The Tartar Steppe: Meaning or Madness?
I examine the Italian novel "The Tartar Steppe" and how the goals we set for ourselves can affect our wellbeing.
Something I want to do here at Rhapsody is write book reviews. But not normal reviews1 that assess whether a book is good or bad. I’ll write about books that I think are particularly useful to illustrate some point or a series of points on my mind. This book is 80 years old and the film adaptation is 44 years old, so yea, there are spoilers. -Joe
I’ve always struggled to live in the present. When I was in high school, we’d often take family vacations and one of my enduring memories is walking around Disney World in July worried about football practice that began in August. My freshman year of college was one of the best years of my life, but at night when I’d go to bed, I’d think a lot about how I couldn’t believe high school was over and that so many of my friends were scattered all over the country. I recently heard a psychology professor say that anxiety comes from fears about the future, while depression tends to stem from concerns about the past. That felt intuitively right to me.
I don’t think it was ever a conscious decision I made, but somewhere along the line I settled into the belief that if I could achieve some kind of status or receive some kind of award that I’d feel OK. My mind would stop wandering and I’d feel content with my life. When I first decided I wanted to be a writer my goals were always based on accolades, like my work getting into a sports hall of fame or winning a Pulitzer. It seemed to me like achieving something like this would fill the void I felt, or allow my mind to be at ease. I could stop worrying because I had achieved something in my life. I equated awards and titles with meaning and satisfaction. I recently read a novel that brought to mind a lot of the questions and thoughts I had about finding meaning in life and being happy, which was the impetus for this essay.
The Tartar Steppe2 is an Italian novel by Dino Buzzati written in 1938 as World War II loomed over Europe. It follows the entire adult life of the protagonist, Giovanni Drogo, who begins as an ambitious and starry-eyed young military officer assigned to Fort Bastiani, a nearly forgotten outpost that stands on the edge of the “Tartar Steppe”—a vast, rocky desert that separates Italy from the “Northern Kingdom.” On the very first page, the reader learns, “This was the day he had looked forward to for years—the beginning of his real life.” Already we see a young man living in the future, dreaming of glory.
Fort Bastiani is not considered very important. Officers often go there for a few years, get some easy experience under their belt, and then leave for another posting. It’s not uncommon—even encouraged—to lie about having some kind of illness so that you can be reassigned. It’s not glamorous, and few want to be there. Certainly nobody asks to go to Fort Bastiani. The Fort exists to defend the country from the “Northern Kingdom,” but it has been so long since there were actually any Tartars on the steppe that many of the soldiers think it might just be a myth.
When Drogo arrives, his optimism and excitement quickly diminish and his sole focus is how to leave as quickly as possible. He feels alone. He worries his youth will pass him by. He learns regulations from the particularly by-the-book stickler Sergeant-Major Tronc, and in Tronc sees a warning of what this fort can turn people into. As Drogo observes, “you could see at a glance Tronc had forgotten other men—for him nothing existed but the Fort and its hateful regulations.”
Despite the loneliness and perceived uselessness of Fort Bastiani, Drogo notices that many officers have been at the fort for decades. About four months in, he goes to visit the tailor and discovers he’s been there for 15 years. When out of earshot, the tailor’s assistant says to Drogo:
“Fifteen years, sir, fifteen accursed years, and he goes on repeating the same story—I am here on a temporary basis, I expect to go any day...but he will never move on from here. He and the commanding officer and lots of others will stay here till they’re done—it’s a kind of illness. You’re new, sit, watch out—you’re newly arrived; watch out while there’s still time.”
“Watch out for what?”
“See that you leave as soon as possible, that you don’t catch the madness.”
“I am here for only four months,” says Drogo. “I haven’t the slightest intention of staying.”
“Watch out all the same, sir,'' said the old man. “It was Colonel Filimore who began it. Great events are coming, he began to tell me, I remember it very well—it will be 18 years ago. ‘Events,’ that is what he said. These were his words. He got into his head that the Fort was tremendously important, much more important than all the others and that in the city they don’t understand.”
The “events” referred to are war. From now through the end of the novel, the notion of war increasingly becomes an obsession—one with perverse manifestations. The soldiers who stay on at Fort Bastiani dream of war and want nothing more than war, not because they are particularly interested in any humanitarian outcome but because it would provide meaning in their lives. At one point on a scouting mission, a fellow soldier—in his 20s, mind you—dies on the side of the mountain, and his death is the object of envy because he died doing something rather than being old in a bed. The war is what would give meaning to the lives of the soldiers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Drogo’s initial service is supposed to last for two years, but he ends up spending decades at Fort Bastiani. He catches the “madness,” the allure of some great event on the horizon that would give his life meaning. He had a chance to leave early on during a medical exam, but had a change of heart and decided to stay. He took pride in that, being the dutiful soldier. The days pass, one like the other. While still youthful, he often daydreams of “heroic fantasies” of the King of Italy telling him, “Well done.” Time and time again older officers tell him to leave, get out while he can, go enjoy life, but he only thinks of war and the meaning it will provide.
Eventually, war does come. But in a cruel twist of fate, Drogo is now in his mid-50s and has taken ill. The fort’s commanding officer commands him to leave Fort Bastiani—essentially a forced retirement—so that his room could house the soon-to-arrive reinforcements rather than a sick old man. He dies alone in an inn.
Buzzati, the author who wrote this book, was a newspaper reporter. According to “Throwing Down the Gauntlet,” an essay on the novel by British writer, translator, and professor Tim Parks, Buzzati said:
“The idea of the novel came out of the monotonous night-shift I was working at Corriere della Sera in those days. It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life quite pointlessly. It’s a common enough feeling, I think, for most people, especially when you find yourself slotted into the time-tabled existence of a big town. Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was an almost instinctive decision.”
Humans evolved to survive, not to find meaning in life, or even to be happy. Being anxious and thinking about whatever threat is on the horizon is great for survival but less optimal for just being happy and living in the moment. We also have an innate desire to grow and master skills and achieve things—we want to be competent. This competency is a primary source of satisfaction and meaning in our lives. When we are good at something, when we contribute, it makes us feel good. But often the innate need to feel competent and useful combines with our natural inclination towards anxiety and leaves us feeling, well, anxious. And in our modern society that so values status and wealth, we often think to ourselves, “Well, if I reach a certain level of achievement, or get a certain award, then I’ll have the sense of meaning I’ve been searching for and the anxiety will stop.”
But there’s a lot of evidence that it doesn’t really work that way. Studies repeatedly show that when people reach a certain level of wealth, status, or achievement, they habituateto that level and they need more of it. It’s not unlike developing a physical tolerance for a drug or alcohol. To be sure, context matters. When someone who is impoverished moves into the middle class, there are material benefits that are permanent and lasting, but then diminishing returns kick in. Happiness doesn’t scale with affluence, and it doesn’t scale with achievement.
Something called Goal Contents Theory can help to explain. It holds that people generally have two kinds of goals in life, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic goals are those that are rewarding in their own right; simply doing the task makes us feel good. Extrinsic goals are those that are not fulfilling in their own right, but are instrumental to achieving something, i.e. an award or a level of wealth. Intrinsic goals include things like personal growth and contributing to one’s community. Intrinsic goals have been associated with greater wellbeing, extrinsic goals not so much.
Another factor is simply the weight we put on “doing things” as a factor of our overall wellbeing. Happiness, according to a study performed by University of California psychologist Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, is the result of three factors: 50% genetic tendencies, 40% our attitude toward things that happen, and 10% events in our life. In other words, the stuff we actually do is only 1/10th of what matters in terms of being happy.
Which brings us back to the present—what is our attitude toward what’s happening now? As I said at the beginning, human minds are constantly thinking about the future or the past. It’s how we evolved, and it helps us to survive. Our minds are constantly trying to figure out how to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. But that doesn’t necessarily make for happy, fulfilling lives. In an interesting study, sociologists Michael Killingsworth and David Gilbert developed a phone app that would ask volunteers three questions:
How are you feeling right now?
What are you doing right now?
Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?
First off, they found ~46% of people were not thinking about what they were currently doing (which is probably understating the percentage because people were self-reporting and people are often not aware of where their attention lies.). Of those mind-wanderers, most were thinking about pleasant things rather than neutral or negative things. But thinking about something happy didn’t correlate to being happy. The thing that correlated to being happy was thinking about what you were doing, even what you were doing wasn’t a particularly enjoyable activity, like washing the dishes. These are people living in the moment rather than daydreaming about military glory when the Northern Kingdom storms across the steppe.
Drogo and his fellow officers didn’t enjoy the journey. They were entirely focused on extrinsic rather than intrinsic goals. Drogo spent his time daydreaming about accolades and commendations from an imagined king while simultaneously worrying his life was devoid of meaning. To be honest, Buzzati might have been the same way.
They were also thinking mostly about themselves.
There seem to be some categories of activities that do not habituate and do not put us on the so-called hedonic treadmill. These are referred to as “meaning and connection” actions, for example when we do things for the benefit of something bigger than ourselves. It seems that when we act with compassion towards others, the sense of happiness we feel doesn’t diminish over time. The same goes for acts of gratitude. And this fits with Goal Contents Theory as well, since helping one’s community is an intrinsic rather than extrinsic aspiration, in other words, the act itself is rewarding.
It’s also important to point out the role of societal institutions. There are influences and pressures that prevent—or at least do not encourage—living in the moment or happiness or anything. Western society undeniably promotes extrinsic aspirations as good and true, even though as far as our psychological needs are concerned, they are empty calories. That’s a real problem when it comes to finding meaning and happiness, and it’s naive to pretend it’s not the case. While we can work on ourselves, society itself needs work. Drogo’s values and beliefs weren’t solely of his creation, he integrated the views of the society into his own worldview. It’s an essay for another day, but the “time-tabled existence” that Buzzati talks about is, of course, real and thwarts the wellbeing of many. As an individual, it’s not easy (and at times impossible) to overcome this context. When someone internalizes the perceived importance of wealth and status and lives in this “time-tabled” existence, there’s the potential to confuse or conflate one’s job with their identity and overall self worth, which can breed more anxiety and depression. At some point, whether or not there was a war determined Drogo’s entire sense of self-worth—it was his entire identity.
When I thought I’d find meaning by winning awards, I was thinking about extrinsic goals. My attention wasn’t where it needed to be, on simply doing a good job, getting better, and having a positive impact on the world. I didn’t have the intention of living in the moment and I didn’t understand the correlation between being present and truly finding satisfaction and meaning, which ultimately yields happiness and wellbeing. My attitude towards the work was as if it was nothing but a means to an end, when it should have been an end in and of itself. So I was failing on all three fronts: I valued extrinsic vs. intrinsic goals, had a poor attitude towards the work I was doing, and I wasn’t present. A recipe for disaster.
Drogo died alone in the inn, but he didn’t die unhappy. In his last moments, he at least partially figured it out. He realized what you face in life is less important than how you face it, and that is what will provide a sense of satisfaction and meaning. As he felt himself approaching the end, he resolved to face death on his own terms—he was, finally, living in the moment.
“With inexpressible joy Giovanni Drogo suddenly was aware that he was absolutely calm, almost eager to put himself once more to the test.” He looks out the window to once more observe the stars in the sky and then he smiles to himself in the dark.
Here’s a “real” review from the New York Times on August 24th, 1952, after the novel had been translated. You have to be a NYT subscriber to read it, though.