The tragedy of human life? Akenfield... again

I am re-reading Ronald Blythe's Akenfield again, this time as an audiobook, and am again finding it a deeply moving experience. 

This applies especially to the earliest section, that has the old farm workers and their wives "speaking" about the span of their lives - memories and experiences which go back to the end of the 1800s, but which especially focus on the early years of the 20th century. The two World Wars loom large, but also the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s and 30s. 

The village is composite, and the people in the book are anonymised - their raw words have been selected and arranged by the poetic-pen of Blythe. It was published in 1968, and stories are from interviews in the preceding years. 

I first read this book when it was recently published and I was 14 or 15 - it recommended by a favourite history teacher; and it had a lasting effect on me. I was made starkly aware of the qualitative transformation in the comfort and convenience of ordinary rural people's lives over the middle decades of the twentieth century. 

Listening again; I can see that my own reflections went beyond those of the author himself, who talked with the people and gave them each a voice and perspective  - and I think they still do, but differently. I suspect that Blythe himself drew rather different conclusions from his own work than I get from it - then and now. 

Fifty years ago; I saw the vast improvement in the security and abundance as having solved the age-long problem of material - or Biblical - poverty reported by the older Akenfield residents - the chronic hunger, insufficient and worn clothes, wet and cold, severe overcrowding; the serious lack of time, drainage of energy, cultural impoverishment, and infrequent fun.

My youthful conclusion from the contrasting interviews with younger people of the village - confirmed by my own experiences and observations - was that the recent abundance, the all-but universal comfort and convenience, was being dissipated in the quest for ever more of the material "goods" that had been had been in such short supply. 

Instead of saying "we have enough", people were saying "we want (even) more".  

Instead, my idea was that we should be striving in the direction of creative achievement - arts, and sciences - and building a world with wholesome (folkish) communal activities such as singing and dancing and crafts. 

I ignored the book's story of the decline of religion - by which Blythe mainly means serious and frequent church or chapel participation - because at that time religions seemed obviously untrue; and the descriptions of the olden-days life of church and chapel were without any appeal to my young self. 

Nowadays, I am more intrigued by the way that people regard their lives, taken as a whole - what they seem to think their lives were "about". 

For many of the villagers, "life" seems to have been about some aspect of the village. Even the religious ones seem to think of it in terms of communally recognized activities. 

I see this now, with a different generation of the oldest - and in my own, now-old, generation - a tendency to look back and seek, bring-forward, various achievements; usually from earlier life, or recently, or perhaps those of family - and to regard these as justification. 

The younger or fitter elderly seem nowadays to be justifying their lives in terms of continuing activities - the "I am busier than ever since I retired" sort of thing. 

In Blythe's 1979 book about old-age - The View in Winter, based on interviews with the elderly (a book which I did not much like) he concluded similarly that the things to strive for in old-age was continued activity and engagement for as long as could be managed. 

Blythe himself lived to the age of 100 and was writing - and writing well - into his nineties; but (as so often happens nowadays) he was apparently afflicted with dementia for the last decade-plus, and dis-engaged from reality. He continued living in his own house and alone (he never married), but with a great deal of essential outside help - as he had advocated as best for the elderly several decades earlier. 

Yet I find this kind of advice about old-age - staying active and engaged, living in one's own home etc - to be better than most alternatives, but merely a temporary and very partial palliative, when it comes to understanding and justifying "what my life is about". 

Such reflections always lead to the solid insight that human life, as such, is tragic. If life is about what happens during life - it cannot help but be sad, one way or another. 

Because real or supposed achievements in the past, or by the now-deceased, do not really mean anything of themselves - no matter how often or vehemently we may repeat or pretend they do. 

But some things that happen in our lives go much deeper than others, and are experienced as much "better". 

Nostalgia for being-active, working-hard, social engagement, or for the fun (of various kinds, including the obvious...); are simply not very profound - no matter how we spin it with words, pictures, or stories. 

Or, if such things genuinely are the most profound experiences of our lives - as so often seems to be the case (by self-report); then that does seem ineradicably, and finally, tragic.