Your Whole Life by James Bernard Murphy

Author:James Bernard Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Who Am I?

A Storybook Life

A narrative can be told about anything, but not everything already has a quasi-narrative structure. Only a life unfolds like a story: the first narratives are biographies because both lives and stories develop. Even nonliving entities, such as a mountain or a planet, might have a beginning, middle, and end. What is different about life? What makes a life different is that the end (maturity or death) is already present at the beginning in the form of biological potential. This unfolding of what is already present gives a life a temporal unity unlike any other entity. The beginning foreshadows the end, and the end recapitulates the beginning. Moreover, good narratives require conflict between a protagonist and its environment. Unlike any inanimate entity, an organism is essentially distinct from its environment by means of a self-regulating metabolism. (Indeed, no inanimate entity has an environment at all, since the very word and concept refers only to the home of a living organism.) Every organism, like a Greek hero, comes into conflict with its surroundings and with other organisms, overcomes some of these challenges, and eventually succumbs. We can make sense of the mature organism only by knowing the unique path it has traversed. The dramatic whole of an organism’s life is itself composed of smaller dramas: being born, building a nest, migrating south, finding a mate or a meal. In each event, we also see a goal at the beginning, striving and conflict, and, perhaps, fulfillment. The life of a species of organisms has the same narrative structure, beginning with birth (speciation), growth (propagation), and death (extinction). Every species, like each organism, is a biography. A life is a story composed of stories.

Does life intrinsically take the form of a dramatic narrative? Or do we merely project literary ideals of unity, suspense, crisis, and resolution onto a meaningless stream of time? Perhaps nature has no goals, no beginnings or endings, no striving, no conflict—merely necessity and blind chance. Human beings do tend to anthropomorphize nature, for example, by describing evolution as a “struggle for survival” or development as a “quest for maturity.” We falsely impute agency to the weather, to landscapes, to accidents, and to many other natural phenomena. Perhaps one reason we anthropomorphize nature is precisely because of the real analogies between biological growth and human stories. Are literary narratives an escape from—or a compensation for—the sheer random meaninglessness of life? Or do we tell stories about human lives because life itself is already quasi-narrative? Some philosophers insist that “there are no beginnings or endings in the flow of events”—implying that narrative beginnings and endings are purely arbitrary.1 True, there are no absolute beginnings or endings, but the birth of any organism or species marks the beginning of a unique entity that has never and will never be seen again. Conception is the closest thing to a true beginning in nature, which is why we associate hope with pregnancy. As for endings, only death and extinction are truly forever.

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