“Isolated? I’m surrounded!” George Clooney’s character defiantly states in the trailer of the upcoming film “Up in the Air.” In this, Clooney highlights one answer to the dilemma of the modern individualistic global citizen… in becoming citizen of the world (pursuers of ambition), do we become strangers to all things particular (relationships, community, home)? When it comes to jobs and relationships, the movie sets itself as a reflection on what it takes to live with meaning? If it’s work, then what what does one do and why? If it’s people, then who is the audience and how many admirations does this require?
One of the more poignant moments of the trailer (yes, I know, I am reviewing a trailer) is when George’s character argues the following: ”If you think about it, your relationships are the heaviest components of your life: your husband, your wife, your home. We weigh ourselves down until we can’t even move. Make no mistake, moving is living…”
Contrast this to the following quote from CS Lewis, recently sent to me by my good friend Dave Ellis: “My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs—or else sitting up till the small hours [of the morning] in someone’s college room, talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than laughter…friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”
The contrast is stark, and it’s one that many of us feel acutely. Where is significance found, we wonder? Do our strivings for meaning lead us to pursue the needs of the generalized other and the significance driven self (push for health care reform, desires to influence policy, wanting to ‘make’ it in business, attempts to gain recognition and influence), or do they usher us into the arms of others? We feel both desires, and often live in the tension, evidenced by the father who goes to his son’s baseball games (living the particular) while simultaneously attempting to live vicariously through his success and thus enter his unrealized dream of doing something on the big stage (desiring universal recognition). Or likewise, the opposite side can be seen when the most powerful people in the world (universal recognition earned) yearn for relationships, desire significance IN THE EYES OF A FEW OTHERS, rather than the generalized other (desiring particular). I personally find it hard to live into one desire without the other… as Walt Whitman says “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“Up in the Air” takes on hard questions on the location of significance, and whether at the end of the day, commitments to the particular (one person, one location, one seemingly universally insignificant life) tie us down or free us to act.
