What Is It All Only Passing Through Life?

“What is it all only passing through life?” Good Behaviour, by Molly Keane.

Isn’t that a freeing idea? It diminishes the importance of all those things we take far too seriously, events we blow out of all proportion. It is what the doctor says to Aroon towards the end of the novel, Good Behaviour. Aroon, the main character, has woken from a drunken stupor – a state arrived at with the help of her father’s oldest friend who has travelled from England to Ireland for Aroon’s father’s funeral. A succession of brandies (quickly imbibed) has caused Aroon to stagger and fall, sprain her ankle, pass out, and miss the entire funeral. Having slept off the effects of the drink, Aroon is then tended to by the local doctor. Upon waking, she has forgotten everything, blames her headache, not on the drink, but on banging her head on the ground as she fell, which she didn’t. Aroon is prone to self-delusion, and this is another one. Like many other simple, throwaway lines in the book, Keane weights her writing with multiple meanings. The doctor is offering a kindness to Aroon, but he’s also something of a philosopher, stopping this reader in her tracks with the line, “What is it all only passing through life?”

Rare is the person who does not ask themselves, from time to time, when passing through life: ‘Is life meant to be this hard?’ Having spent fifty years convinced that the answer is yes, certain that my cumulative experience patently supported ‘yes’ as the correct the answer, that there is no way around life’s incessant obstacles, I have changed my mind. The obstacles aren’t real. The events that I re-purpose as obstacles are real, but the negative feelings I attach to them, the stories of suffering I adhere to them, those are my narrative choices, and these stories I tell myself can be as untrue as a short story I splurge onto a page at a creative writing class. Life is not meant to be hard, although it is probably meant to be simple, and the more complicated we make it, the easier it is to sell oneself the false narrative of it being a difficult trial to be got through. Unfortunately, most of us don’t like simple.

Then there’s the issue of believing we’re in control as we’re passing through life. Perhaps that’s what makes it hard, the belief we can control it. I suspect that Keane’s decision to get Aroon blind drunk was to show us what she looks like out of control, then show us that when she sobers up, she’s still not in control, and must lie to herself to feel in control. There is not one thing in my life I have been able to control. Life has been a series of trying and not trying, having a goal and being utterly goalless, going after something and capitulating before I even began, losing what I thought I had, then realising it never belonged to me in the first place. No matter what direction I come at it, I am not in control. We tinker around the edges of control by getting a job and opening a bank account and taking out insurance policies and putting in place all the accoutrements of responsibility that lend a patina of control to the groundlessness of life, whilst ultimately, we control nothing, and every moment we might call control is a small miracle, it is grace.

Headaches, literal and figurative, are easier to bear with the reminder that it is all “only passing through life”.