Life is precious

Writing about life and death recently in an essay, I asserted that life is precious to all of us. My friend Jeff House commented that life isn't precious to murderous kids in ghetto gangs, or people who commit suicide. I added child soldiers to that list, and doubtless there are other groups too. I don't think many suicides belong there though: a large proportion are suffering from the accursed affliction of depression or some other mental illness which so warps their perception that sometimes their life no longer seems precious to them - and occasionally when in this diseased state they take not only their own life but the lives of their spouse and children. Leaving aside these diseased states and forms of social pathology, I maintain that life is precious to all (the rest) of us. I said to Jeff House that I could make a list of reasons why my life has been precious to me, reduce that list to a short list, and even narrow it down to a single reason, the mutual love that Wendy and I had for each other. In this post, I'll try to list some of the other reasons life is precious to me. The most obvious is the one Peter Medawar gave: considering the alternative to life, i.e. death, he expressed a very decided preference for life. I agree one hundred percent. What are some of the other reasons that life is precious? There is the love I have for my children and grandchildren, and most definitely the love I still feel for my beloved Wendy, even though she isn't here to reciprocate. Then there is the affection I have, reciprocated I am confident in most if not in all cases, for friends, even a diminishing small handful of friends whose bond with me dates from childhood or university, more than sixty years ago. What else? Many particular experiences have made my life precious to me. Very high, indeed top of the list, I must put the experience of being present at the birth of all three of my children. I actually delivered Jonathan, the youngest of the three, because the nurse-midwife, the only other person present in the labour room, was on the phone trying to call our doctor, and Jonathan's birth was very quick, almost precipitate. By then I had delivered many babies and that birth was easy for Wendy too, and so quick there was no time to worry about any of many things that could have gone wrong. Next on my list of reasons life is precious is curiosity that can only be satisfied by the pleasure of finding things out, Richard Feynman's phrase for scientific curiosity which I will broaden to a wider, richer curiosity about what's become of people I know, how has their life unfolded since last I had word of them, what's become of whole nations. Now, in my mid-80s, my main reason for wanting to remain alive is curiosity about what my grandchildren and a few others I know of the same age, will do with their lives. The many pleasures of travel are another thing that makes life precious. Sad to say, these pleasures have diminished perceptibly in the past 20-30 years, not because of increased age and reduced vigour but because of the increasing annoyances of air travel and the decline of sea travel (cruise ships don't provide sea travel, merely a way to commute between allegedly interesting ports at which they stay too briefly for the cruising passengers to gain any insights). Only train travel remains relatively pleasurable, and only in Europe, not in Canada or the USA, and I can't really include it among things that make life precious. Next come an array of aesthetic pleasures: listening to several kinds of music, contemplating art in galleries, especially galleries in Europe that I will never see again - and watching the other people contemplating art, often as richly satisfying as the art itself. Admiring buildings designed by great architects fits in this class too, and above all other forms of creative endeavour, reading great works of literature - and lesser works too - is so rewarding it is high on my list of reasons why life is precious. Throughout my life I've had immense pleasure from reading, sometimes I feel from reading just about anything, even the back of cereal packets. Reading is most pleasurable of course when I'm reading something worth while. Worth while reading includes the literary canon from Homer through Dante and Shakespeare to Proust and Joyce, some living and recently dead writers who seem very likely to join that company; it includes literate works about physical, biological, social and medical sciences; it includes classical and some contemporary works on history, literary and a few political biographies; and for me it also includes enough less eminent writers for this subject to receive further attention in another post on this blog some time.