Christians are to be envied at Easter. The story of death and resurrection, suffering and rebirth is a beautiful and all-encompassing one. For non-believers, a diet of chocolate and wall-to-wall snooker, and the prospect of a perhaps drizzly bank holiday, do not have the same teleological logic. The religious narrative gives life meaning. The notion that there is a plan and purpose is deeply satisfying.
The last line of Kenneth Williams’s diary encapsulates the conundrum we all face: “Oh, what’s the bloody point?” James Bailey’s new book, The Meaning of Life, sought answers to that vexing question from a variety of what Bailey calls “extraordinary people”. Like a philosophically inclined Henry Root, Bailey – “unemployed, heartbroken and living alone in my dead grandad’s caravan” – sent more than a thousand letters to well-known artists and philosophers, and to people who had suffered some tragedy that might, he thought, give them special insight into life’s purpose and meaning.
