I was running late for an appearance on an RTÉ programme, the traffic was terrible, and I still didn't know what I was going to say, writes Frank McNally
My stress levels where high. So when I jumped into a taxi at College Green, the driver was greeted with a facial expression that read: "Please don't talk to me".
And fair play to him, for the first three minutes, he confined himself to listening to the radio, while I tried out various interview scenarios in my head and scribbled notes. Then, inevitably, the driver's need to speak got the better of him. We were stuck in a tailback anyway. So he glanced over his shoulder and said: "Do you mind me asking, bud? What is life?"
The question jolted my train of thought off its rails. I had been asked many things by taxi-drivers down the years, but this was a first. Distracted as I might be, the profundity of the inquiry demanded an answer. Maybe the driver was going through a dark afternoon of the soul. Or maybe he was just over-reacting to the traffic. But here was a fellow human being reaching out and, instinctively, I wanted to reach back.
Still, before wrestling with such an important topic, I needed a clue as to his state of mind. So I played for time and asked, rather lamely: "Er, in what sense?" The traffic oozed forward, and the driver got as high as second gear before having to stop again. But he was still giving away nothing when he replied: "I mean, what is life, these days? What does it mean?"
I noticed his emphasis on the word "is" and his curious use of the term "these days". Surely the meaning of life was an absolute, I thought, and not subject to periodic revision. If life no longer seemed to be what we used to think it was, it was us who had changed, not the immutable truth.
But I didn't say this to the driver. Instead I was trawling my memory for some bite-sized piece of wisdom that would satisfy or amuse him, while discouraging further conversation.
Unfortunately it was years since I'd read Russell's History of Western Philosophy, and the only quote I could remember from it was Schopenhauer's bitter comment on the death of his landlady. I recalled that the final moments of Socrates had been an inspiration to those present, as he calmly drank the hemlock and discoursed with his students while looking forward to the next world. But of his last instruction I could recall only that it mentioned a rooster.
Meanwhile, my puzzled look had provoked the driver to try again. "Like, when they say 'life', what exactly does that mean?" he said, gesturing at the radio. Suddenly the penny dropped. He had been listening to the four o'clock news and was querying a legal point. I was embarrassed, but at least I knew the meaning of life. "About 15 years, with good behaviour," I told him.
Sitting on the TV studio sofa beside Gráinne Seoige, my own life flashed before me. It wasn't stage-fright. It was just that the subject of the panel discussion was regret: things you would have done differently years ago if you'd known then what you know now. This was a surprisingly awkward topic. The temptation - to be resisted like death - was to talk about property: the house you would have bought, if only. On the other hand, to say you had no regrets, even if it was true, would seem smug.
So in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate myself with Gráinne, I said I regretted not working harder at my Irish in school and not going to the Connemara Gaeltacht when I was 14, like the town boys did. I had to stay at home on the farm, while my classmates not only improved their Irish but discovered girls. They came back with a whole new vocabulary (if you know what I mean), and I was left behind.
After that sob story, I mentioned a poignant letter that appeared recently in the Financial Times and put regret into perspective. It was from a US English professor who, almost 60 years ago, had fallen in love with a painting in a New York art gallery. He badly want to buy it and the gallery badly wanted to sell, to the extent of offering to accept the $450 price in $5 weekly instalments.
Sadly, the future professor was then an impoverished 19-year-old living in his mother's one-bedroom Bronx apartment. Five dollars was his weekly transport allowance. So he passed up the chance to own Jackson Pollock's Number 5. And ever since he had watched the painting's rise to fame, culminating in its sale last month for a world record $140 million. "Let your readers try to imagine how many miles of blocks I have kicked myself around since 1948," he wrote.
I'm not sure which is more impressive: that the painting should sell for $140 million now, or that a teenager could have recognised its importance 58 years ago. It was painted in the style that earned Pollock the nickname "Jack the Dripper": using paint to express feeling rather than just illustrate it. But it is of course abstract, so that what it signifies is entirely up to the viewer. And for $140 million, personally, I would want the meaning of life, or something close.