Lessons from “The Razor’s Edge”

Or what living a principled life is like

I can quite clearly remember the first time I saw the 1946 Tyrone Power movie “The Razor’s Edge.” Based upon the 1944 W. Somerset Maugham novel, the title comes from ancient Hindu text Katha Upanishad, and that forms the book’s epigraph:

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;

thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard

In the movie Tyrone Power plays a man named Larry who was traumatized by his experiences as a pilot in World War I, and he leaves his upper crust society friends to seek meaning in his life. He does this through hard labor, new lands and customs and books to expose himself to, and ultimately to the Himalayas where he learns from a holy man how to reach enlightenment.

In this case, Larry is not to leave the world, but to never lose sight of the bigger picture of life. The beauty that exists in life.

The part of the movie that startled me was the way Larry behaved with his friends before he found enlightenment:

Larry (Tyrone Power) is the man on the left, looking at Gene Tierney

…and the way he behaved after he found enlightenment:

There’s Larry again, but now Gene Tierney cannot figure him out

The difference is that Larry discovers the beauty of life and the meaning of life, and thus is no longer distracted by the concerns most people have: who said what to whom, who did what to whom, did you hear about this, etc.

He moves among his friends as an equal before his journey, and then he is like a giant among them after his journey. He simply sees how pointless it is to get so caught up in the daily squabbles most people occupy themselves with.

I will talk about this more in my media posts, but once you notice that most media reports exists at the junior high school level of “you’ll never believe what he just said,” you can never unsee it. You become like Tyrone Power in the picture just above.

Once you realize that most people talk about people or things, or simply recite what happened, repeating conversations verbatim, and hardly ever talking about ideas, you can never unsee it.

You can be among society, but you will never again be distracted by the silliness of life:

Please do not think I am saying living a principled life makes you better than others. While I think it is a better way to live, I believe all humans have worth (and so do animals). But I do find that living a principled way of life sometimes makes people look at you curiously the way Gene Tierney looked at Tyrone Power. They cannot figure out why you aren’t as preoccupied by the latest meme, or social media squabble, or political campaign as they are.

While you can see the things they are preoccupied by, they are no longer the center of your life. You are focused on the beauty that is in the world, not the ugliness.

By the way, at the end of the movie Larry signs on with the crew of a cargo ship, doing more hard labor. So he is not done searching. Living a principled life doesn’t mean having all the answers, it just means you can see which answers are worth fussing about and which ones are trivial.