Primary Life

It was evening. We had parked our Volkswagen bus on the side of the road on a cliff above the Pacific. Below was a stretch of empty, sandy beach and beyond that the waves rolled in, powerful, rhythmic and peaceful. Above, a grey, light-filled sky. It felt like a vast expanse lay before us.

We had a small hibachi, on which we cooked chicken. Some bread and wine made up the meal. Somehow we were both happy. Life, for me and my then-husband David, didn’t get much better than this evening of simple food on the road. Other people, also parked to watch the evening, looked on in approval. What more did anyone need? The freedom of the road, the rumble of the distant combers rolling in under an immense sky, good food and each other.


Early in my California life, I decided it was better to have what I thought of as a “primary” life than a “secondary” one. By this I meant that I wanted my own life rather than someone else’s. I was well-educated and could easily have accepted what cultural critics laid out as good as the gospel truth. David was not educated. He relied on his senses. He did not want to go to museums, or the symphony, or bookstores. Instead we explored California, criss-crossing the state. We went to rock concerts, movies and hunted for authentic restaurants as well as cooking great food for ourselves. Part of this was based on my research and sensibilities, but part of it was based on his.


I wanted to write, which can only come from a place of individuality. I was a long way from that in 1973. My reading, as well as the many strains of thought I picked up, influenced me, but in every case, I tried to respond from my own particular genes and culture. Wanting to write some day kept me on the straight and narrow.


Secondary life, or life once-removed, it seemed to me, was life lived in thrall to something outside one. It might be an ideology one becomes attached to. Or it might be that of the connoisseur, the critic who experiences life so that he or she can report on it. Often this takes the form of explaining their relationship to things, events, people so as to show themselves to be in the middle of the herd. Or perhaps a leader of the group. As one young woman put it, most young people want to report on “who they hate, what they bought, and what they saw on television!” It seems to be what is left to us, once we have secured our food and shelter.


But we can choose our lives. Writers I admired came from a deep self, speaking as honestly as possible. Nothing else is worth much. Nothing else is any fun. At the same time, I had, and have, a belief in the classical order. I am not desperate to hear one’s dark secrets and passions, as are the romantics. Since order need no longer be seen as the death of freedom (when we understand chaos theory correctly), the expression of passion may no longer be, in literature or anywhere else, as important as the understanding of how to master it.


For example, of the Brontes, in Charlotte’s work, the characters are consumed by anger. Jane Eyre is “licensed to speak for all underlings and trampled people.” This is still important, of course. But Emily believed in the regenerative power of nature, and depicts, in Wuthering Heights, the natural softening of the fortunes of the heirs of Heathcliffe and Catherine, whose destructive passion fills the beginning of the book.


We are of nature and can trust it. Carlo Rovelli in his book There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness [2020], notes that current philosophy is dominated by a “humble and complete” naturalism. “We are natural creatures in a natural world … we are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty, and our ability to experience emotions.”


To live a primary life is to trust one’s own reactions and to accept the limits laid down by the world of the senses in which we live. The world itself is bigger, more thick and layered than we can know, but it can be trusted. We have also come up with many ways to ease our way in it. Antibiotics, anaesthesia, and palliative care help us to physically bear the arrows of the world. And we soften the pains of separation which we impose on ourselves by our incessant travel and resettlement with a thick net of modern digital communication.


We are animals and we haven’t changed much for thousands of years. Families are still our primary unit of relationship, and rather than complain about what has been given to us, we would be better off trying to understand and repair them. Our actions, even as exponents of families, feedback into them with a powerful force. It behooves each of us to become the best selves we can be. 


Even as an older person, holding my small place in Indra’s great net, I know that my actions affect others. And an authentic, primary life is still mine to choose. Stripping the world of its superfluousness, informing myself by a wide-eyed attention, and holding tight to my family I remain a happy animal.

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