Havel muses on the structure of the experience of meaning - II

"Most people's lives, it seems to me, are fragmented into individual pleasures (both mundane and exalted, wretched and admirable, but most often a rich mixture of everything imaginable), and it is precisely these individual pleasure that give people the elementary and essentially spontaneous feeling that life has meaning.  To put it another way, such pleasures ensure that the question of what life actually means never comes up....this all-important question, only arises, I believe, when one first suffers or experiences, existentially, the 'gap,' the abyss that separates the pleasures in life from one another.  That, at least, is how I feel it....all kinds of things, from serving good dinners to working for a 'suprapersonal' cause....I have always experienced them as mere 'islands of meaningfulness' floating in an ocean of nothingness....It may well be that this warning thought comes through most clearly at the climax of a particular joy, not only tainting it, but intensifying it as well.  Even if one is standing firmly on solid ground, then, one can never forget that the ground is just an island, or lose sight, of the 'sea horizon,' surrounding it.

"....One usually begins to pose the question of the meaning of life and reflect on it in a fundamental way when one is suddenly ambushed and overpowered by a painful question: 'and what next?  A question essentially the same as the question, 'so what?' ....In other words, what is the meaning of that which gives our lives meaning, or, what is the 'meta-meaning' of the meaningful?  It is only when all those thousands of things that impart meaning (spontaneously) to our lives - that seem to make life worth living, or for which we have simply lived - are thus challenged, that the stage is set for us to pose, in all seriousness, the question about what our lives mean.

"Posing it then means, among other things, asking whether those 'islands' are really so isolated, so randomly adrift on the ocean as they appear in moments of despair, or are they in fact merely the visible peaks of some coherent undersea mountain range."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga