Jardin des Plantes – Paris
The reason that I find some biographies so interesting is that you can trace the person’s developing sense of the purpose of their life and the meaning. Clearly for everyone it is different. If you google ‘the meaning of life’, the AI overview goes something like this: that finding meaning is deeply personal and it’s a process and journey involving reflection, action, and connection. AI tells us that if you can align daily activities with your personal values and long-term goals alongside meaningful relationships, and experience and contribute, you’re on your way. The third point offered for guidance to find the meaning of life is connecting to something larger than yourself. (Incidentally, the first is self-reflection and understanding, and the second taking action and pursuing meaning)
In this post I’m drawing on the experiences of Raissa Oumansov, a Russian Jew who moved to Paris as a child, and who later married the theologian, Jacques Maritain. In Raissa Maritain’s Memoirs written in the first half of the 20th century, she demonstrates the urgency about finding meaning and purpose when we are young. Raissa, who later became a poet, [her work was translated by Thomas Merton from French to English], describes how she and Jacques are walking – then as girlfriend and boyfriend in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Both are students at the Sorbonne: Raissa a serious scientist, Jacques a philosopher, and both are unhappy and dispirited by the limitations of their subjects, and Raissa, persuaded by the arguments given out by science was an atheist. Writing some years later Raissa says although the memories come back very strongly of that time she cannot: ‘live over again … the same intensity the deep distress of my heart, fainting with hunger and thirst after truth. … This metaphysical anguish, going down to the very roots of the desire for life’.
On this day that she describes, the couple had said to one another that if truth couldn’t be found then life was debased, and it was no longer possible to live humanly.
‘I wanted no part in such a comedy. I would have accepted a sad life but not one that was absurd. Jacques had for a long time thought that it was still worthwhile to fight for the poor …but now his despair was as great as mine. … Before leaving the Jardin des Plantes we reached a solemn decision which brought us some peace: to look sternly in the face, even to the ultimate consequence – insofar as it would be in our power – the facts of that unhappy and cruel universe … We would accept no concealment, no cajolery from persons of consequence, asleep in their false security’.
They agree to have a little confidence in the unknown, looking on existence as an experiment to be made,
‘… in the hope that to our ardent plea, the meaning of life would reveal itself, that new values would stand forth so clearly that they would enlist our total allegiance, and deliver us form the nightmare of a sinister and useless world.’
The vow they make is that if this experiment is unsuccessful then the solution would be suicide and before they lost their youthful strength. ‘We wanted to die by a free act if it were impossible to live according to the truth’.
The following chapter begins: ‘it was then that God’s pity caused us to find Henri Bergson’.