DRIVING WITH PLATO:
THE MEANING OF LIFE’S MILESTONES
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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To Zoë, Esther and Eden, as time goes by
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii, lines 139–66
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Being born
2 Learning to walk and talk
3 Starting school
4 Learning to ride a bike
5 Taking exams
6 Having your first kiss
7 Losing your virginity
8 Passing your driving test
9 Casting your first vote
10 Getting a job
11 Falling in love
12 Tying the knot
13 Having children
14 Moving house
15 Going through a mid-life crisis
16 Getting divorced
17 Retiring
18 Living the third age
19 Going out in style
Afterlife
Further reading
Index
BECAUSE DRIVING WITH PLATO is the companion book to my Breakfast with Socrates, it benefits from the support of all those involved in that first publication. I thank them again. I’d like to single out both my agent, Stephanie Ebdon at the Marsh Agency, and my editor, Daniel Crewe at Profile Books, along with their colleagues; I also thank Hilary Redmon at Free Press in New York. An author couldn’t ask for better.
IMAGINE GETTING INTO YOUR CAR and finding that as soon as you switch on the engine it turns into a time machine. But instead of pitching you backwards and forwards through the history of the planet, as did the famous contraption imagined by H. G. Wells, it zooms right in on your own life. It takes you back to bawling as a baby, noses through the gates of the school where you are taking a maths lesson, and pulls over by a bus stop to study you as a teenager having your first kiss. It then accelerates towards your later years, to watch you floundering in a mid-life crisis, say, or having a knees-up at your retirement party. And when death looms into view, the car doesn’t just screech to a halt; it inches forward to have a look at what might lie beyond. That is the both ordinary and extraordinary journey taken by this book.
And you have company. You look to the passenger seat and notice none other than Plato, beard blowing in the wind. He’s not just along for the ride; he’s there to help you make sense of things. He observes you falling in love, for example, and explains how this very human experience connects you with the divine. Look behind on to the back seat and, crammed in against the windows, you behold a whole team of writers, thinkers, painters and other gurus, all eager to comment on what they see and offer insights about your life. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist, explains how those school gates might as well be the entrance to a prison. Leonardo da Vinci peeps at you losing your virginity and ponders how you’d measure up against the ideal of purity as he had painted it in The Virgin of the Rocks. John Milton looks on as you go through an ugly divorce and consoles you that there’s nothing to feel bad about – paradise can still be regained. You hear from Hegel on the matter of having children, Locke on the question of how those children learn to talk, and Tolstoy on how to control them so they don’t talk too much. They are there, these luminaries from the history of ideas, like a raucous team of all stars, to cajole, inform, caution and entertain you as you pass each one of your milestones.
Many of these milestones are of course natural: being born, learning to walk, growing old and dying. But just as many will be cultural, even if they’ve gained acceptance as near-inevitable rites of passage. These include starting school, passing your driving test, moving house and getting married. Unlike the simplest animals, we don’t merely eke out a biological fate, even if, like them, we’re subject to laws of growth, hunger, decay and reproduction. We create structures around us, be they material, like houses, or institutional, like schools and governments, which take on an endurance and an independence that belie their origins in the biological human who creates them. We’re both natural and cultural creatures, and this book looks at both these interrelated aspects of our lives.
Decades of individualism have told us we’re all unique, but we enjoy a largely common trajectory through the world. True, some people will become rich, many will live in penury, and plenty will strive throughout life merely to improve on the situation they were dealt at birth, but these differences in fortune rarely alter the basic path of life as it is lived. We’re all born, we all connect with others, and we all die. Not all the milestones I discuss will be passed by everyone and they may occur in a different order, but they should all be highly familiar if only from observing friends. The strange thing is that the familiarity isn’t guaranteed to make them more intelligible: no matter how many weddings you attend, say, you may not have stepped back to think about their meaning, and even if you have, you may still find the ritual bizarre. One could even say that there can be something obscure about what’s most common: the fact we’ve all been to job interviews makes it likely that we take them for granted and don’t ever get at the essence of what is going on. And so, in the company of various thinkers, this book examines what often remains unexamined in such events and phases. It helps you to think a little deeper about the key moments and transitions in your life.
Some might argue that life flows more smoothly precisely by not analysing it too much. But there are rewards in being able to reflect on these subjects, especially if the reflection is informed by the thinkers I’ve crammed into my car (and if they sound forbiddingly intellectual, I’m equally happy to cite The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Thelma and Louise and the US sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm). Thinking through the philosophy of mid-life crisis, for example, might help to forestall it. Appreciating what was involved in learning to walk and talk might make us more insightful parents. Examining the experience of being born will round out our sense of the miracle that it is. If life is a mystery, then let’s take advantage of everything at our disposal to shed a little light. Besides, where asking about the meaning of life is too large a question to be helpful, breaking things down into life’s milestones can give us a little bit of traction.
To drive with Plato is to take a fresh look at the moments that define the all too brief transit our car makes across the earth. There are some remarkable ideas to explore en route.
JEAN-LUC GODARD, doyen of avant-garde cinema, declared that every story needs a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order. What about the story of your life?
If you’re talking to a friend, you could start the story of your life with your first love, or your last job, for example, and work forwards or backwards, making your story like any other story, subject to all sorts of cutting and pasting that undermine the notion of a simple beginning, middle and end. You certainly don’t have to begin with birth.
When it comes to your life as you live it, however, a different law applies: your life as lived is affixed to a chassis of biology, and the chassis’ chassis is real time, which for you begins when you slither out of the womb. The story of your life and your life as lived denote two quite different things. On the one hand, there’s your biological progress, and on the other hand, the edited version of that progress as narrated. In the spirit of Godard, Martin Amis once wrote a novel called Time’s Arrow, which ‘begins’ the story at the end and works back, but, being a novel, of course it could. When it comes to living your life, that coloured-in bar stretching from a starting to a finishing line, it can go only one way.
And however you picture that starting point, a starting point is what the momentous event of birth emphatically is. Birth marks the beginning of life independent of umbilicus, placenta and amniotic fluid. No one is actually born in their forties, and if the prospect is so freakish, it’s because life is only ever given to us from the beginning, its gift never second-hand or recycled, but always delivered brand new. To cite a classic storytelling device, a life that starts in medias res (‘in the middle of things’) is unimaginable: birth and beginning go hand in tiny hand. What’s more, because it’s the beginning of something (i.e. you), the creation of the uncreated, this beginning-energy is also a breaking-energy, a dislocation of the flatline along which a world-without-you would have otherwise continued. Your birth is the constructive interruption that alters the tableau of things, making it resize and reshuffle around your newborn self. More than the filling of a vacancy, this is the kneading into significant form of a former, nothingish dot. In your own microcosmic way, you are a unique cosmic event, a little Big Bang.
That life begins at birth would appear to be one of the most solid facts we can start from, and yet since the advent of ultrasound technology, and the opportunity it provides to peer inside the baby-bearing womb, our thoughts about when life begins have got rather muddled. While many continue to think of life beginning with birth, others say it starts with conception, and a few insist it begins somewhere between the two, in the slow-motion bloom of the foetus’ consciousness – meaning that the front end of the coloured bar has a grey area.
What makes that area grey isn’t only the biology, as it happens, or even the ethics of abortion that dogs it; it’s the philosophical question of whether, despite all this emphasis on starting points, yours is a beginning at all. Even though your expulsion from the mother’s body jump-starts your career as a singleton, as an entity with edges de-soldered from anyone else, this effect of singularity stemmed from a cause – namely, the amorous clash of parental chromosomes. Unless yours was a virgin birth, you’ll have had two biological parents, on whom your being born depended. Your ‘beginning’ didn’t come from nowhere – it was caused by something before you, meaning the singleness you achieve upon being born is something of an illusion; you are actually the result of a process that began long before your conception. The phrase ‘being born’ suggests a launching into fresh individuality, but it could also be construed as the mere unfurling of the latest leaf on a very long stem whose base extends well back into history.
Similarly, the very notion of being ‘caused’ by your parents might be subject to doubt. I’m thinking here of David Hume, luminary of the Scottish Enlightenment and arch-proponent of empiricism, the doctrine that puts direct observation above abstract theory. Hume was particularly exercised by the false or hasty conjoining of cause with effect, and his famous example was billiards: one ball strikes another, with the predictable consequence of sending it off in a given direction, but once in a while something unexpected will happen, and the first ball will backfire, skid or bounce. The lesson is that a single exception can invalidate the rule, so you have to consider each event on its merits; in this sense, theories are for the lazy, mere ready reckoners that help you rub along with a working, but imprecise, knowledge of the world. So what might be the empiricist attitude to birth? Every time a baby is born, you’d have to prove, rather than assume, it was the fruit of two human loins.
And if that sounds tedious or absurd, just remember that the virgin birth itself was an exception so compelling that it gave birth in turn to a world movement. Yet even the virgin birth was not without a cause, which, if you believe it, was the first cause of all: the Prime Mover of the world, otherwise known as God. Assuming God is the creator, his USP would be that there’s no cause that causes him, a marvel that medieval theologians called the ‘causa sui’. This makes being born – whether you’re a creationist who traces it back through your parents to Adam and Eve, or just believe that all creation is God’s own – a direct result of Him. As a deriving from God, and thus a deriving from something derived from nothing, this is the first of three senses in which birth can be seen as a miracle. The second would be as described by atheist parents who, dismissing divine intervention in their child’s birth, nevertheless feel the wonder at this appearance of new life, and the astonishment that from the simple sexual clasp of mother and father, a child, in all its complex, miniature perfection, is born. What about the third?
The third sense of the miracle of birth belongs to the baby itself. Now, all of us were born – you wouldn’t be reading and I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise – but most will have forgotten the experience. Hardly surprising, given the evidence that earliest memories tend to come from the age of three. True, we can consult a huge amount of literature about childbirth, but it’s mostly to do with the birth of other people; and even if your own birth was meticulously documented, such objective accounts hardly replace the subjective report that would be so valuable to have. This remains chronically elusive, and yet some people testify that they continue into much later life to dream about their own birth, a fact worth dwelling on in case these dreams give a clue as to the paradoxically forgettable experience of what is most seminal in our lives.
Birth dreams are not quite the same as memories, and leave a shadowy, ‘sentic’ impression, that is, they register in the body as more a feeling than an image: people speak of a sensation of pressure on the head, for example. Nor are they like such common dreams as being naked in public, which are painfully clear. These so-called birth dreams resemble occlusions of the soul, dark spots on the psyche that, like animals at night, just about stand out from the darkness that surrounds them. For these reasons, birth dreams correspond to what Plato called ‘anamnesis’, which, as the word suggests, is pretty much the opposite of amnesia. Except there’s a crucial distinction, for Plato, between remembering and not forgetting: the latter harbours experiences in the mind without putting them in its grasp. This is anamnesis, and it’s likely that birth dreams fall into this category: a not-forgetting, as opposed to a clear recollection, of what’s beyond one’s conscious reach. The memory of birth is gone yet not completely lost.
Perhaps that’s not so extraordinary – why wouldn’t you preserve, somewhere in your being, as in a fossil record, the trace of its founding event? To efface it would be weirder. It does imply, however, that whatever our age, we carry the whole of our biological past in the present, like a walking palimpsest of experience, or a cliff face in which each stratum, as you go down, speaks to an epoch older than the one above, and all are on show. If under the category of anamnesis Plato says you can intuit things you don’t remember experiencing, or recognise what first time round was never cognised, then being born provides the perfect material for it. It was an event that came upon you without you even knowing. It’s in this that the miracle consists, the surprise from nowhere that inaugurates who you are.
To others, however, the miracle of birth is misery, the gift of life a curse, and with this we meet the empiricist’s bête noire – existentialism. While empiricism calls for vigilance over the detail of what is, existentialism draws the grandest conclusions about what is and is not; it hacks beyond the annotating of activity in the foothills of experience to the high ground of generalisation and the sweeping panoramas it affords. Take Jean-Paul Sartre, who would have said that being born is a poisoned chalice, because it offers you life but withholds the meaning to go with it, like winning a sports car and immediately losing the keys. For a start, being born was entirely out of your hands – the very origin of your life, and you didn’t have a say in it! Birth happens to you, rather than you determining it, and that leaves you affronted by the arbitrariness of your own existence, which, in any case, could already be reduced to the chance encounter, nine months earlier, of Joe Sperm and Jane Egg. Not to mention the throw of the dice that made you appear in a random year, in a random location, and of a random gender, ethnicity and class. Things scarcely improve as you grow up: anyone with eyes to see will observe how everything that happens happens as a result of equally arbitrary causes – an event as major as the First World War starts with a minor to-do about an Austrian duke, one thing leads to another, and hey presto, the dogs of war are let loose. There’s obviously no God – believing in one is just a comforting delusion – and so no overarching sense is to be made of anything; from birth you’re consigned to beetling about on your patch of the forest floor, moving twigs from A to B.
For all that, Sartre manages to pull something from the fire, realising that precisely because there’s no transcendent meaning, there’s no bar on creating one for yourself. If being born is an inauspicious fall into a mire of meaninglessness, you can rationalise it as a necessary preparation for a great life that might ensue – a greatness that can’t, however, be left to chance. In response to Malvolio’s classification in Twelfth Night that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them’, Sartre would have rejected categories 1 and 3: you’ve got to make your own luck, and you do so, above all, by redeeming the accident of your birth and taking it upon yourself to act. Part of this philosopher’s appeal to the class of’68 who rioted on the streets of Paris (the very streets that Jean-Luc Godard had just been filming) was his anti-philosophical emphasis on action as a means of giving life a purpose – an emphasis he’d borrowed from Karl Marx, who claimed that ‘so far philosophers have only interpreted the world – the point is to change it!’
But you don’t have to be so brazen – being born has a number of natural consolations. Not only do you get to live, but because, before birth, you weren’t living at all, you also might have a useful inkling of what’s to come on the other side. The time before birth could be a rehearsal for the time after life (or death, not to beat about the bush) which should relax any fear of dying that grips you. Secondly, even if Sartre’s right and being born means being cast into a landscape of hopeless contingency, there’s another way of looking at it. While he said that you’re morally required to convert the position you find yourself in at birth, of being merely ‘en-soi’ (‘in yourself’), into being ‘pour-soi’ (‘for yourself’), thus making the passive active, his opposite number in Germany, Martin Heidegger, saw pretty much the reverse.
First of all, you can’t be without being somewhere, and when you’re born you take up space on the planet, and in a particular geography: all being, therefore, is being-there, connected to the earth. Far from getting cut adrift in a Sartrean wasteland, being born means finding a place, and belonging. Second, if your being has to exist in a place, it also has to exist in time, and being born means entering time’s river, so to speak. Rather than, as in Sartre, having to grope for a sense of direction, you are, from the moment you’re born, directed in time, taken forward in an element or medium that activates your being – after all, if you didn’t exist in time, you’d be as frozen as a statue. Taken together, that means birth is the gift of time and space, the two main facets of being. Before birth, you have neither, but your coming into the world means being presented with everything that is.
WHAT GOES ON FOUR LEGS in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening? If you don’t know, I’ll kill you; if you do, I’ll kill myself.
Such was the riddle of the Sphinx, the mythical monster who perched crazily at the city limits of Thebes in ancient Greece, tormenting passers-by with its exorbitant wager. Before the riddle was solved, many fell foul of the half-human, half-lion freak; and when it was, its decoder was none other than Oedipus. His answer, of course, was ‘man’, the creature that in its infancy crawls, walks upright in the middle of its life and in its third age resorts to a walking stick. On hearing Oedipus’ suave reply, the Sphinx, true to its word, dashed itself to the ground in an act of self-murder.
Beneath the horrors, the Sphinx’s cruel game alludes to the profound connection between man and walking. In the riddle, ‘man’ – for which let’s also read ‘woman’ – gets defined by his ability to move about on his pins. Where the Sphinx was four-legged (was its motive jealousy?) man is a biped, and, as we’ll see in a moment, that comes with advantages both theological and evolutionary. Whatever else he may be, man is a walker, a perambulator, a pedestrian, and so when, as a baby, you haul yourself off your haunches to wobble on your soft pods, one hand on the sofa, you’re doing more than reaching for the biscuit on mum’s plate – you are joining the species proper.
Not that this is the would-be toddler’s conscious intent. Like the birth that preceded it roughly twelve months earlier, when, with a seismic convulsion, the mother’s body was activated like an alarm clock to heave the suckling out on to the earth, in almost complete disregard for her will, nothing can brook this urge to stand and move. More powerful than the baby itself, a force passes through it, calling it with all the imperiousness of Jesus commanding Lazarus to stand up and walk. True, the baby in the moment might use its muscles deliberately, and will control its movements as best it can, but this urge on the ground comes from one higher up, the biological imperative that makes our bodies grow, develop and assume a certain shape. No matter how feeble the fledgling attempts, how often the little one falls back on its bottom, walking will happen soon enough. Unless there’s a defect of some kind, it’s perfectly unstoppable.
Consider: what if it were a force you could resist, and you never learned to walk at all? Apart from having to eat dust, and forfeiting the entire vertical plane for moving about in – that is, losing a whole dimension – you’d find yourself on the lowest echelon of a stairway to heaven. It’s sometimes forgotten that the snake in the Garden of Eden, the devil incarnate, was originally able to walk upright. Being damned to crawl on its belly was the snake’s punishment for tempting Eve, and turned it into the literal embodiment of a lowly form of life, the subtle serpent become a humble worm. And if that’s life on the bottom rung of the stairway, the realm of beings that crawl, then having the ability to walk – the next rung up – must be a privilege. Walking doesn’t only define man, it speaks to a superiority on his part that’s to do with more than physical elevation. The altitude achieved in standing up speaks to his nearness to God and corresponding distance from the animals, such that the height of the head of the standing human marks the symbolic midpoint between heaven and earth. When that person then starts to move by walking through its extra dimension, a gift of liberty is redeemed, a liberty not just geographical but scientific: walking offers the opportunity for surveying new worlds.
Yet both crawling and walking find themselves outdone in turn by what’s possible from the top rung of the stairway – namely, flying. Yes, walking testifies to freedom, but of a circumscribed variety that falls somewhat short of the airy transport favoured by the angels who look down on man and devil respectively. Although walking allows us to traverse the earth, it binds us to it, hence the name of the first man in that fateful garden. Adam means ‘red earth’, implying that man was made of clay to curb any hubris of the kind that gave Satan ideas above his station; the word ‘human’ also refers back to the soil. Man’s feet were to remain on earth, as if that one extra dimension was privilege enough. Above him, and keeping him in his place, were the putti that floated about in celestial joy, unburdened from the supposed liberation of human walking, which, compared with their own bound arylessness, must have seemed about as free as the plod of a chain gang.
To one angel, however, flying itself constitutes a burden and walking is to be envied. I’m thinking of Wings of Desire, the German film of 1987 in which an angel becomes enamoured with an earthling and longs to fall back to earth in order to be with her. But it’s not just love he’s after. Being bound to the earth brings rewards unavailable in heaven, to do with human emotion in all its imperfect complexity. For example, if you can fly like an angel, falling over holds no fear, whereas because we humans have had to learn to walk, and fallen over many times in the attempt, we have a more nuanced, more real sense of its value. To us, walking is a conquest over stumbling and slipping, over gravity itself and those countervailing forces we’re always having to subdue. While the angel can hover above it in serene immunity, walking puts us into tension with the earth, and that brings a certain human satisfaction.
What’s more, where angels are either invisible or, on being glimpsed, liable to vanish into thin air, walking leaves a trace. The baby’s first steps, though in one sense generic, signal the beginnings of a journey that moves in a particular direction that can’t be undone and remains a unique document of its progress. Going where angels never tread makes a path in time, and when you learn to walk you are marking your place on the earth, scratching your autobiography into the ground. Zora Neale Hurston, the great African-American chronicler, gave her 1942 autobiography the title of Dust Tracks on a Road, and this idea of walking your life has been brought out more recently by the British landscape artist Richard Long, who has spent his career crossing the mountains and valleys of the earth on foot. While he builds stone circles and records his journeys in both photographs and semi-poetic journal entries, thus turning them into art objects, the walks themselves also lay claim to being pieces of art. Or rather, they are pieces of nature that show how the act of walking merges with the art of being human, and plots our relationship to the dust from which we’ve come and to which we’ll return.
All of which reinforces the idea that walking makes the human human, and even the theory of evolution, which reminds us we are monkeys and, in doing so, asks us to abandon the illusion of man’s special relationship with God, compensates by showing how far we’ve surpassed those simian cousins. Homo erectus marks a triumph. When Darwin writes that ‘I can see no reason why it should not have been advantageous to the progenitors of man to have become more and more erect and bipedal’, there’s a clear presumption that walking makes sense in competitive terms, and a suggestion that the becoming bipedal of the hominid, the movement that will ultimately extend from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, marks a literal step towards intelligence. One can’t help thinking that the brain becomes more rangy and capable when set atop a neck, looking out like a periscope, than when mounted behind a snout truffling about on the ground. The one-year-old who can survey its new dominion has an undeniable advantage over the six-month-old baby who lies on its back, flailing like a fly. It can look down as well as up, and that supplies it with an extra axis for appraising the world.
In Darwin, walking appears cognate with becoming human, and in this light the baby’s advance from four to two legs reprises evolution itself, a kind of fractal echo. Yet one of Darwin’s canniest revisionists, Elaine Morgan, says there’s archaeological evidence proving that the creature that went on to become Homo erectus was walking a long time before it became ‘man’, the mammal that could manipulate tools. The evolutionary chain included a bipedal animal that wasn’t yet man, implying that the link between walking and humanness might not be so tight; and that in so far as we are bipeds we ‘humans’ fall into the same category as creatures as quirky as the ostrich.
Then, in a quite different rewriting of evolutionary theory, you have the teachings of F. Matthias Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique, which among other things alleviates backache through better posture. Alexander, making his observations in the late nineteenth century, noticed how our notions of ‘walking properly’ were based on the idea that man is an upright animal, a creature with an almost militarily stiff bearing – and that this idea was culturally determined. If our parents and schoolteachers tell us to stand up straight, their words function partly to reassert the rectitude of the human being, but what Alexander suspected was that we hadn’t evolved quite as far as we might have hoped. It is more natural, he suggested, for the knees to remain slightly bent, not locked, and for the spine to be flat, as opposed to curving out at the coccyx like a sergeant major’s; the same applies to walking. The unavoidable implication is that, far from thrusting out the chest and holding up the chin, it’s better and more appropriate for us to walk a little like the apes we so blithely assume we’ve overtaken. As it happens, Alexander used the technique to cure his own malady: an actor who lost his voice, he was informed he’d never speak again, but by flattening the spine, and letting his neck incline somewhat, he enabled his larynx to open again and fill with words.
No matter how natural and inevitable, however, the baby’s first steps can’t help being somewhat theatrical. Learning to walk rarely happens alone; usually it takes place in a domestic theatre of relatives urging you on and applauding each faltering, incremental advance, perhaps wielding a camera to capture you for posterity. It’s a rite of passage that, unlike, say, losing your virginity (exhibitionists excepted), will almost certainly happen in view of others. And once you’ve mastered it, walking remains a going forth – unless you’re the anxious type, given to pacing the floorboards, you won’t walk about very much indoors. It nearly always means being out in the world, and passing under other eyes.
In this sense, learning to walk forms part of a baby’s social, not just its motor, development, and there’s an obvious way in which making physical contact with another person requires crossing the room – it’s usually the feet that enable the touching of hands. But true socialisation, it is thought, comes with the acquisition of language, and among language’s myriad benefits, one is that you can touch others without having to touch them, and move them without having to move them: talking spares us a lot of walking. That it acts at a distance both characterises language and lends it power. It’s something the baby knows long before it has moulded any words in its mouth, for its cry was designed to project vital needs over the longest possible range – as if the volume of its cry lay in direct proportion to its inability to walk. As the cry gradually morphs into language, the volume of oral emissions goes down and their precision goes up.
That transition from crying to talking doesn’t happen overnight – it involves a period of babble, and if there’s a theological depth to walking, then the biblical roots of speaking run deeper still. Getting up and walking might have afforded man a certain height, and raised him closer to God, but such terrestrial stretching was spectacularly exceeded by the Tower of Babel. Constructed with the explicit aim of reaching into the heavens and broadcasting the skill of those who had built it, it stood as a monument of mankind’s self-love. Until, that is, God in righteous indignation demolished it, scattering its inhabitants to the four corners of the earth. With their dispersal came the curse of speaking different tongues, and ever after hearing their former compatriots’ words as mere ‘babble’. Not that Babel and babble are strictly related: no connection has been reliably traced. However, both Babel and babble, in this woeful allegory, refer to a state of being cut off from others, and there are times when the babble of a baby can seem demented, not so much a form of nascent expression as impenetrable solipsism. Babble is subjective expression that defeats objective understanding, leaving the infant stranded in a halfway house between private articulation and public incomprehension.
To a school of post-war literary theorists, however, babble marks a particularly precious phase, something to cherish rather than develop away from. Because social norms have yet to correct it, baby babble represents the point at which language is most redolent with desire, with unfettered longing. In this it’s almost like poetry or dream-speak, that interior monologue which falls under the radar of our conscious selves. To witness a baby burbling might be to tune into their unconscious, inner life, into a narrative of unimpeded desire. In fact, the toddler’s pleasure in his or her ululations, and the disregard for conformity, hint at other kinds of subversion. It will sound far-fetched, but in the eyes of some theorists babble has political potential, because it’s untamed language that literally speaks to its speaker’s disregard for what’s acceptable and what’s not. It’s a self-indulgent pleasure that defies the efforts of elders – for which read the state – to constrain it. Before long, however, we do conform: our language becomes ‘normal’ and we articulate the world in the way that those around us do. There’s a gain in being understood and accepted, but a loss in leaving behind those aspects of the world that now lie beyond the reach of the newly acquired linguistic faculty.
Babble might even reveal something of the origin of language itself, something that James Joyce tried to reproduce in Finnegans Wake. Take the opening of the third paragraph:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.
It might, like a baby’s babble, sound like nonsense, but it’s packed with allusion, not least to the idea of the fall of man, and in particular of that fall from the Tower of Babel into the melee of languages we’re then consigned to disentangle (Joyce said people should spend their entire lives studying his work). Like Joyce’s text, a baby’s babble can actually be understood as a strangely integrated language, whole and consistent, a discourse that prevailed before the dispersal of tongues, the multiplication of new languages and the burden of having to translate between them. Alternatively, but also like Joyce, babble might represent that very confusion that arose after Babel, and the hell of misunderstanding. If the latter, we can hear the baby’s burbling as a lament for the fact of having to enter the world of compromise and negotiation, of social relations and grammatical order. The baby ‘falls’ into language and out of the Edenic state of simply being.
But a fall into language implies that the baby has no language before the fall, that its brain is empty, which raises an important philosophical question. For if a baby arrived on earth with nothing in its head, how would it know about eternal values like truth and goodness? How would it acquire reason? Yes, it could find out about these over time, but if they had to be learned from other humans, from adults, it would imply that those eternal truths were not so eternal. They would be the mere product of experience accumulated by others before them, pragmatic constructs rather than transcendent principles – a possibility abhorrent to classical philosophy. Instead, learning to talk surely must be a process that gradually excavates and activates the language embedded in the baby’s mind from birth – its parents might nudge it along, but the language was already there, waiting to be teased out. To use a technical simile, the newborn’s brain is like a computer preinstalled with software.
Not surprisingly, this classical view had its critics, and chief among them was John Locke, the eighteenth-century philosopher and political radical. Like David Hume, whom we caught playing billiards in the last chapter, Locke was a keen empiricist, and he compared the baby’s mind to a ‘tabula rasa’ or blank sheet of paper. When you learned to talk you were taking in simple ideas from the world about you, then combining them in your mind to make those ideas more complex and finally expressing them in words. Rather than being