The Mother of All Questions
By Rebecca
Solnit – Harper's Magazine – Oct 2015
Extracts:
"I
gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer
period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of
people was whether Woolf should have had children. I answered the question
dutifully, noting that Woolf apparently considered having children early in her
marriage, after seeing the delight that her sister, Vanessa Bell, took in her
own. But over time Woolf came to see reproduction as unwise, perhaps because of
her own psychological instability. Or maybe, I suggested, she wanted to be a
writer and to give her life over to her art, which she did with extraordinary
success. In the talk I had quoted with approval her description of murdering
“the angel of the house,” the inner voice that tells many women to be
self-sacrificing handmaidens to domesticity and male vanity. I was surprised
that advocating for throttling the spirit of conventional femininity should
lead to this conversation.
What I
should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf’s
reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent
questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, “Fuck this shit,”
which carried the same general message and moved everyone on from the
discussion.) After all, many people have
children; only one made To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and we were discussing
Woolf because of the books, not the babies. (…)
But just
because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that I ought to answer it, or
that it ought to be asked. The interviewer’s question was indecent, because it presumed that women should have
children, and that a woman’s
reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally,
the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.
But even to
say that there’s one proper way may be putting the case too optimistically,
given that mothers are consistently found wanting, too. A mother may be treated
like a criminal for leaving her child alone for five minutes, even a child
whose father has left it alone for several years. Some mothers have told me
that having children caused them to be treated as bovine non-intellects who
should be disregarded. Other women have been told that they cannot be taken
seriously professionally because they will go off and reproduce at some point.
And many mothers who do succeed professionally are presumed to be neglecting
someone. There is no good answer to
being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question. (…)
Questions
about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of
having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private
property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will
bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still
miserable.
We are
constantly given one-size-fits-all
recipes, but those recipes fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given
them again. And again and again. They become
prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the
prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely
miserable. (…)
Even those
who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find
happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman
who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life
that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn’t call her happy;
her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a
despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better
language to describe. There are entirely
different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person — honor,
meaning, depth, engagement, hope. (…)
After I
wrote a book about me and my mother, who married a brutal professional man and
had four children and often seethed with rage and misery, I was ambushed by an
interviewer who asked whether my abusive father was the reason I had failed to
find a life partner. Her question was freighted with astonishing assumptions
about what I had intended to do with my life. The book, The Faraway Nearby,
was, I thought, in a quiet, roundabout way about my long journey toward a
really nice life, and an attempt to reckon with my mother’s fury (including the
origin of that fury in her entrapment in conventional feminine roles and
expectations).
I have done what I set out to do in my life, and what I set out to do was not
what the interviewer presumed. I set out
to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have
great adventures. Men — romances, flings, and long-term relationships — have
been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas,
mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives,
records, and lives. (…)
In the
traditional worldview happiness is essentially private and selfish. Reasonable
people pursue their self-interest, and when they do so successfully they are
supposed to be happy. The very definition of what it means to be human is
narrow, and altruism, idealism, and public life (except in the forms of fame,
status, or material success) have little place on the shopping list. The idea that a life should seek meaning
seldom emerges; not only are the standard activities assumed to be
inherently meaningful, they are treated as the only meaningful options.
People lock onto motherhood as a key to
feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to
fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted
mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many
things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.
While many
people question the motives of the childless, who are taken to be selfish for
refusing the sacrifices that come with parenthood, they often neglect to note
that those who love their children
intensely may have less love left for the rest of the world. Christina
Lupton, a writer who is also a mother, recently described some of the things
she relinquished when motherhood’s consuming tasks had her in their grasp,
including
'all the ways of tending to the world that
are less easily validated than parenting, but which are just as fundamentally necessary for children to flourish.
I mean here the writing and inventing and the politics and the activism;
the reading and the public speaking and the protesting and the teaching and the
filmmaking. . . . Most of the things
I value most, and from which I trust any improvements in the human condition
will come, are violently incompatible with the actual and imaginative work of
childcare.'
One of the fascinating things about Edward
Snowden’s sudden appearance a little more than two years ago was the inability
of many people to comprehend why a young man might give up on the recipe for
happiness — high wages, secure job, Hawaiian home — to become the world’s most
sought-after fugitive. Their premise seemed to be that since all people are
selfish, Snowden’s motive must be a self-serving pursuit of attention or money.
During the
first rush of commentary, Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker’s legal expert, wrote
that Snowden was “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” Another
pundit announced, “I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a
narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us.”
Others assumed that he was revealing U.S. government secrets because he had
been paid by an enemy country.
Snowden
seemed like a man from another century. In his initial communications with
journalist Glenn Greenwald he called himself Cincinnatus — after the Roman
statesman who acted for the good of his society without seeking
self-advancement. This was a clue that Snowden formed his ideals and models far
away from the standard-issue formulas for happiness. Other eras and cultures
often asked other questions than the ones we ask now: What is the most
meaningful thing you can do with your life? What is your contribution to the
world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will
your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe
our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way
to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how
far-reaching our love can be. (…) There are many questions in life worth
asking, but perhaps if we’re wise we can understand that not every question
needs an answer."
