There’s a common script about about artists who live hard and die young. It says that the combination of a self-destructive lifestyle and art means that they were in some way fully alive, in a way that would be impossible, say, for some happily married husband and father, living in the suburbs and working as an editor. Indeed, the script reaches beyond the young and the dead to those who become obsessive about the pursuit of something. In this case, it says that the purity and single-mindedness of their obsession, even as they sacrifice other values and people along the way, shows that they are living fully.
I am extraordinarily hesitant to judge whether other people are living fully. The economist who inhabits one corner of my soul tells me that people make choices, and those choices generate costs and benefits. If a mountain-climber dies while trying to summit a lofty peak, I am willing to consider the possibiliy that the climber was willing to make that tradeoff. But many other people (including me) would not make that choice, and I do not think we are somehow living less fully as a result.
As always, George Orwell had a useful comment on this theme. It’s in a book review, “Review of ‘The Rock Pool’ by Cyril Connolly, ‘Almayer’s Folly’ by Joseph Conrad,” which appeared in New English Weekly, July 23, 1936. It appears in The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell (1920-1940), by George Orwell, Sonia Orwell, and Ian Angus (1970, pp. 225-227). In paricular, he is reacting to the book by Connolly. Orwell wrote:
Obviously, modern mechanised life becomes dreary if you let it. The awful thraldom of money is upon everyone and there are only three immediately obvious escapes. One is religion, another is unending work, the third is the kind of sluttish antinomianism – lying in bed till four in the afternoon, drinking Pernod – that Mr. Connolly seems to admire. The third is certainly the worst, but in any case the essential evil is to think in terms of escape. The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
In our hypersensitive age, even using words like “normal” and “decent”–or at least using them as descriptors rather than ironically–can trigger a negative response. It is perhaps useful to note that Orwell is not making an exclusionary claim that only normal decent people can be fully alive. He is leaving open the possibility that a life of, say, risk-taking, intoxication, promiscuity, disloyalty, and friendlessness can also be fully alive. Instead, Orwell is making a more limited claim that normal decent people can be fully alive; indeed, that the idea of being fully alive in this way should be something to cling to, like a lifebelt. It’s interesting to me how many 21st century people have a nearly allergic reaction to that idea.
