Field Notes: The Purpose of Life
I enjoy watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty every year’s end. When it came out in 2013, I was skeptical. It didn’t look too appealing- this middle-aged man goes on his own eat, pray, love.
But Walter Mitty, a Negative Asset Manager isn’t full of regret, going to find himself. On the day he hears that the magazine he works at Life is printing its last copy before going fully digital, he receives a gift from an esteemed photographer, Sean O’Connell, whom Mitty has worked with for years but has never met. It is a wallet with Life’s motto embossed on it and it arrives with a letter from O’Connell and a tin with a negative roll. In the letter, O’Connell thanks Mitty for the years of service and insists that Negative 25 be used as the cover image of the last print edition of the magazine. O’Connell says that Negative 25 is the ‘quintessence of life’.
The only problem is that Negative 25 isn’t in the tin with the roll of the other negatives. In a state of panic and perhaps a deep sense of responsibility, Mitty works to track down O’Connell and retrieve Negative 25 or risk losing his job. This has him following O’Connell’s adventurous tracks around the world, having him lead a life he could have had if Mitty had made different decisions.
In the movie, Life’s motto is
To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.
and it comes with this cool montage:
Now, I know that Life was a real magazine and over the years of trying to look for it, I cannot tell if this is the actual motto. However, in the 1930s, Life magazine had a prospectus, allowing the American public
To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things - machines, armies, multitudes, shadows of the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work- his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed…
While it is not as succinct and inspirational as the movie version, what I love about this mission is how much it calls us to bear witness to the good and the bad, to the safe and loving to the dangerous.
2020 running into 2023 has been a lot about bearing witness, to a world still trying to find its confidence in the chaos. 2024 may be no different. The reason why I like watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is not because it is going to convince me to get on a plane and fly to Greenland on a wild crazy adventure (Note: this is not why I applied to the Arctic Circle).
It is because this very unassuming man goes on this purpose-filled adventure only to realise that the ‘quintessence of life’ was (SPOILER ALERT) so much closer to home than he originally thought.
Life.com is now owned by Time (oh there’s a metaphor in there somewhere) and primarily features photography. Just to demonstrate how much of the quintessence of life is close to us, please enjoy this piece from Life.com of children being on the phone with Santa Claus.
This week’s curiosities:
My favourite internet grandma did her dating wrap and she’s killing it.
The Kontinentalist has an excellent infographic note about boycotting companies in the name of humanitarian causes.