(This) Man’s Search for Meaning

I’m a man on a mission—one that began very early in life.

I’m a seeker—searching far and wide—a traveler of inner and outer landscapes. There’s nowhere I’m not willing to go, no journey too arduous, no climb too steep, no descent too deep.

After all these years, my desire is still at times overwhelming. I thirst with an unquenchable thirst, crave with an insatiable craving. I’m in pursuit of the thing I was pursued for—and though it can be called many things, it is one. What I’m after, what I’ve been looking for so long, what I will ache for all my numbered days, is meaning.

From early adolescence, I have felt that life is fraught with meaning, and that to live a meaningful life requires a certain approach—mindfulness, openness, meditation, contemplation, abandon, deliberate study, intentional experience.

I find meaning in many places and through many experiences. My quest has led me to theology, philosophy, psychology, and to art. In fact, art is in and intertwined among everything—art in general and literature in particular. So much so, I can no longer distinguish between art and religion, art and philosophy, art and psychology, art and life.

Writing this column is a facet of my search for meaning. I’m look for the meaning of life in every book I read, every movie and play I watch, every song I hear, every photograph and painting I gaze at. But reading and watching and gazing aren’t enough. I also have to process, explore, contemplate—and that’s where the column comes in. After all, how will I know what I think until I see what I write?

We live in a world where deep meaning (and therefore living) gets lost in shallow pursuits, in noise, in movement, in franticness and freneticness and forgetting what really matters most.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of “Man’s Search For Meaning” observed, “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

“Man’s Search for Meaning” chronicles Frankl’s experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend not eating again until you do.

One of the main reasons I write novels (or columns or short stories or plays) is to have a more meaningful life. Through writing, I explore, I delve, I knead, I grope around in the dark searching for light. And I read for the same reason. Art is all about meaning—all about what it means to be human—to exist, to live, to love, to die.

I find art meaningful—both the creating of and the partaking of—as meaningful as anything in my life. That’s why I spend the majority of my limited time on this pale blue dot making it and breathing it.

Many people spend time talking about and looking for the meaning of life—as if it’s one thing to be discovered, a hidden ancient thing to uncover, but the meaning of life isn’t one thing. It’s many.

Frankl also said, “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

Art works this way. I read a poem, get lost in a novel, go to see a film, pass a graffiti-covered boxcar or bridge and all are messages from the universe—ethereal, ineffable, transcendent, true, all spoken to me in the present moment, the eternal now. I pause, breathe deeply, reflect, then continue moving again, only now with more meaning.

Giving ourselves over to art, letting it work its magic in us, is a way to have a meaningful life. Art speaks to the deepest part of our humanity. Artists create from the soul and the art they create speaks to our souls.

My quest for a meaningful life has led me time and again to art. Art comforts. Art heals. Art teaches. Art inspires. Art transforms. Art broadens the mind and expands the soul and increases our compassion like very few things can.

Through art we can explore and experience the depraved depths and heroic heights of humanity—and be transformed in the process.

Frankl said, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

This very moment, you and I are being asked about the meaning of our lives. What will we answer? Art can tell us.

My wish for you is a deeply, profoundly meaningful life—and though there are a plethora of elements involved in such a thing, art needs be among them.

As both an artist and someone whose closest companions are art and artists, my faith is that of Joyce Carol Oates:

“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

“I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called culture—and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

“Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

“The individual voice is the communal voice.

“The regional voice is the universal voice.”