Thanks to Life

Violeta Parra and the art of saying yes to a life that also hurts

There are songs we like, and then there are songs that slowly become part of our own lives. They follow us through the years. We hear them again and discover that they no longer mean quite what they did the first time. Perhaps it is not the song that has changed. Perhaps it is we who have changed.

“Gracias a la vida” – “Thanks to Life” – by the Chilean singer and artist Violeta Parra is such a song.

At first encounter, it almost seems simple. A human being gives thanks to life for what it has given her. For the eyes that can see. For the ears that can hear. For language. For the feet that carry her through the world. For the heart that feels. For laughter and tears.

But the simplicity is deceptive.

For what does it really mean to give thanks to life?

A life is received

We often speak of life as something we are supposed to create.

We are to realize ourselves. Make the right choices. Find our way. Develop our abilities. Take responsibility for our own happiness.

Violeta Parra begins somewhere else.

Life has already given.

Before we have had time to decide anything at all, we have received a body, a language, a history, people around us, and a world we did not choose for ourselves. Heidegger called this our thrownness: we discover ourselves already in the midst of a life that began before we were able to choose it. Gadamer adds that language and history, too, are realities we enter into rather than create from the ground up.

Violeta Parra says it much more simply:

Life has given me.

Perhaps that is the difference between seeing life as an achievement and seeing it as a gift.

Eyes, ears, and feet

It is striking what Parra gives thanks for.

Not fame.

Not money.

Not success.

She gives thanks for the senses.

The eyes make it possible for her to see the world and the person she loves. The ears open up the world of sound. Words make it possible to say what she thinks and feels. Her feet carry her through streets, puddles, beaches, deserts, and mountains.

It is almost phenomenology in song.

We do not observe life from the outside. We live it through the body. As Merleau-Ponty showed, the body is not merely an object among other objects. It is our way of being present in the world.

Parra needs no philosophical terminology to say the same.

We see.

We hear.

We walk.

And through this, we have a world.

And then comes the other

But the song does not stop with the senses.

Among the crowds there is one particular person.

The one she loves.

This is where the song gains another depth. The world no longer consists only of things that can be seen, heard, and touched. A human being steps forward from the crowd.

Martin Buber called this the difference between I–It and I–Thou.

Much of the world must necessarily meet us as an It. We examine, use, classify, and orient ourselves among things. But another human being cannot be fully reduced to an object of our observation.

In the encounter with a Thou, something else happens.

The other becomes present.

Perhaps this is why love can transform the landscape around us. A street is just any street until it leads to the house of the person we love. A place can be insignificant to everyone else and yet contain an entire world for us.

Parra thus moves from the world to the other.

From seeing to meeting.

It is a decisive movement in the song – and in life.

For we never live only in the world.

We live with someone.

The heart that discerns

Then she gives thanks for the heart.

Not only because the heart loves, but because life has given her the ability to experience the difference between what brings joy and what brings pain.

Here the song approaches one of practical philosophy’s fundamental questions: What does it mean to live well?

Aristotle already knew that a good life cannot be reduced to pleasure. A human life must be understood as a whole, and within that whole there is both loss and joy.

Parra moves even closer to lived experience.

She gives thanks not only for laughter.

She also gives thanks for tears.

Perhaps that is the song’s most demanding thought.

To give thanks is not to say that everything is good

Gratitude can easily become sentimental.

We may get the impression that the grateful person is someone who looks away from suffering and insists that life is, after all, good.

But we do not have to understand Parra this way.

She is not saying that everything that happens in life is good.

She gives thanks for having been allowed to experience life.

That is something else.

We can protest against injustice and still love the world.

We can grieve what we have lost and still be grateful that it once existed.

We can experience pain and still know that the love which made that pain possible had value.

Gratitude does not cancel grief.

They can exist side by side.

Violeta Parra’s paradox

And it is precisely here that the song becomes more difficult.

Violeta Parra lived an extraordinary artistic life. She collected Chilean folk music, composed, sang, and worked with visual art and textiles. From April 18 to May 11, 1964, she exhibited works at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre Palace in Paris. In December 1965, she opened the Centro de Arte Popular in the Carpa de La Reina in Santiago. The following year, 1966, she recorded her final album, Las últimas composiciones. On February 5, 1967, she died at the Carpa de La Reina, aged 49. Is there a connection here, between her song and her death the year after?

It is difficult to hear “Gracias a la vida” without allowing this knowledge to cast a shadow over the song.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes the song so human.

A person can love life and still suffer under it.

A person can be grateful and despairing.

Human beings contain contradictions that cannot always be resolved.

Kierkegaard knew something about this. For him, despair is not simply the opposite of happiness. It arises in the human being’s relation to self – in the tension between what we are, what we hope to be, and what life actually allows us to become.

Perhaps we need say no more than that.

We do not know what “Gracias a la vida” meant to Violeta Parra when she wrote it.

The song must be allowed to remain open.

A gratitude without guarantees

Perhaps “Gracias a la vida” becomes most profound if we do not read it as a declaration that life is good.

It is, rather, a gratitude without guarantees.

I do not give thanks because I know how everything will end.

I do not give thanks because I have understood life.

I do not give thanks because life has treated me fairly.

I give thanks because something has been given to me.

I have seen.

I have heard.

I have walked.

I have loved.

I have cried.

I have laughed.

I have lived.

That is a far more demanding form of gratitude.

From I to we

Toward the end, another movement takes place.

Individual experience opens toward community.

The song she sings is her own, but the experiences from which it springs – joy and sorrow, love and loss – do not belong to her alone.

They belong to us.

The song thus moves from I to we.

And perhaps that is precisely why it has been able to travel across countries, languages, and generations. It was written by a Chilean woman with a very particular life, in a very particular historical setting. Yet at the same time it speaks of something almost any human being can recognize.

We have received something we did not make ourselves.

Life.

Perhaps practical philosophy begins here

Practical philosophy is often associated with great questions.

What is the good?

What is justice?

What do we owe to other human beings?

How should we live?

But perhaps practical philosophy begins in an even simpler place.

By opening our eyes.

Listening.

Walking.