Excerpt
Everything Is Never Enough
1Hevel (I): Uncontrollable“For my next trick,” says Qohelet, “I have put the world into a book.” And when you open the book, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess. Tokens and totems of memory you thought you had erased. Documentation of loss you have not yet suffered.
Will you lean in or look away? Will you meet Qohelet’s stare?
Qohelet’s book is the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience. He stakes his credibility on the breadth of his program of inquiry into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, and failure. Our researcher learned all their bitter lessons by heart. He says, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. . . . I have seen everything that is done under the sun.” Later he reiterates, “I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.” Twenty-seven times he tells us that he saw; the objects of his sight include “everything,” “all the oppressions that are done under the sun,” that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” and that “folly is set in many high places.”
Qohelet does not merely observe the full sweep of human life; he passes judgment on it, most often with a single word: hevel. This one-word verdict opens the book and closes its body, bracketing the whole. This word punctuates Qohelet’s reflections as a tolling refrain. The problem is that the book’s most important word is also its most difficult to translate. You might recognize the King James Version’s rendering of the opening thesis, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
The most concrete sense of hevel is “breath, air, vapor.” Because exhaled breath is weightless and apt to vanish, other Old Testament writers often use hevel metaphorically, to characterize something as insubstantial, ineffective, or worthless. For ancient Israel, a political alliance with Egypt would be hevel, offering empty help. When a sage contrasts female piety and beauty, the latter is hevel because it is superficial and fleeting. The theological reasonings of Job’s friends are hevel because they miss their mark. Human life is hevel since, like breath, it quickly disappears. A new car is hevel since the moment you drive it off the lot it starts losing value. Beauty is hevel since age never subtracts wrinkles; it only adds them.
Ecclesiastes uses hevel in all these senses and more. And throughout the book Qohelet custom molds hevel. He presses the word into a new shape, rendering it a fitting term of art to deliver his pitiless verdict on all of life. You could translate Qohelet’s opening thesis in half a dozen ways, each granting some purchase on his point, none exhausting it:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
“Perfectly pointless,” says the Teacher. “Perfectly pointless. Everything is pointless.”
“Absolute futility,” says the Teacher. “Absolute futility. Everything is futile.”
“Utterly enigmatic,” says Qohelet. “Utterly enigmatic. Everything is enigmatic.”
“Complete hot air!” says Qohelet, “Complete hot air! It’s all hot air!”
Utterly absurd, said Qohelet, utterly absurd. All is absurd.
Meaningless, pointless, futile, enigmatic, hot air, absurd. We will meet all these nuances and others in the following chapters, as Qohelet delivers blow after blow to our sense of what’s worth living for. Here in this chapter, we will treat one aspect of hevel as a key that opens the door to the house Qohelet is building. Life is hevel because, in a sense far more fundamental than you want to admit, life is uncontrollable.
Can you control the wind? Or a pea-soup fog? Or your breath after you exhale?
We had to drive at a walking pace. The headlights were little help. My friend Nick half jogged in front of the car, his shadow against the fog marking a road I couldn’t see. In a car that could safely travel at seventy miles per hour, on a twisting mountain road above Santa Barbara that could accommodate thirty, we were making three. A fog so solid it might have been a billion-cubic-inch pillow filled the air.
Four friends, my brother, and I had just begun a hundred-mile trip back to downtown Los Angeles. At our speed, even traversing the asphalt on hands and knees might have been better for morale. Since there was only one way off the mountain, we couldn’t go around the fog. Since the fog was so thick, we couldn’t see through it. And we had zero chance of controlling it.
What do you try to control? What happens when you can’t?
According to sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the central drive of modernity is to “make the world engineerable, predictable, available, accessible, disposable . . . in all its aspects.” In a word, controllable. We want to control everything, down to the temperature of the room I’m in as I write and the one you’re in as you read. Rosa states, “The history of our modern relationship to the world is a history of conquering and dominating the night with electric light, the sky with airplanes, the seas with ships, the body with medicine.” The compounding discoveries of science serve mastery. We want to know so that we can control.
We especially want to control life itself, to tame the intolerable unpredictability of how it begins and ends. Why has euthanasia gained so much popular support and legal sanction in the West in recent decades? Because certain suffering of uncertain depth and length conflicts with the dream and demand of control. And we employ a range of complex, expensive technologies in the hope of creating new lives that enter our lives only when career plans permit. In America alone, ten million women daily dose sterility to “control” birth. As Rosa observes, through these technologically aided efforts, “modern society has found ways to make children more ‘accessible.’ ” Just when we want children to exist, we beckon them; otherwise, we keep them from entering the world and scrambling our schedules. Rosa comments, “Childlessness or having an abundance of children is no longer a ‘fate’ given to us as a kind of task or challenge to which we must listen and respond in terms of how we live our lives; it is instead either a plan or a mistake.”
More and more of modern life is lived under this clinical light of control: Life is no longer a challenge that summons but a job whose success proclaims a plan well executed or whose failure means someone is at fault. Whenever disaster occurs, like a hurricane demolishing a city, investigations are opened so that we can find someone to blame. Rosa notes, “We seek out guilty or responsible parties wherever accidents and misfortunes occur, on the assumption that the conditions that produced them were ‘essentially’ controllable. Someone must be responsible for this.”
As a result of this dominant desire to dominate, “for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression. Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.” A fact that escapes explanation, a force that won’t be tamed, a reality that can’t be utilized or optimized—modern persons encounter each not as a given but as an affront. Because the world resolutely resists our efforts to control it, we experience the world as hostile. Painfully often, the world does not do what you want; instead, it does the very thing you hate, spawning tornadoes, recessions, wars, cancer. From this hostility between self and world comes what Albert Camus has called “the absurd”: “He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The world has always resisted our efforts to control it, but the more you expect to be able to control, the more you will resent the uncontrollable. The more dominant you expect to be, the more the world’s resistance will rankle.
