Abstract

I make my living by writing. Someone once said to me, "It's no good writing like this; you've no life! "At first I thought he meant I was dead, and I got very angry. Then I suddenly thought that the word' life" could be used in a different way. Writers often go and live for a while in remote places where conditions are hard, and such excursions are called "experiencing life." This expression may sound as if it refers to a corpse momentarily coming back to life, but that is not actually what it means. These writers do it in order to gain some understanding of a hard life and to write better books, and it is a very good way to set about it. This was what the person speaking to me meant by "life": He did not mean I needed to die. When I realized that, my anger turned to joy. Although I had lived and worked with a production team in a very poor area, I did not consider that I had seen enough of life. Far from it; in fact, I needed more experience of it. But I still felt that "experiencing the hard life" would be a better way of putting it. Leaving out the adjective implies that "life" means frequently having to suffer hardship—there is a presumption that life is to be understood especially in a negative sense. People of my age have all had the experience of contrasting present happiness with past misery: Listening to reports of past sufferings, eating "recalling suffering" meals, and so on. This is not the same as "experiencing life," but there are some similarities. As we all know, in the old society poor people led lives worse than the lives of cattle, eating chaff and greens—not vegetables, but wild plants—and the "recalling suffering" meals were modeled on the diet of the poor in the old society