Facing the Cold at the Heart of Life
Facing the Cold at the Heart of Life
Seeking nobility and grace in a savage land
It was very cold today in Toronto. The sun was shining and there was barely a cloud in the sky. Yet, if you walked outside you would immediately cough from the shock of the air hitting your throat. If you were unfortunate enough to be hit in the face with a gust of wind then your eyes would tear up and the tears would instantaneously freeze to the side of your face. If you happened to be caught walking outside for any length of time then your thighs would go numb and you wouldn’t even notice until they had defrosted after sitting inside for half an hour.
In fact there have only been twelve years in the last hundred with a day as cold.
-25 degrees Celsius is odd. At this point the temperature has dropped so low that it challenges some basic beliefs about the kind of world you live in. Despite any snow that might be piled up it’s incredibly dry and your breath condenses the moment it hits the air. Any exposed skin never feels cold but transitions immediately to being painful and no matter how many layers you are wearing you can feel the drop in temperature in your bones.
In these conditions, I was walking down King street on my way to get coffee with a friend and I saw the scene above. Somehow the traffic light on the North West corner of an intersection had been brought down. In all likelihood the result of a passing vehicle. Yet, at the time, in this cold and savage setting there was a sense that we had entered another land where strange spirits were at work. Anything could have happened.
A policeman was on the scene directing cars around strewn wires and a firetruck had just pulled up. A few firemen were walking around the debris, assessing the situation, communicating in sharp tones and flurries of hand signals. They were moving with the urgency that the cold brings out in people. Yet there wasn’t any fear.
The frigid, alienating environment made every aspect of the scene appear askew but at the same time there was simply work that had to be done. I couldn’t stay to watch as shivers were running up and down my spine and my teeth were chattering so I kept moving so I could get to the coffee shop and warm up.
This kind of bitter cold is directly confrontational towards human life. The moment you encounter it without the warmth of a fire or gas furnace to protect you it is clearly the enemy. The freezing air outside literally sucks out the energy that allows you to maintain your body. It is as if the whole world is trying to kill you1.
Yet the truth is that, while the cold brings the fragility of life to the forefront, we always live in a precarious state.
The anxiety of fate and death is most basic, most universal, and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile. Even if the so-called arguments for the “immortality of the soul” had argumentative power (which they do not have) they would not convince existentially. For existentially everybody is aware of the complete loss of self which biological extinction implies…
If there were no fear of death, the threat of the law or of a superior enemy would be without effect — which it obviously is not. Man as man in every civilisation is anxiously aware of the threat of nonbeing and needs the courage to affirm himself in spite of it.
Our life brings with it an co-existing death. It is present when we fall asleep to forget the troubles of the day. It is present when we feel sick and worry about our body. And, It is present when we choose one course of action over another and permanently close off one path to what our life could have been. This interdependence brings with it anxiety. Somehow we need to find the wisdom, courage, and peace to live anyway.
Perhaps there is a clear analytical answer that can resolve this tension. It would be wonderful if we could sit down think it through and come up with an answer to forever satisfy our angst. Certainly, people have tried this approach with varying levels of success. However, more often than not a solution will come not from thought but from action.
In the Republic Plato caps his imagined utopian society with an elite martial class of ‘Guardians’ who have been trained from brith to strive for nobility and grace. In Plato’s telling it is only once this group is firmly established that the further class of “philosopher-kings” that can bring wisdom to rightly order the polis will emerge.
In other words, to be able to have the courage to face the anxiety of death we need the example of those who strive for the best outcome. People do beautiful and noble deeds and from watching these we find a way to believe in our own lives.
We should encourage and be grateful for these shows of human excellence - and perhaps even be bold enough to pursue them ourselves. Through these repeated actions we can prove to ourselves again and again that the project of life is worth the constant struggle with death.
I finished up with my friend after about an hour and walked back down King to catch the subway home. The world still felt strange, alien, and inhospitable but the street had been cleared and traffic was flowing.
Links
Against Edenism, Peter Thiel
The history of the twentieth century is a history of [the] loss of hope in the future.
Many people often wish that they could live in an imagined Edenic past. For some it is the picket fences and riches of the 1950s, others hark back to Medieval times, and for yet another group there is the image of the pristine pre-civilisation of the hunter gatherers of the Middle Paleolithic. In any case, it is invariably a world where we were strong and kind, and we lived in ecological harmony with the people and the world around us. Unfortunately, time only moves forward. This essay asks pointedly: As we are buffeted along by its’ flow what is the vision of the future that we striving for?
Vibe
For better or for worse, this is not a bad description of Canada more generally.