“You Are Here to Look at the Stars”

Ancient life, modern life, and the crisis of meaning

She was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed?
—Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”

Images in this post, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, show various constellations as depicted in a thirteenth-century French manuscript. This one has Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and Draco.

Though I’m not a person of unusually eclectic tastes, I’ve had an unusually eclectic life, professionally speaking. There’s something I’ve noticed about my multiple and rather divergent “careers”—in my case the word is particularly apt, since its original meanings suggest rapidity, and I cycled through careers at high speed before finding the right one. What I’ve noticed is that just about any modern job, and therefore just about any modern life, is susceptible to serious bouts of a condition that I will call quarosis, from Latin quare (“why? for what reason?”) and the suffix -osis, denoting a degenerative pathology. Quarosis patients typically present with deeply unsettling doubts that can be generalized into such questions as, “Why am I doing this?” “Is there a real reason or purpose behind all this busy-ness?” “Does the work that I do actually matter?” “Is this all that I have made of my life?”

Such questions take many specific forms; here are a few examples from my experiences:

Job: corporate “employee”
Symptoms: Why am I doing work that I don’t believe in? Do these products actually make the world a better place? If I want to be happy, rather than wealthy, why am I even here? Why does time inside a cubicle move so slowly?

Job: organic farmer
Symptoms: Why is it so impossible to make a living this way? Why exhaust oneself just to feed the body, which is doomed to death and decay, or just to delight the palate, which is never satisfied anyway? And why do the livestock keep dying?

Job: editor
Symptoms: Does anyone really care if “time-consuming” is hyphenated or not? The author doesn’t care—he’s just writing this to get a promotion. Three people, perhaps, will read it, so they can cite it in the papers they are writing, in order to get their promotions. It’s all a game and I’m not having any fun, so why am I playing?

Job: teacher
Symptoms: Is anyone in the room really paying attention? Have I convinced even one of them that literature is important? It’s TikTok they want, not Aristotle, not Cicero, not even Shakespeare—why bother?

And so forth. Some of these questions are more justified than others; some are cynical meanderings of a discontented mind; some are downright irrational. But strict rationality is really not the driving force here. Quarosis is a malady of the soul, the very depths of the soul, and its etiology goes back to the Garden of Eden. The ancients were not immune:

Gilgamesh, to where do you wander?
The life you seek you shall not find.
When the gods created Man,
death for him they set aside,
life in their own hands retaining.
(Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10)

And when we have gone down to meet
pious Aeneas, rich Tullus and Ancus,
there with them we are shadows and dust.
(Horace, Odes, 4.7)

Alas for that futility! that care I gave you long ago,
that labor and service so sweetly bestowed….
All of it now is gone in a day….
Our evil fortune tore all away,
returned you as ash and a useless shade.
(Sophocles, Electra)

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher:
vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
What remaineth to man in all his travail,
which he suffereth under the sun?
(Ecclesiastes 1:2–3)

Aquarius

All living creatures must work to survive; only human beings ask why, for what reason, to what end—only we are always in yearning to know what is the meaning of life. No society, no age of the world, is fully immune to the turmoil caused by this dread question, of which quarosis is a characteristically modern, and uniquely pernicious, variant. The historical panorama is by no means uniform, however—and there is one age that seems to me much more immune than others.

The problem in modernity is an acute one. Quarosis has conventionally been associated with middle age—the so-called midlife crisis. My observations suggest that “midlife” in this sense has been getting longer and starting earlier, since the crisis often begins in the teenage years and then continues, slowly mutating, for the next few decades. Thus, the description below, taken from recently published research on the midlife crisis, is also representative of the more widespread “modern-life crisis.”

Residents of today’s affluent nations are citizens of the richest societies in human history. By the midlife point, these men and women have normally encountered no significant illness or disability. They are also close to their peak lifetime earnings…. It would be expected, therefore, that middle-aged adults in the industrialized nations would have extraordinarily cushioned and enjoyable lives.

And yet,

midlife is a time when people disproportionately take their own lives, have trouble sleeping, are clinically depressed, spend time thinking about suicide, feel life is not worth living, find it hard to concentrate, forget things, feel overwhelmed in their workplace, suffer from disabling headaches, and become dependent on alcohol.¹

What the authors here describe seems all too much like the world I see when I look out my window. When I look into the medieval world, however—when I enter intellectually or spiritually or imaginatively into that world, as I must often do to write this newsletter—I see something else. Or rather, I feel something else: a certain absence, not only of midlife crises, but of the very question—what is the meaning of life?—that is at the root of those crises.

Orion

Robert Lazu Kmita

, whom some of you already know from his essayistic writing on Substack and elsewhere, wrote a novel entitled The Island without Seasons. First published in Romanian, and then in English translation by Os Justi Press, the story follows the literal and figurative journey of its narrator, a brilliant but unfulfilled classicist by the name of Alexander Jacob Wills. The book’s back cover has some fine endorsements from notable individuals—Joseph Shaw and Joseph Pearce, for instance—but none of those comments highlight what is, for me, the heart of Kmita’s tale. In my reading, The Island without Seasons is fundamentally about two things: 1) a thoroughly modern man who suffers from that quintessentially modern malady, quarosis; 2) a journey, physical and spiritual, by which that man discovers the cure.

Among the most eloquent passages in Kmita’s book are those that sketch the interior landscape of a human being who is lost in the maze of postmodernity’s inhuman vanities—or as one of the chapter titles concisely expresses it, “Lost in London.”

I left behind me the bustle of the street to face the torments of my daily work. There was nothing heroic in the ascent, although the zigzag of the stairs might very well have represented the contorted path through the innards of an all-devouring beast. What this dragon burned up was no less than the energy of my hopes.²

If you’ve had a job like that, or some other non-professional routine of comparable misery, little comment is needed here—Kmita’s words resonate, and his metaphor strikes deep. So does his portrait of the modern career man, sitting vacantly at his digital workstation, and weighed down not so much by labor as by hebel, the Hebrew “vapor” that English Bibles call “vanity”: the crushing burden of nothingness.

For a few moments, I shut my eyes, weary as they were of the endless ballet of pixels and the composed and recomposed simulacra of reality on the surface of the monitors.

The narrator, Alexander Wills, must work and suffer like men and women of ages past, but unlike them, he is somehow an orphan in his own world,

completely cut off from everything around me, from the moving phantasms that hastily slipped past me, a mere background to the dream of a shadow.

“A mere background to the dream of a shadow”—that’s a phrase worth remembering. That’s the world which Enlightenment secularism, followed by scientific empiricism and then materialistic nihilism, has made. It’s a world that begins, as does T. S. Eliot’s poem, with “the hollow men,” and ends “not with a bang but a whimper”:

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass.

“I ate, I slept, I read,” says Alexander Wills, but what awaits him after that? It is simply “my inglorious and pointless work.” Though trained as a scholar in the venerable and indispensable tradition of classical studies, he lost something along the way and ended up with a job that meant nothing to him—and a bad case of quarosis. As his journey is taking shape, and his island destination is in sight, the process of healing begins: “Perhaps that something that I had lost was actually myself.” It was indeed.

Perseus

Wills is a practicing Catholic. He should, therefore, rise easily above the pestilent fog of meaninglessness, for the Church teaches clearly what the meaning of our existence is: “to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.” I have nothing against this formula, which is succinct and accurate and really quite beautiful. The discouraging reality, though, is that it tends to float placidly on the surface of postmodern life, like a lily pad on a pond that is dying from the bottom up. Alexander Wills, like so many of his nonfictional counterparts, needs to go much deeper. In his case, going deeper also means going farther—all the way from London to a lonely island somewhere in the Atlantic. And even there, with his journey well begun, he feels the weight of hebel: “Questions kept running through my mind about the meaning of my own life.”

Leo

The island is lonely but not desolate. Among its amenities is a marvelous library owned by an English nobleman named Gilbert Newman, otherwise known as the Duke of Kirkwell. His title draws attention to itself—dukes hold the highest rank, and are relatively scarce, in the British system of peerage. For Gilbert Newman, the title is more about his role in the story than his position in England’s aristocracy: “duke” derives from Latin dux, meaning “leader.” Newman leads Alexander to the island; he leads him through the stages of his quest; and he leads him, eventually, to the “new man”—to an Alexander reborn, first in the violent waters of a hurricane, and then in the contemplative stillness of a de-modernized life: “Without any doubt, right now, as I set down these words, I am in the right place, at the right time. Placed, somehow, outside time…”

I’ve said very little about the novel’s actual plot. If you want to know more, the book is there, waiting to be read. I’ll just mention one more thing. The Duke is wise with ancient wisdom, and seems to speak for the Ancient of Days as he watches over Alexander and guides him toward his destiny. One of the Duke’s sentences—conveyed to Alexander in a letter, and hovering in mood between the indicative and the imperative—stands out from all the rest. It is crucial to the story, and to the topic we’ve treated today, and to the medieval “meaning” of life which we will discuss on Tuesday:

“You are here to look at the stars.”

1. Osea Giuntella et al., “The Midlife Crisis.” Economica, vol. 90 (2023), pp. 65–66.

2. Sometimes I don’t like the visual distraction caused by in-text citations or even footnote indicators. Please see below for the page numbers corresponding to the quotations from The Island without Seasons.

“I left behind me …” (p. 20)

“For a few moments, …” (p. 23)

“completely cut off …” (p. 53)

“I ate, I slept, I read …” (p. 54)

“Perhaps that something …” (p. 57)

“Questions kept running …” (p. 113)

“Without any doubt, …” (p. 210)