Two Years

Liminal reflections

Today marks two years since the disaster that wrecked my life so comprehensively that I still struggle to comprehend it. As good a time as any, I suppose, to take stock. Or try to.

A little while back I wrote that if I were asked to summarise my life in a single world, it would be “failure”. To which people have objected: but you didn’t fail, you had an accident. And I see what they are saying, what they are trying to get at, as a way of encouraging me towards a kinder self-estimation. But I am drawn to a countervailing analogy.

Imagine a spaceship is launched, following meticulous and careful planning by a team of top scientists. But when the spaceship is roughly a third of the way to its destination, a rogue meteorite hurtles out of nowhere, smashing it irretrievably off course. Let’s imagine that there was no way the scientist could have predicted in advanced that the meteorite was going to appear, nothing that they could have done to prevent the collison. It was nobody’s fault that the spaceship has been knocked off course. It was just a terrible piece of bad luck; an accident. Still, the mission is now a failure. The spaceship will never reach its destination, even if perhaps it continues onwards into the void of space, occasionally sending signals back home.

To which the obvious reply is: but a life is not the same kind of thing as a space mission. The point of a space mission is to arrive at a particular destination. A life, by contrast, is not best or properly understood as aiming at some specific final end. It is not about the destination, but (to use a metaphor that I dislike) about the journey itself. After all, every single one of our journeys ends in the same place – so clearly the destination itself cannot be the point. My journey is now taking a radically different path to the one I had anticipated and planned for. But that does not make the journey a failure. It just makes it different, with the jury still out on whether it remains, nonetheless, worthwhile.

Which is a fair point to make, insofar as it goes. But how long should the jury remain out? I have been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (call it work, if you like). At the centre of his moral and political thought was the conviction that human life was capable of obtaining a certain kind of excellence, of eudaemonia. (Often translated as “happiness”, I’ve always preferred the more expansive rendering: “human flourishing.”) Now what exactly Aristotle meant by this is not straightforward, unless you think that “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” is an easy thing to make sense of. But what he was getting at is the idea that there are not just better and worse ways to live, but certain ways to live which are the most fitting and appropriate for a human being, given the nature of what a human being is. And if those most fitting and appropriate ways of living are correctly realised, then the human being in question is able to achieve a kind of flourishing, which itself constitutes the highest instantiation of what it is to be human.

The rub, however, was that Aristotle did not think such flourishing was possible for all and every human being. Women (being defective men) were simply incapable of eudaemonia. So were barbarians and “natural slaves.” Roughly speaking, the only ones who had a chance were the well-brought-up male citizens of a properly ordered Greek city state. But even for them, nothing was guaranteed. Somebody could have spent many years developing their character in the right kinds of ways, learning to exercise the virtues in a manner that would give them the best chance for achieving eudaemonia – and yet be struck down by some cruel accident of fortune rendering their external circumstances so adverse that flourishing became impossible. Disease, financial ruin, being enslaved by an invading enemy army – such catastrophes would make happiness impossible for even the wisest and most virtuous. Whereas Plato had taught that the truly just man could remain happy even whilst being broken on the torturer’s wheel, Aristotle would have none of it. Whether or not they realised it, such people were “talking nonsense.”

One need not endorse Aristotle’s deeply inegalitarian conception of eudaemonia to nonetheless think that he has a point. That there are certain bad things that can happen to a human being, and which put a hard block on their ability to lead a flourishing and happy life. That life (that journey) might well continue onwards. But it will be irreparably limited in terms of what it is able to amount to.

For me – and I do literally mean for me – it is hard not to conclude that tetraplegia amounts to such a block on the possibility of a happy, flourishing existence. I once lived an open and expansive life, vast in its multitudes. I now sustain an existence of minuscule proportions, a Groundhog Day of small horizons, watching my friendships slowly die on the vine, the inevitable consequence of no longer sharing 95% of the world that others inhabit.

For two years, I have been depressed. This is now just my new normal. A proportionate and appropriate response to what my life has become, not least given that I know very well what life can be (what until not long ago, it was). I take the pills, I do the therapy. Fleeting moments of happiness come around, usually involving trips to a pub. They do help. But given the broader facts of the situation, my baseline now looks distinctly settled.

Of course it could be worse. It has been, for plenty of the last two years. Merely being depressed is by no means the worst state to be in. At present, I am not actively suicidal. I am unhappy, certainly, but not to the point where the agony is so intense that I just want to make it stop at any cost. There is no denying that this is progress, of a sort. (Although things here can go backwards, as well as forwards, as they undoubtedly will again before too long.) One way to put it, I suppose, is that whilst I am not actively looking to die, I also see no essential point in continuing to live. I exist in a liminal state, in which the possibility of happiness appears foreclosed by the unchangeable facts of what it now means for me to stay alive.

Total dependence. Humiliation. The impossibility of spontaneity. Loneliness. Boredom. The death of wanted intimacy. Constant war with a living corpse. These are the facts of my life now. There is no realistic prospect of these facts changing. I have, it is true, come to tolerate them in a way that I once thought impossible. Yet toleration is one thing, happiness quite another.

To me, it remains clear that it would have been better not to survive that accident; to never wake up from the fall. And whilst, today at least, I am free of the urge to finish what the rocks started, if you told me that I won’t wake up tomorrow I’d be at peace tonight - give or take a fit of blinding rage.

The chances are, however, that I will wake up. Another monotonous, repetitive day in my liminal state. It has been two years since I felt joy. I doubt that I will ever feel it again. But the pain, the grief, they do become easier to bear, I can at least now report. That is not nothing, even if I remain far from convinced that it is enough. I guess the jury is still out, after all.