The Art of Living

There’s a young man on the train reading a book. The bare fact of this fascinates me. Who reads books anymore? Almost everyone else is either staring at their phones or talking (loudly and obliviously) into phones held face up in front of their mouths on speaker mode as seems to be the new bewildering norm. But there he sits, reading his book, like some kind of peculiar relic from a bygone age. I glance at the cover of the book. The Art of Living by Epictetus. Well. Not just any old book—which would have been remarkable enough—but a book of ancient philosophy and virtue? My mind is well and truly blown. I want to lean over and congratulate him or give him a hug or something.

How many of us, I wonder, believe or are even willing to consider the possibility that there might be an art to living well in the world? That how we choose to live our lives is something worth thinking deeply about? That there are better and worse ways to spend our days? That something might be required of us and that that something might originate outside of ourselves? And even for those of us who may be thus convinced, how easy is it to just allow the grim tides of consumerism and entertainment and apathy and TikTok to wash over us, conditioning us to imagine that life is little more than the passive consumption of digital content?

I look around the train. There’s a girl staring out the window. She looks lonely. There’s an advertisement behind her asking, in bold colours and huge font: “IS CAKE BETTER THAN SEX?” I squint to try to read the fine print to see what this might be advertising, but I realize that I don’t care and move on. The guy beside me is using his phone as a mirror, adjusting, readjusting his hair. He looks like he’s on his way to an important meeting. Almost everyone else is walled off from the outside world, cloistered away by their headphones and their phones. The young man reading Epictetus is getting off at this stop. I look out the window and wonder, “Are we living well? Any of us?”

A few nights ago, I attended a lecture on models of Old Testament interpretation. It was ok, nothing particularly revelatory or groundbreaking, but a few interesting ways of presenting things, I suppose. I was struggling to pay attention. I had been fighting some kind of a stomach bug all day and was generally annoyed at my body for its unacceptable performance. At one point I glanced at an older man a few rows in front of me. He kept folding and unfolding his hands. I wondered why until I noticed a tremor in his one hand. It would start to shake, and he would use the other to gently massage it back into temporary compliance. My heart felt heavy. Parkinson’s? I have seen people endure this wretched disease, some for long periods of time. I know of the various ways it comes, like a thief, to steal, kill, and destroy. I prayed that that it was something else, that this terrible disease would not be in this poor guy’s future. But the heaviness remained.

I couldn’t help but wonder: If I were the one thus afflicted, would I be attending a public lecture on models of Old Testament interpretation? My strong suspicion is that I would be far too inward-focused to care about much of anything other than myself and my infirmity. But then I am not always a very artful liver. Perhaps this gentleman was seeking some better tools to discern the methods of the wild God of the pages of the Old Testament, the God of Job and Jonah, Samuel and Solomon, David and Daniel, the God who baffles and demands, who forms light and creates darkness, who brings both weal and woe. Perhaps his attendance at a public lecture was an act of defiance or an expression of devotion to the God who made him and the God who would accompany him through whatever trials lay ahead. Maybe he believed that living and suffering well was an art, that even terrible things can invite us into deeper communion with the suffering God.

I returned my attention to the lecture. The presenter had some kind of a summary slide on the screen above the lectern. I looked over to the man in front of me. He had his phone raised, trying to take a picture of summary on the screen. His tremors would not allow it. He couldn’t press the button. He lowered his phone, folded his hands, began to gently massage them, and smiled.