The Bureaucrat, part 2

I leave it to the reader to decide whether it is a vice to look for images to overcome confusion or disorientation when confronting a new situation. At any rate looking for an image was what I did recently when I volunteered for a committee that tries to develop walking and bicycling trails in my little city.

As luck would have it, I soon thereafter ran into an interesting movie: "Ikiru (to Live)" by the famous Japanese director and auteur, Kurosawa. The supposed greatness of his other films has always escaped me; I've never been able to finish them. Fortunately I gave "Ikiru" a chance.

The movie is about an older man who was section chief in city government. He had spent the last thirty years sleep-walking through his job of stamping approvals on meaningless paperwork. Then he found out that he had terminal cancer. At first I thought this was going to be a Japanese film version of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich." But there was no Tolstoy-ian groping for Absolute Religious Truth. Neither did it offer Hollywoodish sentimentalism. There is something valuable about access to international movies. Thank you, Netflix.

At any rate this movie, whose ending was a surprise, served as a valuable and beautiful metaphor to my dilemma of working on a committee that tries to build trails. We all have a terminal disease called aging. The protagonist of "Ikiru" had a solution to his own life and death that applies to all of us, in some form.

Somewhere in Bertrand Russell's "Conquest of Happiness" he says that, as a man in his fifties, he enjoys life more than when he was younger. There were several causes for that,

"But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.

Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects.

But over and above these self-centred considerations is the fact that one's ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist." 

The Horribleness of Death is proportional to how seriously we take our own egos. There is a small amount of consolation in busying oneself with public projects -- like the trail building -- instead of acting like my own Individual Ego is the center of the universe.

There is one more reason to continue in this community busybody-ism: there might be some Guilt and Duty involved in "giving back" to the community. Ordinarily I would rebel against them. But in the case of trail-building, I feel genuine gratitude. This is one of the fairer -- and yes, rarer -- flowers of human nature, and when by some miracle we genuinely feel gratitude towards others or receive gratitude from others, it makes sense to lengthen and deepen the experience.