Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualising mind.
Anthony de Mello
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis
Mean While It Lasts
“What does it mean?” is a question I imagine we’ve all asked at some point; whether pondering the mysteries of the universe or just trying to decipher the instructions on a bottle of shampoo. It applies across the whole spectrum of possibilities, from the ridiculous to the sublime: from ‘What do they mean by ‘shake once and apply?’ to the more existential ‘What does it all mean?’ Perhaps this search for meaning is part of what makes us human. The last time the Director checked, it was certainly one of humanity’s most persistent preoccupations.
This question of meaning often assumes that meaning is something static, waiting to be uncovered, as if it were a buried treasure, or revealed to us like the punchline of a cosmic joke. But meaning, as both philosophers and poets remind us, is elusive. If there is a joke, it is probably on us for thinking that meaning works this way. As you will recall, a friend of the Director’s column, Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, famously declares that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42; a response that, while mathematically sound (always a lovely thing), is spectacularly unhelpful. The problem, as Adams points out, is that an answer is all very well, but in order to understand the answer, you need to have asked the right question. Meaning, dear reader, is inseparable from the act of questioning itself.
But whilst meaning might be elusive, it’s certainly not an illusion. Far from it. If Adams highlights an often comic absurdity in our search for meaning, Viktor Frankl demonstrates its life-or-death significance. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he recounts his time in the concentration camps not only as a chronicle of suffering but also as an exploration of what enabled some to endure the horror while others succumbed. And what was it? It was meaning. Those who could find a reason to live, even in the darkest of places, stood a better chance of survival. For Frankl, meaning is not an abstract luxury but the very thing that gives life its shape. Without it, existence collapses into a kind of abyss. And yet, for all we might want it to be so, meaning is not something one can order à la carte. Or table d’hôte for that matter. There could be no such prix fixe, to extend the analogy past its breaking point. Neither can it be conveniently delivered to the doorsteps of our minds. It is lived, intuited, and often only recognised in hindsight. Just like life, I suppose.
Literature, unfortunately for some of our more literal-minded Tiffinians, thrives on this sense of elusive ambiguity. The great exasperated cry from the classroom once a poem has been read is often something along the lines of, “Why can’t poets just say what they mean?!” The great task of the teacher in this kind of scenario is to gently point out that they do. Meaning thankfully does not work the way our Tiffinian often imagines it does. And we must invite them and all of the like-minded to embark on a journey towards some deeper understanding of life. Life would perhaps be easier (it wouldn’t) if language was a code (it isn’t). Works of art must remain implicit in just the way that a joke must remain implicit. Once a joke has been explained, as the Director knows to his cost, it no longer has any power. It falls completely flat, and it’s the same when paraphrasing a poem. After all, there are only so many things that poets are going to write poems about: how being in love is pleasant, how betrayal is not, the awareness of mortality, that war is brutal, to name but several. If we do a process of simply taking apart and paraphrasing what we come up with, we’ll have nothing more than a handful of dust. We will have destroyed something that could have profoundly moved us and spoken to us deeply. This is the danger of decontextualising and making explicit what needs to remain implicit. As we have discussed, so much depends on context because context changes everything.
A poem’s essence lies in how it says something, not just in what it says. If paraphrase sufficed, poetry would not exist. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land epitomises this challenge, layering voices, allusions, and fragmented narratives to create a sense of meaning that resists fixed interpretation. His famous line, These fragments I have shored against my ruins, suggests that meaning is something we piece together rather than something handed to us whole. The poem’s disjointed structure forces the reader into an active search for coherence, mirroring the way meaning in life must be assembled from the fragments we are given. His Four Quartets similarly meditates on the very instability of language, as he writes:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Rather than capturing meaning, words often reveal its transient, shifting nature. Eliot’s imagery suggests that meaning is always just beyond our grasp, requiring and repaying our constant negotiation. Just like life, I suppose.
Eliot’s poetic exploration of meaning’s slipperiness naturally leads us to consider our friend Wittgenstein’s later thoughts on the fluidity of language. Just as Eliot illustrates the instability of words and meaning through his fragmented narratives, Wittgenstein shifts our understanding from a rigid structure to a more dynamic interplay of language and context.
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein proposes a picture theory of meaning where the meaning of the word is what the word refers to. For him, language mirrors reality, arguing that where it does not, it is literally ‘nonsense,’ leading him to his famous final words of that book: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent).
Later, however, he came to reject this idea as too rigid and limited. Well done, Ludwig. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), he shifted towards more of a use theory where meaning is not about reference or representation but about how words are used in different contexts. In this, Wittgenstein suggests that meaning is public, social, and dynamic, rather than something derived from a rigid logical structure. Neither is it something to be captured in a type of predator-prey type framework. Nature once again has provided us with spooky parallels. Take, if you will, the Sarcastic Fringhead, a fascinating fish that is known for its vibrant colours and the sharp wit of its performance under the sea. When predators approach, the Sarcastic Fringhead often reacts by puffing up and displaying its colourful frills, creating a theatrical performance that can leave the predator confused and no doubt feeling a bit foolish, much like us when meaning eludes us. Just when we think we’ve captured it, it swims away, leaving us to wonder if it was ever really there at all.
One of the great gifts of literary texts is their resistance to a single, fixed interpretation. The moment we try to pin them down definitively, something is inevitably lost. Consider Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Is it a play about revenge, madness, political corruption, existential despair? The answer, of course, is ‘yes,’ but never only one of these. Literature invites us not to extract meaning but to dwell in it, to engage with it as something living rather than as something to be reduced to a set of bullet points. It’s the difference between reading Pride and Prejudice as a novel about love and social class versus reducing it to ‘Women in the 19th century had it rough, but Darcy looks good.’
This is why the act of interpretation is both necessary and tricksy. Meaning is always, to some extent, a conversation between text and reader and between past and present. The idea that a text has one ‘true’ meaning, waiting to be uncovered like buried treasure, is a comforting illusion although it probably shouldn’t be. ‘Ignorance is bliss‘ is a comforting illusion, until you step on a piece of Lego in the dark. Similarly painful is the notion that meaning is entirely subjective; that it resides solely in the mind of the beholder. Literature shows us very clearly that making up meanings willy-nilly just will not do. A great novel, for example, is not a blank screen onto which we project whatever we please; it offers structures, tensions, and possibilities that guide interpretation even as they resist simplification. Just like life, I suppose.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot explores this idea at its extreme edges. Its characters search for meaning but find themselves trapped in a context of an endless cycle of waiting, where words lose their significance and actions become absurd. The play functions as a meditation on the futility of searching for a single, definitive meaning; Godot, who never arrives, is the embodiment of meaning perpetually deferred. The characters engage in dialogues that simultaneously affirm and undermine their own significance, mirroring the human struggle to assign meaning to, and in, an apparently indifferent world. Some clever critics suggest that the play forces the audience to confront the possibility that the act of waiting, of questioning, maybe all there is. For your Director, it’s a love story with a lot of laughs along the way. Just like life, I suppose.
If Beckett does suggest that meaning is endlessly deferred, another friend, Jorge Luis Borges offers a different view on the business. In The Library of Babel, he imagines a universe where meaning is not absent, but overwhelming; an infinite library containing every possible book. The idea is that if all meanings exist, then none is ultimately meaningful. Various characters in Borges’ story search the maze of the library desperately for a book that will make sense of the chaos, but their quest is doomed. Meaning cannot be extracted in isolation; it must be experienced in relation to something. The library, a boundless collection of words, reflects a certain postmodern predicament: when all interpretations are possible, certainty vanishes. Borges suggests that the search for absolute meaning is itself a kind of labyrinth. Those who believe in an absolute certainty of meaning and conduct themselves accordingly are likely to be in-mazed rather than a-mazed. Just like life, I suppose.
We couldn’t leave these paltry words on meaning without mentioning that other stalwart friend of the column, Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, he contrasts those who impose rigid ideological frameworks on life with those who seek meaning through personal struggle and faith. The famous “Grand Inquisitor” passage presents a world in which freedom is sacrificed for the comfort of imposed meaning. Ivan Karamazov, in his rejection of God, exposes the dangers of both nihilism and ideological dogmatism, arguing that people prefer comforting illusions over difficult truths. His brother Alyosha counters this despair, suggesting that meaning emerges not from grand theoretical systems but from love, connection, and lived experience. Dostoevsky presents meaning as something neither arbitrary nor imposed, it is something we participate in, something that grows through human relationships and moral choices. Like Frankl, he shows that meaning must be discovered rather than imposed. Imposed meaning, dictated by ideology or dogma, often collapses under reality’s weight. Discovered meaning, as you know dear reader, emerges from engagement with others and with the work that calls to us. Just like life, I suppose.
So where does this leave us in our quest for the meaning of meaning? If meaning is not static but dynamic, not imposed but cultivated, then our task is not to capture it but to nurture it. In literature, in language, in life, meaning is less like a solved equation and more like a melody; an evolving resonance that deepens as we listen and one that we could do worse than dance along with.
Even if in doing so you need to end a sentence with a preposition.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Relating
Director’s Tip # 14
Why not combine cooking and spring cleaning over the Easter break?
Save your bean water and drop hard-to-clean, fiddly pieces of brass into it. They’ll come up a treat.