Running with the Pack (23 page)

It's around the twenty-three-mile mark — as I am running east over the Rickenbacker Causeway — that the cramp really starts to hit hard; and this time it's in a big muscle group, my quads — both of them. This is much more difficult to stretch away. It's partly because I'm so tired, and tend to topple over every time I stand on one leg to do a quad stretch. But even when I manage to stay upright for more than a few seconds, the quad stretches just don't quite seem to be doing it. Cramp in the quads is a lot more worrying than in the calves. I may be able to limp home on shattered calves, but if a big muscle group like the quads go into spasm, I'm going to go down like a ton of bricks. And I doubt I'll be getting up any time soon. I'm three miles away from the finishing line, but I might as well be three hundred. I manage the problem as best I can: I stretch, then run as far as I can until I feel them starting to spasm, and then stretch some more.

When you run in pain, you are running on the borderlands of freedom. You still belong to the land of reasons, but are flirting dangerously with the line that marks the land of causes. The last long run I did, at the beginning of December, I began during an arthritic flare-up of one of my knees. I forget which one, but I do remember that the first eight miles or so were very unpleasant indeed; but after that it seemed to sort itself out. The pain in my quads today I judge to be considerably less than the pain in my knee then. But on that run I wasn't
skirting the borderlands between reason and cause. That is the difference.

The pain in my knee was a reason to stop. But it was never going to become anything more than a reason; and no reason can ever compel me. The pain in my knee was manageable, it would get no worse and my knee would not seize up. The pain in my quads is quite different. It has everything to do with possibilities: it has little to do with what is happening now — the level of severity of the pain — and everything to do with what might happen in a moment.

Suppose I somehow knew that this pain would not lead to any more severe cramping, of the sort that would deposit me on the tarmac as if I'd been shot. It doesn't really matter how I knew this. I might imagine, for example, that there is a God kind enough to take an interest in my fortunes during this race, and He appears to me on the Rickenbacker Causeway. God tells me: okay, Mark, the pain is what it is. But it's not going to get any worse. Your quads are not going to cramp any more than they already are. You don't have to worry about collapsing in a broken heap on the ground. Just keep doing what you're doing, and you'll finish the race. If I knew this, could I keep running? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. It wouldn't be entirely pleasant. But it would certainly be bearable.

The borderlands of freedom are the shadow lands — populated not by the concrete and reassuring what is, but by the shadows of what might come to be. When I run in this sort of pain, I run the borderlands — skirting the line that divides reasons and causes. Pain — certainly moderate pain of this sort — is a reason, and can never make me stop running. But this particular pain is a reason of a special sort: a reason that signifies the imminent appearance of a cause that can crush me.
The pain in my knee of two months ago was not this sort of pain at all, even though it was significantly more severe. It was what it was: it signified the imminent appearance of nothing. With the pain of today, I must push and push and push, right up until the last second: the second before the transformation occurs — the moment when a reason that I have becomes a cause that simply happens to me. I must push and push on to the borderline of the land of causes. But I must not step over.

8

Gods, Philosophers, Athletes

2011

That was how an ageing philosopher and talentless runner finished his first marathon: running, stretching, running, stretching, running, stretching, walking when there was no other choice, skirting the borderlands of freedom for the last three miles from the Rickenbacker Causeway to Bayfront Park. That was the deepest I had ever journeyed into the heartbeat of the run. In the gap between reasons and actions — the gap where Sartre found anguish but I found joy — I encountered one of the more surprising forms that the experience of intrinsic value can take. Maybe one day I will go deeper, if there is a deeper. My thoughts upon crossing the line: is that it? Can I stop running now? Then someone put a shiny medal around my neck, and I decided I probably could. It would have been nice if some more appropriately triumphant thought had taken the trouble to make its way into my head as I crossed the line; but I suppose that was never what it was about. 5.15:23 clock time, 5.08:44 chip time
(because of the number of runners, there is a delay between the time of the gun and the time I actually cross the starting line. There is a little chip in my number bib, given to me by the race organizers, and this records the time elapsed since I crossed the starting line. This time is what is known as ‘chip time'). My quad-cramping issues cost me about fifteen minutes over the closing three miles. They are pathetic times really and a couple of months ago I would have been a seething mass of malefaction. But today — facticity being what it is — I am far from unhappy.

What was the point of these last few hours, these 26 miles and 385 yards? Was it really worth it? That is the beauty of it — there was no point. It is in the places where points and purposes of life stop that you find things that are ‘worth it'. We live in a utilitarian age where we tend to think of the value of everything as a function of its purpose. The defining question of our age is: ‘What is it good for?' And to say that something is ‘good for nothing' is equivalent to saying that it is worthless. This, as Martin Heidegger put it, is our
Gestell
, our enframing, and it is one that requires us to think in a quite specific way about what is of value in life. If something is worth doing in life it must be for the sake of something else. If running is worth doing — whether it is a marathon or a gentle jog around the block — then it must be worth doing because of the health it promotes, the sense of satisfaction or self-worth it engenders, the stress it relieves, the social opportunities it affords. If an activity is valuable at all, it must be useful for something. And the implicit assumption, one built into our defining
Gestell
, is that this something is something
else
— something outside the activity.

I see the consequences of this attitude every day, in students who tell me, ‘I really wish I could have done X' —
philosophy, literature, languages — ‘but my parents told me I had to do something sensible, something useful — something that would get me a job afterwards.' And so their young lives are already set on a course they never really wanted. They will work to get paid, and any satisfaction they find in life will probably have to be found elsewhere. In another time, another
Gestell
, their parents might have said: find something that for you is play, something you do for its own sake, and then find someone who will pay you to do it. But no matter how much money this is, try to make sure you always do it for its own sake and not the money: try to make sure it is always play, never work. I hope that is what I shall tell my children.

There is another consequence of the way we think about value, perhaps slightly less obvious but equally pernicious: it makes it impossible for us to understand the value or meaning of our lives. In his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus' the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote: ‘Killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you … it is merely confessing that life “is not worth the trouble”.' From this perspective, which I think is an illuminating one, the search for a meaning in life is the search for something that makes it worth the trouble. The idea that the value of anything in life must lie in its point or purpose makes it impossible to find meaning in life — at least, it makes it impossible given the way the idea of a purpose is usually understood. To see why, consider this, characteristically dense, passage from Heidegger:

When an entity within-the-world has already been proximally freed for its Being, that Being is involvement …
with
this thing, for instance, which is ready-to-hand, and which
we accordingly call a ‘hammer', there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is' for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein — that is to say, for the sake of a possibility of Dasein's Being … But the totality of involvements itself goes back ultimately to a ‘towards-which' in which there is no further involvement … The primary ‘towards-which' is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which.' But the ‘for-the-sake-of' always pertains to the Being of Dasein.

This passage is from
Being and Time
, published in 1927, the same year as Schlick's short essay ‘On the Meaning of Life'. And despite some obvious differences between the two — Schlick is easy to read, Heidegger seemed to take great pleasure in being needlessly obscure — their interests overlap at this point. Suppose something can be valuable only if it has a purpose. Heidegger, in effect, shows us where all those purposes lead.
‘Dasein'
is his term for human beings — or, more accurately, the type of being that is possessed by humans. Humans see the world in terms of a network of instruments, and the purposes that ultimately unite this network all point back to us —
Dasein
. One hammers to drive the nail, to make something fast, to make the house more secure, to provide protection from the storm … to keep
Dasein
alive. Value derives from purpose, and this is where purposes end. So, if we were to take this model and employ it to try to identify the meaning of life, we would find ourselves trapped in a tautology. What is the meaning of life, what it is that makes life ‘worth the trouble'? The only answer we will find is ‘life'.

Nothing that has a purpose outside itself is a candidate for
the thing that makes life worth the trouble — for if you follow that purpose to its logical conclusion, you will simply find more life. There is a way out of this tautological circle, the only way out, as far as I can see: to find activities where the chain of purposes ends. If we want to find value in life, something that might be a candidate for life's meaning or one of its meanings — then we must look to things that have no purpose. Put another way: it is a necessary condition of something being truly important in life that it have no purpose outside itself — that it be useless for anything else. Worthlessness — in this sense — is a necessary condition of real value. If the value of something were a matter of its utility for something else, then it would be this something else that is the locus of value.

So, as Moritz Schlick also concluded many years before I got there, if we want to find what is valuable in life we need to look to things that carry their purpose — and so their value — within themselves. And, also courtesy of Schlick, it is clear what these things are. The things we do that are valuable for their own sake are all forms of play. And running, at least for adult humans, is the oldest and simplest form of play there is. We can run for many reasons, and most of these are instrumental and so form the basis only of instrumental value. But the real value of running eclipses this instrumental value, and on its own makes running ‘worth the trouble'. The purpose and value of running is intrinsic to it. The purpose and value of running is simply to run. Running is one of the places in life where the points or purposes stop. As such, running is one of the things that can make life ‘worth the trouble'.

The place that gave us the marathon also gave us philosophy. That place was the city-state of Athens in the fourth and fifth
centuries
BCE
. To understand the ancient Athenians, one needs to understand at least three things: their gods, their philosophers and their athletes. Admittedly, by this time the Athenians could no longer bring themselves to believe in their gods, just as most of us today cannot bring ourselves to believe in the God of Genesis. But they still remembered the stories and, just as it was for the stories of Creation and Fall, it is the metaphysical truth of what they remembered, rather than the literal truth, that is important.

One of Shakespeare's most memorable lines emanated from the mouth of the Duke of Gloucester, shortly after he had been blinded by Lear's daughter Regan: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.' For the ancient Greeks, the connection between gods and their sport was indeed a close one. The reasons for this are far from accidental. In his
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
, Friedrich Schiller — the eighteenth-century German philosopher, historian, poet and playwright — wrote:

For, to declare it once and for all, man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing. This proposition, which at the moment perhaps seems paradoxical, will assume great and deep significance when we have once reached the point of applying it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny; it will, I promise you, support the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and the still more difficult art of living. But it is only in science that this statement is unexpected; it has long since been alive and operative in art and in the feeling of the Greeks, its most distinguished exponents; only they transferred to Olympus what should have been realized on earth. Guided by its truth, they caused not
only the seriousness and toil which furrow the cheeks of mortals, but also the futile pleasure that smoothes the empty face, to vanish from the brows of the blessed gods and they released these perpetually happy beings from the fetters of every aim, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indifference the enviable portion of divinity; merely a more human name for the freest and most sublime state of being.