An Obligation to Our Feet

 

On the meaning of life, the wisdom of hindsight, and the necessity of dancing.

Snoopy has been thinking. A dangerous habit for a beagle and a ruinous one for a philosopher. In one cartoon he tells Woodstock about a fruit fly with twenty-four hours to live, whose only regret is that it didn’t know at nine o’clock what it knows at the day’s ending. In another, wearing a scoutmaster’s hat, he leads a troop of small birds up a hill in search of an objective and, when one asks a question, confesses that he has no idea what the meaning of life is. In the third and fourth images, the world is falling apart, and he dances. Lucy is baffled. Surely, she feels, there are graver matters to attend to.

Side by side, the four contain a fairly complete theory of the human condition. We climb hills without knowing why. We gain the wisdom to understand the climb only when the daylight starts to fail. Throughout, we have to decide whether we can enjoy ourselves before someone explains the whole business to us.

A Hill, and Therefore a Climb

Snoopy has at least settled on an objective. There is a hill, and therefore it must be climbed, which is the entire philosophy of most expeditions and a good deal of ordinary life. He even allows questions, as a good leader should. The little birds keep a respectful silence until one of them, Conrad, produces a row of squiggles and a question mark. We never learn the wording. We only know what Snoopy made of it: what is the meaning of life? It is a fair question, though not one usually raised at the foot of a mountain, where everyone’s breath is wanted for other things. Snoopy answers honestly. He doesn’t know. He has a direction without a destination and a plan without a reason.

Nevertheless, he sets off anyway, with the confidence of a navigator who’s lost the map but kept the enthusiasm. The birds fall in, regardless, which I suspect is how most of us came to be climbing.

We are not so very different, except that we are less honest about it. We go to school to prepare for life, go to work to pay for it, and save to secure it, and meanwhile we put off enjoying it until the arrangements are satisfactory. We have ambitions, deadlines, and, at intervals, a new car or kitchen. We assure ourselves that all this activity must add up to something. Then, now and again, we stop, look round, and wonder whether we have mistaken being busy for being alive.

There is always another hill. We tell ourselves that happiness lies just past the next achievement, and that peace will arrive when the work is done. But the work is never done. Worries breed like rabbits, and the next hill is in sight over this one’s shoulder. 

The odd thing about a summit is that it is mostly a place from which to see more hills.

Nine O’Clock

The fruit fly has a different trouble. Twenty-four hours is a short allowance for acquiring self-knowledge, and yet the creature has stumbled on what takes us decades, the terrible clarity of hindsight. At nine o’clock the day was full of possibilities. By evening, it had a single regret, a better record than most of us manage in a lifetime. Notice, too, what the regret is about. The fly doesn’t wish it had done anything differently. It wishes it had known. Snoopy passes this on to Woodstock with a small contented smile, as though it were good news. It is the human predicament in miniature, and a tidy miniature at that, since a fruit fly gets through the whole of it between breakfast and bedtime.

We learn to prize childhood when it’s gone. We prize health when it falters. And we value people most when we no longer have time to tell them so. We spend years becoming the person we think we ought to be, only to find that those who mattered most were content with who we were. Hindsight is the universe’s most generous gift, but it always arrives at the wrong address. When it does arrive, we are wiser, gentler, and a little less sure of ourselves. We begin to see that being right matters less than being generous, and that the people we love would generally prefer our attention to our advice.

By the time we understand our parents, we may have become parents ourselves. Some of those we learn to forgive are no longer there to hear it. We say it anyway, at kitchen tables and at gravesides, and it never feels wasted.

By the time we discover that the climb mattered more than the summit, we have spent most of it looking at our boots.

Yet it would be unjust to call the climb wasted because we didn’t understand it while we were making it. At nine o’clock the fruit fly knew what nine o’clock could know, and the rest had to be lived. Understanding that comes late is still understanding, and it has a curious power to reach backwards and make sense of afternoons we thought we had only endured. The young cannot have the old’s understanding, and the old cannot recover the young’s unselfconscious hope.

Every age has its own blindness and its own peculiar gift. The sadness is that they never arrive together.

Treasure on the Path

Snoopy’s expedition offers something to learn from. He does not pretend to have the answers. He has gathered his companions, pointed at a hill, and set off, and I suspect that is as good a way to begin as any. None of us chose the slope. We woke up on it, with a path already worn by those who went before, and at some point most of us have been grateful for that. None of us knows what is at the top. We climb because curiosity pulls us on and because we hope the view will be worth the trouble, though some of us suspect that something beyond the present horizon is calling as well as waiting.

Sometimes the view is magnificent, and sometimes it is only a view, and we find that the best of the expedition was the company. The meaning of life may not be a secret kept at the summit for those who climb high enough or think hard enough. It may be scattered along the path in a conversation that ran on longer than planned, in laughter at something entirely foolish, in the presence of someone who stayed, or in a kindness we hardly noticed at the time. It is an odd sort of treasure hunt in which the treasure lies about on the path, and we walk over it because we are studying the map.

We rarely recognise these things as they happen. We are too busy getting somewhere.

Feet that Love to Dance

So far, understanding has arrived too late to be useful. Snoopy’s dance is a different answer to the same problem. He declines to wait for it. This brings us to Lucy.

Lucy is baffled. To her credit, she opens with a confession: “I don’t understand you!” Then she spreads her arms and presents the evidence. The world is coming apart, and Snoopy is dancing. Surely there are weightier things to attend to: the state of the nations, the uncertainty of the future, the collapse of whatever it was we thought we understood. And there he is, whirling about with perfect contentment, as though the patch of grass under his feet were the only ground that mattered.

His reply comes in thought balloons, so Lucy never hears it. “I can’t help it,” he thinks. “My feet love to dance.”

Then comes the clincher: “I have an obligation to my feet!”

One has to admire the logic. It is less an argument than a declaration of independence from the tyranny of solemnity. Snoopy does not deny that the world is coming apart. He declines to give it exclusive rights over his attention.

Lucy wants an explanation of the dancing before she will let it count. Nobody was ever argued into a dance, and Snoopy cannot be argued out of one.

There is no music. Snoopy dances in an empty field to no tune whatever, or to life itself, which comes to the same thing and is a good deal harder to switch off.

Something revolutionary is in all this. We have somehow come to believe that taking life seriously means looking serious, that anxiety proves moral engagement, and that enjoyment, while any problem remains unsolved, is a kind of desertion. If there is suffering in the world, how dare we be happy? How can we sit down when the future is uncertain? Surely, until we find the meaning of life, we ought to keep looking and not waste our time dancing.

This makes a curious mistake. It assumes joy must wait until everything is right, and since nothing ever is, it postpones joy forever. Solemnity looks like the serious option, but it is often the easy one, because it costs far less to frown at the world than to love any part of it. A man can look grave for years without once being brave. Gravity is what keeps a stone on the ground. Only something with wings can be light.

A presumption also hides in the frown. It assumes the world’s troubles rest on Lucy’ shoulders, and that if she stopped worrying for an afternoon, the whole structure would give way. Snoopy takes a humbler view of his own importance. The world was coming apart before he began to dance, and no one’s frowning will put it back together. I suspect he dances with a half-formed trust that something other than his vigilance holds it up. It is a restful thing to believe, and I have met very few people who could do much good without it.

Snoopy can be taken too literally, of course. One cannot dance away every sorrow, and the world sometimes wants more than a cheerful shuffle. We owe things to other people. Some griefs must be lived through, and tapping one’s feet won’t mend injustices. Sometimes the right thing is to sit beside someone who is suffering, to speak when silence would be cowardice, or to do the difficult, unglamorous work.

Even Snoopy must come down to earth now and then.

Too Stupid to Know the Difference

A further strip answers the objection better than I can. Lucy is at it again. She calls him a “crazy dog”, then tells him anyone who would dance like that in such troubled times is “too stupid to know the difference”. This time Snoopy responds to her. “You’re right!” he thinks, and kisses her. Then, still airborne and still dancing, he names the thing after the insult and christens it his “I’m too stupid to know the difference” dance.

Notice what has happened. He hasn’t defended himself, and he hasn’t stopped caring about the person who scolded him. The kiss goes to Lucy, not to the troubles of the world. He accepts the title of fool and finds that the dance is still there. The Christian tradition has always had a place for holy foolishness, and Snoopy would not claim it, but his folly points the same way, since the dance does not wait on being clever enough to justify it. It is given, and a gift shared with a kiss is not a refusal to care. The dance was never an escape from Lucy. It was offered to her.

Lucy’s bewilderment has its own small absurdity. She seems to think that because the world is in trouble, nobody has a right to enjoy it. It’s as if sadness were a duty, anxiety a virtue, and happiness an admission that we hadn’t been paying attention. She has mistaken a grim face for a good heart. Snoopy has grasped what most of us take a lifetime to learn. Joy isn’t always the reward for setting everything right. Sometimes it is what keeps us going while everything stays wrong.

The phrase “obligation to my feet” contains more than he may know. Nobody owes anything to what he made himself. Snoopy did not make his feet. He found them at the end of his legs, ready-made and already fond of dancing, and the love of it arrived with the feet, not as his own invention.

An obligation of that sort is gratitude with its sleeves rolled up, the right answer to a gift.

Who Wrote the Tune

The truth is that we shall never finish preparing for life. We shall never abolish uncertainty, settle every question, or reach a summit from which the view makes everything clear. We may grow wiser with age, but wisdom will not give back our lost afternoons or the people we loved and failed to appreciate quite enough.

Which is why Snoopy’s answer matters. He doesn’t claim to know the meaning of life. He hasn’t solved the problem of suffering, devised a philosophy of history, or drawn up a five-year plan for happiness. Suffering is real, the day is short, and joy is still legitimate. He doesn’t insist on resolving that contradiction before he starts. He has found that his feet love to dance, and that this deserves some respect.

The fruit fly was reaching for something like it. It may have wished it had spent less of its day worrying about how short the day was and more of it enjoying the peculiar privilege of having one. The little birds, when they reach the summit, will probably find that the meaning of life is not waiting there in a neat explanatory paragraph. It has been with them all along, in the company, in the question one of them asks, and in the occasional chance to stop and enjoy life. We cannot have nine o’clock back, but we have the hours that remain, and knowing is where doing starts.

There is something bittersweet in that. If life is the music, it will stop, or we will stop hearing it. Not every dance can be repeated; we often understand what we had only once it has become a memory, and time will not wait for us to finish thinking about what it all means. But while it plays, there is movement and laughter, and a chance to be briefly and gloriously alive. None of us wrote the tune. Snoopy hears it without any band at all and doesn’t seem to mind who composed it.

If Lucy still doesn’t understand, Snoopy is prepared to live with that. He has an obligation to his feet, and he seems to know exactly what he is doing.

The rest of us have a little more time than the fruit fly. It would be a shame to spend it regretting nine o’clock.