LIFE IS FOR LIVING

27 September 2026

1 Noël Coward

With lyrics

There is a line I remember from Noël Coward, in his song “A Bar on the Piccola Marina”, written in 1954 - so the generation of my father - about a respectable English widow, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster.

Coward himself introduced the song by saying that its heroine had:

“discovered in the nick of time that life is for living."

And then, no interest in grieving, she goes off the rails completely in one of the most improper widowhoods ever written about.

So, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster has spent most of her life as a model wife and mother, but not a woman in her own right. But now, her rather dreary husband has died. At the funeral wake, she suddenly realises that she has been living according to everybody else’s expectations and she makes up her own mind on what comes next, according to her own dreams and desires and imagination.

Her immediate conclusion, in the song at least, is that the old life is over, her real life is only now beginning, and it is high time she had some fun!

She goes to the island of Capri,  off Sorrento, and discovers the bar on the Piccola Marina. There, she drinks, flirts with fishermen and sailors, and discovers a new and quite different version of herself.

2 But what actually made life worth living?

Ahaa... this is the interesting part... It wasn’t simply pleasure, ok!

Coward’s joke is that Mrs Wentworth-Brewster discovers aliveness.

She had been existing rather than living.

Her life had been organised around

• duty
• respectability
• family expectations
• convention
• being a “good” wife and mother.

In short, supressing or postponing personal pleasure for the good of the family and the expectations of others.

Then suddenly she experiences

• novelty
• adventure
• sexuality
• friendship
• spontaneity
• freedom
• pleasure

ie, the feeling of being noticed as an individual rather than just as somebody’s wife or mother.

That is why the phrase works so well - living here means actively participating in your own existence not just fulfilling a role assigned to you.

3 And there is a deeper philosophical point

This is very close to something I have been exploring in Joseph Campbell's writings. We discover that there's a difference between having a life and living a life.

• Existence is biological: you are alive.
• Living is experiential: you are engaged with the world.

That can involve pleasure for sure, but also curiosity, love, friendship, creativity, discovery, risk, achievement and simply paying attention to the extraordinary fact that you and I are here at all.

There is an interesting parallel with William James:

“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

James was making a serious philosophical point: the value of life is not necessarily something we first discover objectively and then decide to participate in it. Our willingness to engage with life helps create the experiences that subsequently make it valuable. Quite encouraging to know we can shape our world and our destiny.

4 So Coward’s joke is actually quite profound

Mrs Wentworth-Brewster doesn’t discover why life is worth living in some grand philosophical revelation, no. She discovers it by living itself.,, isn't this the point?

You cannot necessarily sit in a room  at your desk or in a comfy chair and reason your way into discovering the value of life. Sometimes the value is generated by getting on down and boogeying: go somewhere, meet somebody, fall in love, learn something, make something, laugh, take a risk, go see something beautiful.

Or, in Coward’s very English formulation:

"She discovered, in the nick of time,
that life is for living."

And the delicious irony is that she discovers this only after her husband dies.