‘The world has become so cynical and cold that we’ve lost the wonder of living’

When my wife came home from work yesterday afternoon, she told me a story. It’s a bit of a sad story but it certainly shed more than a shard of light on the quagmire that Covid-19 has exposed in our once vibrant society.

The story concerns a middle-aged woman, now retired, who was a late bloomer, previously handicapped by an absence of opportunity, by social conditioning to play second fiddle to her husband, and by a consequent lack of belief in herself. Without going into detail, the transformation of our economy that began in the mid-1980s, conspired to eject her from the family farm on which she and her husband had struggled to make a living.

Looking to do something for herself, to lift her horizons, she enrolled in a university degree program by distance and, so well did she do, that she obtained three degrees, including a PhD in that frantically difficult subject of English Literature. By the 2000s, her standing was such that she was offered employment on the faculty of her university. By any standard, it was a triumph of spirit and determination over the dead hand dealt by life.

It didn’t last long, however, as the cutbacks took their toll – tenure replaced by casual piece-work, administrative pressure to soft-mark full-fee-paying students who were clearly out of their depth – to the point where she wondered what a hell-hole she had stumbled into.

The tipping point came one morning when, on arriving, she encountered a fellow staff member in the corridor and gave her a pleasant, civil greeting, one no different from the thousands any of us would have extended to other workmates over a lifetime.

But the response that morning was an exasperated brush-off, along the lines of, “don’t waste my time. Can’t you see I’m stressed, I’m only paid to teach these idiots for 15 hours a week when they [the administration] pile work on me that takes more than a full week”.

It wasn’t the cynicism of the administration that broke my wife’s friend; it wasn’t even the rudeness of the over-stressed colleague. What hit her squarely between the eyes was that this was the wonderful world of English literature that had been revealed to her late in life now reduced to nasty, trivial back-biting. In other words, a subject, and way of life, whose purpose was always to open the mind, had very neatly, closed it. To worse than before.

I couldn’t help thinking of this exchange when watching television a little later and observing the consequences for our overall public health brought upon by the ‘gig’ economy. About how the privatisation of aged care, in particular – and, by that I mean turning what is, and should only be, a hands-on caring function into a money-making venture – has exposed all the fault lines in our lives that have remained hidden for 20 years.

Casualisation, employing unskilled staff in skilled positions, penny-pinching and selfishness, paying people so poorly and limiting their hours so that they have no choice but to work at three or four such institutions to make ends meet. All of this and more has left us mortally exposed to the most ferocious enemy we have faced since World War II.

But I don’t want to talk about the perils of casualisation and the gig economy. Instead, I’d rather return to our friend who discovered the wonder of life in her later years and watched, aghast, as this gift turned to bitter fruit. It’s a shocking story, really, because it shows how efficiently the philistines who perverted western civilisation over the past 30 to 40 years, inculcated such an anti-inquiring bias into our minds and culture that I doubt we can overcome it easily.

If I have to find one word to summarise what we’ve lost – no, let’s be honest, what we threw away – to my mind, it is the wonder of life. It is not necessarily the wonder of the natural world, because we can all go to Bermagui and watch the sunset over Horseshoe Bay, or visit Uluru and watch the colours of the rock change as the evening deepens, or pick up an injured koala and feel how needy it is.

No, what I’m talking about is the wonder of the human world. We can still see echoes of it in the magnificence of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, but I wonder whether we’ll ever again have the brave, unfettered vision to repeat such fantastic exercises in confidence and hope.

No, what I’m talking about is more intangible than that: the wonder of the abstract, of the idea. Never in the past 150 years have we treated new ideas with more disdain, sometimes contempt, than we do now, and we’d be fools to think there isn’t a price to be paid for it.

Let me give a pertinent example. Many of us will have seen the movie of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus where Mozart’s nemesis Antonio Salieri understands the genius in this scatological little man “Wolfie” whom he had despised. There, you can watch Salieri’s slow awakening as he hears the clarinet “sweeten into a phrase of such delight” the musical line of bassoon and oboe in the ‘Serenade of Thirteen Wind Instruments’ (K.361).

Salieri grasps that only godlike genius could compose such an image as that, quite beyond anything that a mediocrity like himself was capable of. But did Salieri say that such godlike wonder was therefore irrelevant to the healthy soul of a civilised society? That a fulfilling life need never be more than a series of petty transactions? Can any of us imagine a world without Mozart? Or his descendants, for that matter, whoever he or she may be?

Because the end of the road when we demean the wonder of the human spirit to become a nasty little transaction, lies at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic Road. Because, the truth is, we don’t know it all and we have never known it all and so we need our prophets and our forward scouts – our Charles Dickenses and T.S. Eliots, and our Vincent Van Goghs – to try to show us the way if we are ever going to deal effectively with whatever may be lying in wait over the brow of the next hill. Like Covid-20. Or World War III.

Let me end by quoting a passage from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It may be a cracking tale of decadence, debauchery and death, but it is also a profound commentary in what it means to be truly human, to put value on the wonder that is life: “Gatsby believed in the green light [at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s jetty], the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning –

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Amen.