Lost Horizon

by James Hilton

Curt asked me to read this so we could talk about it. It was published in 1933 and was maybe the first mass-market paperback ever published. In the book, a small group gets on a plane, only to have it flown into the mountains of Tibet. There, they find a lamasery called Shangri-La, where (it turns out) people live a very long time (like hundreds of years) and basically have no cares, but they are not allowed to leave. Those who run the place expect there to be a world-ending war at some time in the not-too-distant future, and they hope to avoid that and repopulate the earth when the time comes. That’s why it’s important that no one leave.

Curt wanted to know if I would want to stay in such a place. If not, why not? If we aren’t trying to produce a society like that of Shangri-La, he asked, then what are we even doing?

I had trouble with this question. I am not looking for a utopia on earth, and I don’t think you can have anything like the paradise described in the book because of original sin. It’s a hypothetical I can’t even really think about because I so thoroughly reject the premise.

But the question, “what are we even doing?” is really asking, what things are worth doing? When we first had kids, I remember thinking that this was the only thing I’d ever done that really mattered. That may not be strictly true, but I think the things we do that touch other people are the things that can matter from an eternal perspective. When you have children, you are bringing forth another eternal being, and we naturally understand that this is more important than other things we do. More generally, the things worth doing are things that love your neighbor.