HOW TO FIND THE MEANING OF LIFE BY MAKING YOUR FATHER STUB HIS TOE By Tom McBride

How to Find the Meaning of Life By Making Your Father Stub His Toe 

Recently a close friend of mine gave a lovely devotional about Father’s Day. He said that life has enjoyed many blessings, and to God is owed thanks for them. He encourages his children to attend Mass daily to offer gratitude to God. He is right: gratitude is good and ingratitude is bad, in the way that modesty is good and treachery is bad. And it is also the case that saying our blessings come entirely from ourselves is false, and saying the contrary is true. Gratitude is hence both good and true. It is, nonetheles, the argument of this essay that goodness and truth are no bases for the meaning of life, but that only beauty is, including the beauty of the Mass and  the prettines of giving thanks. Being good and true are fine ways to live life, but one’s meaning, the justification for being alive, is found only in beautiful experiences, and if one is lucky enough to find daily ones, all the better

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Even those who shop at Wal-Mart, and certainly those who do at Costo, will know that Plato long ago gave us the meaning-of-life formula with the holy trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. What could be more truthful than little George Washington admitting he chopped down a cherry tree, and what could be more moral, and what could be more beautiful? What a good boy was the future conqueror of General Cornwallis? In a way it’s just common sense, as so many of us lead our lives by trying to line up our words with objective reality and get rewarded for it by someone saying “Bingo.” And then someone is always saying “good” to us when we do anything well. Everything from golf swings to crossword puzzle solutions get the complement of “beautiful.” 

We have these Platonic lives. Men who have been left by their wives achieve a kind of Platonic permanence by listening over and over again to a George Jones song. It’s a good song; it tells the heartbreaking truth; and boy, is it beautiful!

All this is: balderdash, rubbish, poppycock, mule puckey. You will ruin your life trying to find its meaning in truth–public figures, for instance, lie routinely. You will not find it in goodness–never again, we said, after Hitler, and now fascism returns in Europe and Israel and the United States. 

We seek families so that we can find at least a few people who will not lie to us and treat us kindly–often without success. 

That leaves beauty. Nothing her should be construed to mean that you should not seek to be good and true–but you won’t find life’s meaning in doing so.

Even if everyone is lying and bullying and murdering, there’s always the internet, whether you find the Mona Lisa, or, for more plebeian tastes, the heroine of “Debbie Does Dallas.”  You can watch the bad news on CNN and still enjoy the handsome or pretty anchors. You can be semi-convinced of your own sin and still find harmony and symmetry in an old hymn about how wicked we all are. 

I myself have led a most meaningful life, but I am also someone who has fallen far short of the glories of truth and goodness. If I had relied on them, I’d have had a futile life. 

But I have not. Years and years ago, when I was a toddler, I liked to watch my father shave in our tiny bathroom. This made him nervous–maybe he was afraid I’d crawl in and he would step on me–but one morning his anxiety over my perpetual gaze made him cut his face and stub his toe on the bottom of the wall. As he bled, he became somewhere between grumpy and furious. My mother intervened and led me away from the bathroom and the slightly Vesuvian eruption. 

This was beautiful, and long after I have given up on truthful humans and good people, I cherish this memory.  I wish to make it clear that the beauty is not in the event but in my recollection. I suspect beauty resides in experienced events, but it sticks around in our remembered lives. We turn actual experiences into beautiful things. 

My father was mad at me, but he disdained to destroy me, rather like the sublime Niagara Falls I once watched from a safe distance. There was a symmetry in the drama: I had won by inducing the toe-stub, but he had won in getting rid of me. There was clarity: everything was transparent from my gaze to his toe to his anger to my exit. There was harmony: we were doing a duet of counter-melodic forces.  There was proportion: he did not try to destroy me, and I did not scream bloody murder. 

All the major classical principles of beauty were satisfied. The check-lst is fully marked. But there is much more. 

Inherent in his affection for me was his anger at me. Implicit in his responsible love was a wish that I would go away. Tacit in beauty is its capacity for reversal. A young woman is beautiful because we all know that she will soon enough be an old one. Beauty’s Beast is ugly and gentle, and the latter makes the former more transcendent in its tragedy while the former makes the latter yet more lovely. Inherent in the beauty of a Grecian urn, like Keats’s, is that there is a paralytic coldness in the balance and attitude of his pagan figures. No one in the Garden of Eden before the Fall experienced beauty as beauty. They experienced pleasure, yes, but since they had no idea of the furious or the demonic or the terrifying or the deathful, they had no real way of seeing beauty. We can lead melancholy lives–what Freud called the “ordinary unhappiness” of the human predicament. But the sorrow comes from beauty that must perish. And herein lies our only chance for justified meaning.  

A few years after my father stubbed his toe, he had speckled gray siding put on the sides of our house. The project was not going well, so my father called the manager, who came over in a business suit to assure my dad that things would be picking up. The manager himself grabbed a hammer and nails and put on several slabs of the stuff. I watched. 

What a beautiful memory; what an event to turn into a lovely thing. The man had on such a resplendent suit, which was soon marred by his humble manual labor. There was something funny about a man who shows up in a sort of tux to hammer siding into a house. But it was also beautiful–a sense of formal splendor giving way to sweat and toil. It was though the world was ruled by some demiurge who insisted that within every beautiful thing were the seeds of its opposite, and that transgression anf redemption were not opposites but two sides of the same coin. It was as though the man were exiling himself from Eden and showing that there was no way to avoid it. 

In my once Baptist world it is so beautiful that Jesus is calling and yet so vile are the reasons we must be called. You can’t have one without the other. If life does have a meaning, this is it. Beauty that isn’t transient isn’t beauty at all. 

Keats was wrong. Beauty is not truth, and the sooner w