What Do We Make of a Life?

On the way back from a camping trip on the coast, I downloaded and listened to a dystopian novel from the 1990s – I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. As I listened, my mind regularly went to The Life of Chuck that Morgan and I saw a few weeks ago. On the surface, the two stories are very different. One is a surreal, post-apocalyptic novel set in a barren, nameless world. The other is a backward-moving film about an ordinary man’s beautiful, fleeting life. But both are playing with the same theme and asking the same important question.

What does it mean to live?

In I Who Have Never Known Men, the narrator begins the book locked in a cage underground with 39 other women (that number 39 is another connection to The Life of Chuck). She has never known the outside world. Never known touch. Never known family. When the world above collapses, the women are suddenly freed, but they do not find answers. Only silence. Vast, empty landscapes. No clues about what happened or why. The novel follows their slow, quiet attempt to build some kind of life in a world with no past and no clear future.

It is not a story full of action. It is a story full of wondering. What are we, without context? What do we become when survival is all that is left?

“It is not memory that makes us human, it is imagination. The ability to wonder. To reach for meaning, even when nothing explains anything.”

That echoes what The Life of Chuck explores in reverse. A man’s life dissolves piece by piece, and yet we feel the beauty of it through dance, laughter, childhood joy, and fleeting connection. The film says life matters because we feel it. Because we are here, even if only for a short time.

Both stories suggest that life is not defined by what we have. It is defined by what we choose to notice. Even when the world is ending. Even when we do not understand it.

These two stories suggest that clarity is not a prerequisite for meaning. We can still live well inside the unknown. We can still search for purpose, even in silence. And maybe the act of that search is its own kind of purpose.

The book is a quick read (or listen) and I think it’ll get you thinking about life and the things that matter most.