"If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for when you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place."
- Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men
The strange thing about this passage is that I feel like a lot of people would find sadness in this truth from the mouth of Jack Burden, a man lacking in all ambition and, it might be said, any desire for life. From one angle it seems to make life meaningless, the events that occur within it disconnected and fleeting, one moment occurring after another in a long chain leading to nothing. It certainly applies in this way to other characters in the novel like Willie Stark and Tiny Duffy, who live lives in which the ends justify the means, always, who go to any lengths to obtain power and money. This is one of the major moral and human failings of Stark and Duffy. They cheat their way through life, giving up so much of their souls, making so many 'deals with the devil,' that they become almost inhuman. But Jack Burden isn't a man like most men. Instead of finding meaning in life in ambitions and desires, in trying to seize control of it, he lets it flow on past, through him even. He has found something on the other side of it. In giving up all that, he has entered a kind of hyper-meditative state. As he narrates the book, he speaks in a very frank and straight to the point manner, until he then slips into a place from which these brilliant, poetic, philosophical passages flow out of him in a stream. Looking at it from this angle, his words start to take on a more optimistic air. We are human and have the ability to change. Time in our actual 'lives" may be disconnected at times but there is something beneath it that is continuous and omnipresent, if we would only let ourselves see it; something that does bring overall coherence and, because of this, meaning, into our lives.
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