spirit to work it out for her in her novel Before I Fall, an imagined, but
intuitive expression of the redemptive principle of life in Samantha’s desire
to become a better person, to make her recurring day as perfect as possible,
which she did by acknowledging the worth and goodness in others; that’s how she
gave her life the meaning she needed.
But this is a very difficult concept to convey, which I've explored in other musings;
suffice to say today that Before I Fall
is a story that addresses what we all ask, What’s
life for? To become who we are meant to be, our true self intuited the author
Lauren Oliver; that’s what life’s for.
——
POSTSCRIPT
It occurred to me as I edited and
reworked this musing that Lauren Oliver’s novel Before I Fall is an ironic, albeit unconscious literary response to
Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, the
story of a French lawyer racked with guilt at the vanity, selfishness and
duplicity of his former life. Camus’s protagonist Jean-Baptiste-Clamence falls
from grace and spends the rest of his remorseful life in Amsterdam wallowing in
despair. Clamence recounts his story of woe and guilt to a stranger in a
friendly bar called Mexico City in
the red-light district that Camus metaphorically compares to “the last circle
of hell,” hence the title of his novel The
Fall. In Lauren Oliver’s novel Before
I Fall, her protagonist Samantha Kingston safeguards her fall from grace by
improving and bettering her selfish life. I’m only surmising, of course; but in
my experience of how the creative spirit of a writer’s personal daimon works, it has an omniscient
quality that can draw upon the collective unconscious of the human psyche to
make the point of the writer’s story with an unconscious but all-knowing creative
imperative, as it did with both Albert Camus and Lauren Oliver, only with Camus
the point was the absurdity of life,
and with Oliver the point was the meaning
of life, two distinctly opposite perspectives, but one no less valid than the
other, as I spelled out in my spiritual musing “The Two Ends of the Stick:
Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky.” Both novels express the dual consciousness
of human nature, one positive and one negative; and the choice is ours to make,
as the young Samantha comes to realize in her recurring life of seven days.
On a curious note, I wanted to
know how Lauren Oliver came up with her title, and in the special enhanced
edition of Before I Fall she informs
us that after she and her editor and agent went through a long list of titles,
her editor Rosemary Brosnan “dreamed” (Oliver’s
italics) the title Before I Fall, which just happened to be
the opposite end of the stick to Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, confirming for me once again the guiding wisdom of the
creative unconscious. I never cease to marvel at how synchronicity works!
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