March, 3rd Post

Though The Sense of an Ending covers topics ranging from sex and understanding women to friendship and (not to be cliché or anything) the meaning of life, it all falls under the umbrella of perception. He starts off the novel in his adolescence wanting to “live as people in novels live and have lived” (102). I remembering reading The Magic Tree House and the Nancy Drew series and wanting so badly for my life to be like theirs, I even remember believing that my life was actually like theirs even though I have never once traveled through time and space or solved a murder mystery. To be honest, I was a very dramatic child. As we grow older the more we begin to question our actions and our decisions, and the more realize that we are not as special as we once told we were. Barnes gives the example of “a survey of British motorists a few years ago, which showed that ninety-five percent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of average, we’re most of us are bound to be average.” (109). Long story short, we are not as special as we like to think we are.

One of the lines from the novel that stands out to me is “ Sometime I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving however long it takes, that life isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be” (115). This though appears to me as a catch 22, and I love catch 22’s.  The catch is that the “meaning of life” is to learn how meaningless life is. There isn’t going to be some unexpected finally. Chances are that we are going to die of old age in the middle of a nursing home. 

But I am not fully committed to Barnes theories. Though clueless about other matters such as women, he is relatively self-aware. I do not know many people who can genuinely admit to being average and not just say it as bait when fishing for compliments. Maybe I’m just not old enough to understand.

But I’ve decided to not worry about this sh*t anymore because according to Darwin, Dostoyevsky and even Julian Barnes I have no control over how my life is going to pan out, so why not just roll with the punches, right?