Life Tackles the Big Question-- Meaning of Life

“If I were to really, really know, I feel certain that I should then ask, ‘Please, may I now leave?’ ” writes writer Jamaica Kincaid.

“Any answer is blasphemy,” says a Hindu scholar.

But Life magazine persisted in asking, and in the December issue, everyone from Muhammad Ali to Jackie Mason, Mike Ditka, Richard Nixon, Willie Nelson, Armand Hammer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offers answers to the age-old questions: “Why are we here? What is the meaning of life?”

Confronting the Big Issue

When Life senior editor David M. Friend first proposed the idea of confronting the big issue five years ago, his colleagues dismissed him as a “space cadet.” But new managing editor Patricia Ryan looked favorably on the idea, and soon a team of reporters was scouring the world, interviewing or soliciting written responses to what Friend calls “not just the biggest story in the world, but in history.”

About 115 people responded, Friend said, and in whittling the list down to a more manageable 50 or so, the wisdom of Carl Sagan, Liz Taylor, William Westmoreland, Run D.M.C., and Joan Jett, among others, was discarded. But response to the piece, which is accompanied by seven photographic explorations of the question, is so strong that Little, Brown & Co. plans to publish a book, including the remarks that didn’t make the magazine cut.

Those that did run from short to very short, from the Dalai Lama’s three-paragraph explication of Tibetan Buddhist wisdom, to composer John Cage’s Zen-like, “No why. Just here.”

In the array of answers, readers will find:

- Wisdom: “. . . A person who is indifferent is dead without knowing it.”

--Elie Wiesel

- Wit: “Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good, juicy cheeseburger and a strong glass of beer.”

--Author Tom (“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”) Robbins

- Warmth: “. . . Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake.”

--Humorist Garrison Keillor

- Insights into world events: “. . . We are not here to avoid decisions but to make hard choices between good and evil by using an ethical system not invented by man but by our Creator--a framework of truth and moral guidance through which we can find deliverance from despair.”

--Oliver North

- Poetry: “. . . We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

--Charles Bukowski

There is existential noodling and Talmudic ruminating, cosmic navel gazing and the furrowed browisms of serious scientists.

But readers who hope that their $2.95 will buy peace of mind are in for disappointment.

Life’s editors refuse to take a stance on which is the correct answer, most of which circumlocute the issue anyway.

The only unequivocal response is a cabbie’s, and some readers may find that unacceptable: “Life is a fake. . . . The only cure for the world’s illness is nuclear war--wipe everything out and start over.”

Still, the “Meaning of Life” issue stands out among the heaps of popular periodicals pandering to our society’s lust for glitz and trivia.

Look for it at the checkstand.

It’s the one with Elvis’ ex-wife and daughter on the cover.

Middle-Aged Playboy

“Hooray!”

If you’re one of “the 12,359,000 coolest people in America,” you have reason to celebrate. At least that’s what the editors of Playboy are telling their subscribers on the magazine’s 35th anniversary.

With 420 centerfolds under its belt, Playboy saunters into middle age with a bold black cover and the declaration that it is “the magazine that changed America.”

Besides transforming laws and helping “launch a revolution or two,” Playboy’s big contribution was that it freed “a generation from guilt about sex,” editor, publisher and founder Hugh Hefner writes in the January issue.

Self-indulgent sociologizing aside, the anniversary issue is also a stroll down mammary lane, with a healthy sampling of work from some of the “authors whose work was too lusty or iconoclastic for other magazines.”

Anyone who makes it past the retrospective parade of naked and semi-naked bodies, from Marilyn Monroe’s to Vanna White’s, will see that Hef isn’t just spouting hyperbole.

Woody Allen, Jack Kerouac, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Coover, David Mamet and Andy Warhol are a few of the men and woman whose previous work for Playboy is reprinted in the anniversary issue. Also included are interviews with Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, John Wayne, Barbra Streisand, Jimmy Carter and John Lennon and Yoko Ono among other key figures in the cultural history of the last 3 1/2 decades.

In inimitable Playboy style, there’s something for everyone to ponder, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s plea for “an American dream that need not be realized at the expense of other men around the world . . . “ to the current Dear Playmates column, where the prevailing Playboy philosophy, at least as Misses July, April and February see it, is summarized: “Sex is just a lot better when you do it with someone you love.”

If that’s not enough to assure readers that Playboy has matured, note that the “Girls of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s” etc. are now refered to as the women of those decades.

Banned by the British

In yet another twist in the tale of an already ill-fated spy story, the government of Great Britain has exercised its license to kill certain types of information by banning the December issue of the American magazine Harper’s.

The alleged villain is an excerpt from former British Secret Service agent Anthony Cavendish’s memoir, “Inside Intelligence,” which describes his cloak-and-dagger work (mainly of a clerical nature) in Eastern Bloc countries in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

As recounted in Harper’s introduction to the excerpt--titled “Inside M-I6,” in reference to Britain’s secret intelligence service--the Thatcher government first squelched Cavendish’s attempts to get his story printed two years ago by threatening to throw him and his publisher in jail and/or fine them.

Last year, though, Cavendish self-published the 160-page memoir and sent out 500 copies as Christmas presents. The government promptly got an injunction banning any further printing of the intriguing but less than 007-esque tale.

Cavendish has challenged the injunction, and the British Law Lords, the equivalent of the U. S. Supreme Court, are now considering the case. Meanwhile, when the quarterly journal Granta, which is published in both England and America, prepared to print an excerpt in its U. S. edition, the British government threatened to hold the publisher in contempt. Eighteen pages of text were excised from the issue that finally appeared here last summer, Harper’s reports.

That’s where the Yanks stepped in.

In a long introduction to the excerpt, senior editor Gerald Marzorati, explains why the magazine took an interventionist approach in the foreign affair: “It could happen here. It is happening here.”

“What is revealed, in the act of suppressing such a story,” he writes, “is the mind of the censor: the way a government may use its authority not simply to keep secrets that affect ‘national security’ but, even more simply, to control information, limit debate, and enlarge its power.”

”. . . It is from British citizens that the Thatcher government insists the memoir be kept hidden. And therein, for American citizens, lies the moral of this cautionary tale.”

The CIA took former agent Frank Snepp to court over his account of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, “Decent Interval,” Marzorati reminds us. The Reagan Administration has changed security regulations to reclassify as “secret” documents that were previously available to the public and weakened the Freedom of Information act, he reminds us. And he reminds us that the civilian Navy employee who gave “altogether harmless” photographs to “Jane’s Defense Weekly” wound up in jail.

His conclusion is that “the censors must be challenged.”

“It is not a matter of the information putting the lives of agents in danger or of placing in the hand of our enemies information that could put the country in jeopardy,” he said by phone. “What you have time and again is information that will embarrass or put pressure upon the government of the day. It’s politics.”

In the case of the Cavendish memoir, Marzorati believes the Thatcher government fears embarrassment by, among other things, the former spy’s revelations that homosexuals once made up a good part of her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Harper’s publisher, Rick MacArthur, has said he will sue the British government over the banning, Marzorati said. But at least for now, the British distributor has agreed to keep under wraps the 200 or so copies of Harper’s usually sold on British newsstands. Still, a handful of British subscribers to the magazine may already be huggermuggering with their illicit copies, which went out in the mail as planned, Marzorati said.