Questioning The Mean Meaning Of Life

Memories of another lockdown — Beirut 1975

Terry Mansfield started this off yesterday, with his reminiscences of life as an English teacher in Tokyo in the mid-1970s. I was teaching English back then too, but not in Japan. In Beirut. And we were in lockdown.

Not like today, in our own houses. But we couldn’t leave our little quarter of the city near the American University, because everywhere else civil war was raging.

In the early days, there was a frisson of excitement as we turned on the news. We were the news. What was happening? Were we in danger? How were we going to get out of this? Was it safe to go to the beach at the weekend?

In the early days it was safe because the Lebanese were essentially a fun-loving people. The fighters always took the weekend off.

As the days and months passed though, war wore us down. We still went to the school every morning, but our students gradually stopped coming. The news never changed, so eventually we stopped listening. Trapped in our expat enclave, the excitement faded to ennui. We started taking stupid risks to escape it. Breaking curfew became a habit.

Sound familiar?

I wrote a fictionalised version of our lockdown experiences and adventures in my 2010 novel, The Lebanese Troubles. Prompted by Terry’s reminder, I re-read some of it last night, and came across this teaching anecdote. The classroom technology has changed, maybe the methods too, but my response to lockdown hasn’t.

‘The day pressed on relentlessly, closing in on us like a bully. Tempers were short, and so was concentration. Needless to say there was no learning; but that was hardly unusual.

There was just a single moment of relief. The language laboratory was always a struggle: leading the kids through the corridor from the classroom to the lab, losing as few as possible on the way; settling them in; listening to them through the master control to find out whether they had lost their place, broken the tape, or fallen asleep. They couldn’t see the point of repeating mindless sentences endlessly, and to be honest, neither could I. Today’s exercise included such gems as:

What does cat mean? What does plate mean? What does car mean?

It was Mohammed who pressed the call-button after a few minutes.

- Please teacher, what means mean?

- No, Mohammed, what does means mean? … I mean, what does mean mean?

- Yes teacher, but what means mean?

I could see his genuinely puzzled face behind the glass of his booth, mouthing the words like a goldfish, and I decided it just wasn’t worth trying. What was the use?

Precisely. What was the use? The question became an obsession as I trudged back home. What was the use of teaching? What was the use of staying in Beirut? I couldn’t be bothered with answers, but it wasn’t as easy to cut off my own questions as it had been to cut off Mohammed’s — just by flicking a switch. And perhaps he had a point after all: what means mean?

I could feel myself suffocating, the heat and the questions driving me back into a corner. I had to make a move, I had to break out before I was stifled. And yet I knew it wasn’t Beirut, the city. It wasn’t that I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be someone else.’

How are you feeling today?

If you enjoyed this, here’s another lockdown-related story — but this time looking forward, not back. What might life be like a year from now? Is this just a mischievous tale — broken news — or could there be some truth it in?