I have no photos of Clarisse's farm, no cute pictures of her lambs in spring, chasing each other in the frosty grass, mimicking the serious business of predation for which thankfully they never had to prepare. I have no memorabilia of her favorite cow, Marietje, nor of her two nameless black and white cats. So here is a photo of playing lambs taken by someone else:
Photography was analog, and, as a result only used on rare occasions. You took photos on vacation, or of birthday parties and Christmas celebrations, not of the mundane thing that was the farm across the street from our house. Also, the farm felt eternal—that red-brick building surrounded by the sheds and stables had a solidity to it. It seemed like it would last forever, but it didn't.
The farmer was called Clarisse, I only ever knew her first name. She was a small hail old woman with a spare frame, a brown, deeply-lined face and very blue, keen eyes. She had always remained single. As a young woman she took care of her chronically ill father and tended the farm while her younger siblings went to lives of their own. Eventually, she inherited the farm, by then it was too late to go courting, as she said with regret in her voice.
My sister and I would visit her. We went to see her in the main room of the farmhouse, a low-ceilinged white kitchen that looked bare in spite of the religious paraphernalia (a large wooden cross, an etching of the Eye of Providence), some knickknacks and a weather almanac. There was a coal stove and a large wooden table with many chairs that once held a large family, that now usually just had one person seated at it, and the occasional visitors.
Mostly we went to look at the animals, the chicks and the lambs in spring. My sister and I thought old people were boring. We just came to say hi to be polite. For the lambing season, Clarisse would stay up all night until her four ewes had given birth, her old phone with the rotary dial at the ready to call the vet if a ewe had difficulties. Staying up at night could mean the difference between life and death.
She wasn't sentimental except for once, when her cow Marietje had to be taken away to the slaughter house. She had four cows, which she pastured and stabled, and milked using milking machines. She somehow managed to do all of that on her own. But eventually, the cows became too much and she put them away; yet she would not part with Marietje. Marietje was long beyond the point of productivity (cows need to calve regularly to keep that going, she did not keep the calves). Still, she kept this one cow. Marietje would low very sweetly when we entered the stable, or she stood in the pasture, flicking her tail, looking with disdain at the sheep. Until it became too much to keep even her. I still remember the day the truck came, and Clarisse shed the only tears I ever saw her shed, she hugged Marietje fiercely before she gently guided her into the truck. The cow's eyes were so big and forlorn I had to look away.
I've been lately thinking of blessedness, or sagacity, or enlightenment—related concepts that you can find in perfectionist ethics such as Spinoza's Ethics, or in Confucianism. It comes in degrees. You can be, in Confucian ethics, a da ren or a xiao ren (“great person” or “petty person") , and you can go all the way to be a junzi. For Spinoza's Ethics, you can do things that move you closer or further away from the exemplary blessed person. In any case, Spinoza seems to set the bar for that kind of moral excellence is very high, as he writes in the famous closing lines of the ethics.
If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found with out great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare (E5p42Schol).
Sometimes I wonder, and someone lately asked me: Does philosophy give us any advantage in this respect? Does being a philosopher lead to wisdom? One only has to look at the philosophy profession to see that this doesn't appear to be so. I think there are structural obstacles in academia, maybe in philosophy in particular, that make blessedness difficult.
Even though I was a child who thought old people were boring, I could recognize that Clarisse possessed sagacity, if such a quality exists at all. This was in spite of the fact that she was not very literate (she left school early to help the farm).
She had a kind of inner peace with which she approached things. You could physically feel the calm as you entered the main big kitchen-like room of the farmhouse, and her blue eyes would light up and she would smile and we would sit together quietly.
I do not remember any big wise words. Rather, her sagacity lay in her general attitude to life: to do your best and be diligent, but also accept when things go wrong (such as when a lamb died, which happened on some occasions). You did your best and that is all you can do. She ate a spartan diet of what seemed to be mostly some sort of porridge which stood boiling on the stove. She didn't seem to care about money at all. She talked about her animals like a kind of cooperative venture: she cared a great deal about their wellbeing and did enough so that she could sustain herself, but she was not sentimental about them (except her one cow). The one wise thing I do remember her saying was “A cow is at least as smart and kind as a dog, probably much smarter and kinder. Think about that when you eat steak.”
But if sagacity is an excellent thing that is as difficult as it is rare, if a near-illiterate farmer can have it, what then is the point of philosophy? Why do professional philosophy at all if it doesn't make us wiser (if anything, seems to structurally result in the opposite)?
My view on this is perhaps unsatisfying, but it is this: philosophy allows us to collectively share and explore meaning, in a vocabulary and with toolkits of concepts that give us a rich insight into the human condition.
It allows us to share the sorts of insights that otherwise would be purely private (as in Clarisse's case), and even to share and glimpse insights that we ourselves only dimly grasp. It allows us, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it in Phenomenology of Perception (p. xv) to step “back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.”
Also, it allows us to see there is a variety of perspectives and ways of thinking that have deep value. The fact that philosophy in academia has recently become more open for other, non-western etc perspectives, increases this diversity of thinking and ways of being.
Clarisse's health began to fail when I was around fifteen years old. She died very quickly and unspectacularly in her late seventies. One day I saw her cycling to church, the next day she was in the hospital with pneumonia, and it went quickly downhill from there. The church was reasonably well filled with her friends (mostly other old women) and the prominent people of the village were there too, deeming it proper to attend the funeral of the last surviving old-style farmer.
She left no will, remarkable given that she had no direct heirs. Her siblings who I never knew to visit her, except once or twice her younger brother (a gruff, unfriendly man) suddenly became very interested in her property. They would stop by the farm daily. What happened was this: the land had in the meantime become very valuable, and her siblings were thinking of turning it into a place for real estate development, to be sold to the highest bidder.
A painter who was something of a local expert, his family having lived in our village for generations, challenged the development plans. Surely, this farm has value: the farmhouse was old, it could be turned into a model farm where kids could come and visit and learn about animal husbandry. But his appeals were rejected. I overheard my mother talk to Clarisse's brother, overheard him saying to her, “I don't understand why she was so stupid not to retire and sell the land. Why did she have to work so hard like that?”
Why indeed? Most people agreed with the brother that Clarisse was not very clever. Some argued that she should've specified a will and tried to arrange for the farm to be given to some non-profit. Others argued she should have sold the land when she was in her sixties so she could enjoy a quiet retirement in a small flat somewhere without having to do all that hard labor. I think that while the former idea had merit, Clarisse was simply not in a position to arrange for that to happen, to find relevant organizations, and of course, her relatives as potential beneficiaries did not lift a finger. She would sometimes lament, “If only I had had daughters like you [she meant my sister and me] I could've left the farm to them.”
It was not a life without regrets. But it was a life well-lived.
Im so happy that I found you! I came across you in Substack last week while waiting for an antibiotic at the striking pharmacy. (Turns out I have Covid for the first time and somewhat surprised, but I may have grown complacent.)
I love this piece and I can picture the woman so easily in my mind.... the kindness and the reflective quality of her life is very clear. A life well lived is a life lived with clear eyes and heart. You drew a lovely picture of her capturing truly, and honoring a life, not without sorrow or regret, but awake and lived fully.
I agree, I think, but can you say something about why you think hers was a life well lived? If this were fiction, I think I would value it, perhaps sentimentally, as an example of integrity. But I'm interested in what criteria to apply to real people, or whether "criteria" are appropriate.