The Triumph of Failure

This post concludes our series on the meaning of life. The preceding articles are listed below.

1. “You Are Here to Look at the Stars”: Ancient Life, Modern Life, and the Crisis of Meaning

2. The Meaning of Life, and the Closing of Doors

3. “The Most Perfect Expression of Being Alive”: On Rediscovering Contemplation

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Around the middle of the thirteenth century, a French knight named Jean de Joinville was in Egypt with his king, St. Louis IX, and his king’s army, an enormous force of Crusaders who at this particular moment were threatened not so much by the Egyptians as by a “camp-sickness,”

which was such that the flesh of our limbs shriveled up, and the skin of our legs became all blotched with black, moldy patches…. None escaped from this sickness save through the jaws of death. The signal was this: when the nose began to bleed, then death was at hand.

Thus did Joinville himself describe it in his memoirs, a remarkable medieval chronicle written by one of the fortunate men who returned alive from the Seventh Crusade. Joinville’s theory about the origin of the plague, though not quite up to the standards of a peer-reviewed medical journal, is nonetheless a thought-provoking entry in the “this is how much worse your life could be” category:

The bodies of the Saracens they flung over to the other side of the bridge, and let them drift down the river. The Christians were laid all together in great trenches…. We ate no fish in the camp all Lent, except mud-eels; and the eels, being greedy fish, would feed on the dead bodies.

That, combined with the “unhealthiness of the country, where never falls a drop of rain,” brought the pestilence upon them.