The most nauseating cliché is, “Live every day like it’s your last.”
Like most platitudes, it’s banal and empty, recited endlessly like a commercial’s jingle. We hear these words invoked by celebrities and talking heads trying to imbue our ‘boring’ lives with a sense of meaning, or we read them in the profiles and status updates of our no-longer-forgotten friends on Facebook. Perhaps this is why many of us are too jaded to believe in this adage.
And yet I found a similar sentiment echoed in The Happiest Man in the World, a biography about a preacher/musician/ sailor who goes by the name ‘Poppa Neutrino.’ He’s best known for crossing the Atlantic in a raft built from garbage, but more impressive is the philosophy he lives by: the system of triads. By identifying the three deepest desires and pursuing them ceaselessly, he believes one can achieve true happiness. Freedom, joy, and art compose his triad, though he acknowledges that his three tasks change from time to time. Alec Wilkinson, a writer for The New Yorker, deftly captures the rapid shifts in interests of his 74 year old subject. One minute Neutrino is shopping around ‘an undetectable’ offensive football play to colleges in the southwest, then he’s planning his journey across the Pacific, and suddenly he halts both activities to focus on painting.
“Eventually I will move across the ocean and maybe around the world,” he says. “Where does it end? The grave, of course, but I’m going out of this life as what I have worked and striven my whole life to be, a free man—free of possessions, free of greed, free of worry and strife. Free of anything superfluous.” Wilkinson notes that Neutrino’s life “has been less a complex of haphazard adventures than the enactment of projects that presented themselves with varying degrees of urgency.” This explains Neutrino’s stints in both the seminary and the service and what brought him from boarding school to jail to the ocean.
However, his unwavering dedication to his triad philosophy has produced some unappealing side effects. He lives from hand to mouth and is estranged from his family and most of society. But these are the things that revitalize, or at least amend, an otherwise stale aphorism. Poppa Neutrino lives every day like it’s his last, and is happy despite being an old man without many close friends or a steady home. Against our better judgment, he is enviable.
Wilkinson seems to immediately understand this contradiction. Early on in the book, he describes Neutrino’s appeal:
He is profoundly responsive to impulse. He does not always appear to have a reason for what he does, and sometimes he goes about things so awkwardly, even ineptly, that he brings on himself and the people around him difficulties that might not otherwise arisen, but he has ardently imagined who he might be, and he has fearlessly embodied what he imagined. His past is one long poem to the random life. I wouldn’t have wished to enact it myself, nor would I care to have taken part, but I respect the achievement.
Neutrino’s “an unvarnished apparition from the psyche,” a version of ourselves that we suppress but secretly wish was living. And like Wilkinson, I don’t wish to be as reckless or indulgent as Neutrino, but I want his drive. I only expected to capitalize on a piqued interest by reading about him, but was introduced to a person that challenged me to reflect on the things I had done and had yet to do. When I finished the book, I felt untethered and filled with hope.
Between Wilkinson’s spare, elegant prose are long passages of dialogue from Neutrino. He offers slight variations on the didactic expressions we’ve heard before. But coming from an individual such as Neutrino—the epitome of individuality—they are words to truly live by. Just thumbing through the pages again I found something:
I know how to make the fire of life. I don’t know the truth of life, but I know how to make the fire. People have always been drawn to me because of it. I would say, ‘Do you want to live as you’re living, with no fire, or a fire that’s gone out, or with half a fire, or a fire that only works sometimes, or do you want to live like me, in the fire all the time?’
And just by re-reading his words and remembering his journey, I feel singed.
