“After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die,”
Charlottes Web (E.B. White)
One of the earliest memories I have of being captivated by a story is reading Charlottes Web. Like the character in Shyamalan and Spark’s recent collaborative effort Remain, I too found myself being struck by this now infamous line. Not simply becasue it seemed to hold some mysterious and elusive truth regarding the nature of this existence, but because it seemed to tap into an unspoken tension i was already feeling and observing as that young seven year old kid holed up in his room seeing the world through the eyes of these characters amidst the glow of my nightlight.
Which is the question- what is a life anyways.
Or to echo the character in this book, the assumed beauty of this definition also feels to be burdened by a kind of pervading sadness regarding our ability to answer it in terms other than death.
And yet the character in Remain is also aware of what lies beneath this for the timeless story of a spider and a pig. To define “a life” serves to reveal what a life is not. A life is not death. The very essence of the phrase “we live a little while” directs our question towards the thing that death forces us to reconcile- the meaning and nature of a life can only be found in the act of living.
In other words, what E.B. White intuitively understood, which is largely written into the subtext of his narrative (see The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E B White’s Eccentric Life In Nature And Birth Of An American Classic by Michael Sims), is that life and death are not the same thing. They reflect opposing narratives. Which is what awakens Wren, the character in Remain, to note the tension. To live a little while is not to die, it is for existence to “be” in the first place. More than this, it is about what we can rationally and logically say about the nature of a life in light of this antithetial thing called death (and it’s logical implication, a birth).
My very first post 10 years ago in my personal blog space was about Charlottes Web. Encountering this blurb in Remain, particularly as I am now tumbling towards 50, brought this formative story back to mind in a visceral way. I have not yet finished Remain, but in this moment I found the simple observation to be a powerful one. As it would be for Charlotte and Wilbur, the truth is found in the phrase “we live a little while.” The question that breaks in to this equation is simply this- what truth does this thing called a life point towards and reveal. On what grounds can we define what it means to live in ways that actually lliberate us from the defining powers of death.
If I could go back and speak to my 7 year old self, I’d tell him to anticipate 43 years of continuing to wrestle with this question, even in the darkest of places, yet never without glimpses of hope.
The Stories of my Life 