Lying awake last night, I started thinking back, again, on the book Days of War, Nights of Love. This, along with the Idiot, by Dostoyevsky, are the two books that have most influenced my life.
Days of War, Nights of Love begins with a barrage of questions:
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
… And throughout the book, it calls on the reader to answer difficult questions. My main reading of the book is this:
Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves - a sort of moral obligation - to live a meaningful life. And this “meaningfulness” must be something creative, passionate, personal and authentic: not a set of prepackaged meaning that we passively accept.
To create this sort of meaning, we must reject false authority. And false authority is any system of control that extends beyond people you can see and trust, any demand of obedience that goes beyond small groups where you can voluntarily give service and obedience for the good of the group.
(Does this mean then that we should all go out robbing and murdering? Not at all. We should each take responsibility for our own actions, and do what we hold to be right.)
False authority is not new, but it is something that has grown particularly intense in recent decades. Social “progress” and “development” have brought with them ever more sophisticated systems of social control (combined with carefully defined social “rights”). So the individual living in the late-capitalist West has a particularly strong obligation to resist such systems.
I said that this book has influenced me greatly, but I don’t mean that I have taken up its point of view as a means of making all my decisions. (Of course, anyone who knows me, and knows that I work in an office, for a large international publishing house, knows that this is not so.) But ever since reading it, the point of view has always been a consideration in each decision I make.
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