Post #72: Ever-Erring Mankind (Mistakes)

19 Oct. 2023

“To find the right way, you have to go the wrong way first.”

— Told to me in a dream last night

Does anyone enjoy making mistakes, or at least not mind them? Not me: I hate them. Every little one cuts me, and I have made—and continue to make—far more than I care to recall. So on this, if nothing else, I do claim to speak with an unusual degree of authority…

I was put in mind of the question by teaching the Homeric gods in a class recently—Olympian beings resplendent in all the glory of perpetual youth, blessed with ethereal beauty, and burdened by not a care in the world, excepting only occasional trifles on which nothing of any lasting importance ever depends. Thinking of the kind of lives these fabled creatures are said to lead, their lightness of being (as Eva Brann puts it*), their utter lack of serious purpose by any human standards, it occurred to me that mere mortals too have sometimes aspired to floating through earthly existence in this airy manner, aiming to lead lives of leisure, grace, and elegance encumbered by no weightiness to speak of, or only as an afterthought, if it cannot be avoided—thus the rarified upper crust of the late ancien regime, for example, and its various equivalents elsewhere in time and space.

Not that such a way of living can ever, beneath these leaden skies of ours, be sustained for very long: the expenditure alone must prove prohibitive before long, since it consumes vast resources by definition, while precluding any sustained concern with production or conservation, petty scruples altogether unworthy of such lofty altitudes. No surer way to blast genteel pretensions than the need to do any work whatsoever, or any planning even, beyond the next frolic perhaps. (One does not have to be partial to the type to recognize its existence and distinctive way of life. Jefferson spoke of a tinsel aristocracy sprung from the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the banquet hall to those of the bedchamber.** He lived in Paris at just the right time to know whereof he was speaking, and Monticello bears the imprint of the experience as surely as do the scathing dismissals in his letters.)

A set of obstacles already forbidding enough, and yet only the beginning—for the Olympian manner is frightfully vulnerable, in its human form at least, to adverse circumstances of any kind. The least hint of real difficulty, let alone adversity, vitiates its easy charms; it ages poorly by any account; and sickness of any kind destroys it as surely as will accidents and injuries. Even when such a mode of life can be maintained for a few moments, it is forever threatened by a most formidable foe who can be kept at bay only by the greatest exertions and can never be defeated for long: the nemesis of all carefree gaiety and levity, hideous ennui, or plain old boredom to more plebeian minds.

The Olympian mode admits, at bottom, of only one sure motive for doing something: its promise to be amusing, or at least interesting, since there can be in this realm no question of real seriousness, purpose, or meaning that would allow one to prevail and persist with anything dreary or laborious, heaven forbid. Hence human Olympians show a disconcerting readiness to rush their morality and throw everything away at the slightest suspicion that their accustomed satisfactions, such as they are, might no longer be forthcoming. That love might redeem our labors, or duty, or even dogged determination, may sound like a platitude to plebeian ears; few Olympians seem capable of hearing the message at all, or if they do, they cannot credit it.

For all that their lives furnish in such abundance—freedom and the widest palette possibilities of pleasures—these aspirants to Olympus run up against a quirk of the human mind that may turn out to be an improbable saving grace for the rest of us. It appears that we who are not gods, nor harbor any ambitions of the sort, require a good measure of difficulty, scarcity, and pressure in our lives, a sense of limitation and constraint without which things will simply not matter much to us. Thus the dream of happiness on the hedonist model regularly turns into a nightmare in direct proportion as it is most unconstrained by circumstances. Diversions are aptly named: they work well on the side, not at all well as the main course.

What does any of this have to do with our horror of mistakes? Well, is not the dread of errors direct evidence for our constrained condition? If we weren’t at risk, ever circumscribed and imperiled by what surrounds us in life, then what need would there be to fear mistakes? With all the power, all the time, all the resources imaginable at our disposal, what would missteps matter? Knowing little of such a condition, we are naturally inclined to idealize it unduly, as if it were, or could ever be, the answer to our prayers. Yet, if we took a closer look, consulting the experience of those whose lives have approached such a fabled condition for longer than a week or two at a time, we might lose our confidence in the proposed solution, even if it could ever be practically viable for more than a vanishing few. Vacations are so desirable, like feasts, because they are exceptional; make them the rule and watch the magic drain right out of them.

None of these considerations make mistakes any less dreadful, mortifying, even fatal on occasion. But isn’t that just the point: how the very dread of mistakes keeps us on the alert for life’s many hazards? What could better teach us not to do something again—if we survive it in one piece—than the sheer misery and terror of messing up badly? If that were not part of life, what serious development and growth could there ever be, what commitment to a faltering cause, what resolve and resilience in the dog days of adversity, what deeper value and meaning in anything?

Perhaps there is no great reassurance in being reminded, as we are trudging wearily along, that the gods in the Pali scriptures look with envy upon our condition—but it is still worth noting. The lives of the gods are too easy and comfortable for their own good: there is nothing to impel them towards the Path, as liberation appears a non-issue to them until their life-spans too are exhausted and it is too late. Only we humans are said to be in a position that allows us to work out our salvation, because we have the requisite capacity, in principle at least, while our lives are hard enough (and don’t we know it, even when things are going well and we have nothing to complain of) to give us every incentive to get moving.

“Not just hard,” you may protest, “altogether too hard!” Sad but true; who could deny it in view of the hellish agonies to which we remain liable, even in the world’s most fortunate corners, from one day to the next on account of an unlucky toss of life’s dice. So let us continue to do what we can to lighten the burden, our own and that of others; but let us not forget, when we are feeling overwhelmed or maddened by the tolling of the bells, that we are built for facing challenges and hardships; that our strength will often grow along with our toils and troubles; and that we turn out to be capable of enduring and overcoming far more than we may believe in times of calm.

“But I want to see for myself,” you may say at last: “Before I dismiss the lives of the gods (an exercise in sour grapes if ever there was one), let me taste their delights first!” I hear you; I would too would jump at the offer of a green card for Olympus, and I wish you best of luck in your quest to get your hands on one. Not many gods have ever climbed down from their high abodes willingly—so why should we not want to travel in the other direction, given half a chance? (How much our frail and fraught condition weighs on us is daily illustrated by our entertainments, a smorgasbord of fantasies about violent heroics far beyond what we could ever hope to survive in real life, and a never-ending projection space for super-powers of every sort—one continuous confession, in sum, of our own feebleness, keenly felt lack, and creaturely inadequacy.)

Even the Buddha’s story as it is commonly told, tracing as it does the archetypal hero’s arc, bespeaks a profound longing on our part. But there is in it something more consoling than the blockbuster fantasies can offer, namely the reminder that a Buddha too must start his journey a long way from enlightenment and liberation, with plenty of unavailing trials and errors on the road, much confusion and desperate groping in the dark—the very reason, surely, why it so remarkable and impressive when the fog clears at last and the waters part. If it were easy, a mere matter of course, or else altogether out of our reach, we would have little reason to value the example so much. Instead it hovers at the very edge of what is possible for us: reachable only by the greatest effort and determination, and therefore the very definition of human achievement, even while it liberates us from such categories upon arrival and attainment. Nor do we even need to arrive at our destination to reap its fruit; the very pursuit is already rewarding, even if that soothing message is easily forgotten in the heat of life’s relentless trials and tribulations.

*See chapter 1 of her delightful Homeric Moments (2002).

**Letter to George Washington of 9 September 1792.