“In the Gospels Jesus is always talking to the crowds in parables, which he later ‘explains’ to his disciples. The dynamic is odd in a couple of ways: either the parables are obvious, and the explanations seem almost patronizing, or they are opaque, and the explanations only compound their opacity. (Or could it be—and I confess to relishing this possibility—that the explanations illustrate Christ’s wry sense of humor, which is nowhere else evident?) In any case, the notable point is just how little the explanations amount to, how completely the ultimate truths of the parables—just like dreams and poems—remain within their own occurrence … ‘If that’s what he means,’ says the student to the poetry teacher, ‘why doesn’t he just say it?’ ‘If God is real,’ says the parishioner to the preacher, ‘why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?’ The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.”
That is how The New Republic titled one of the many fascinating archival video clips it has assembled on its website. When you watch that particular clip you realize that inserting “possibly” into the parenthetical statement was an act of inspired generosity.
Along with the Kerouac clip you will find videos of J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaiah Berlin, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Leon Trotsky, Aldous Huxley, Michel Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, and several more. Most of the clips are quite short, many are a bit grainy, and a few are not in English (such as Camus at a soccer match).
Just in case you needed something to help you waste away some time. Although it’s not quite a waste, I don’t think.
Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express in recent days. “The Perils of Progress”, a brief essay appearing in The New Republic, opens with a story about “a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today” which elicits tired labels contemptuously applied. As Gurstein puts it:
These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations.
And this presumably from a learned and sophisticated audience.
Gurstein goes on to challenge the same NY Times editorial by Steven Pinker which drew some of my own comments a few days ago. She observes that in …
… disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart”)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.
Gurstein concludes with some poignant reflections on the materiality of the book and the difference it makes to the experience of reading and the reader’s relationship to the author. The essay truly is worth a few minutes of your time to read. Also reading the few comments posted in response to Gurstein’s essay tends to reinforce her concerns.
At one point in the essay Gurstein spoke of Pinker’s “stacking the deck against” her sensibility. That word, sensibility, struck me. This is I think near to the heart of matter. What Gurstein and others like her attempt to defend and preserve is not merely a point of view or a particular truth. It is more subjective than that, but is not merely preference. It is not at all like a preference, which, I suspect, is precisely what those who do not understand it will try to label it. It is, well, a sensibility — a certain disposition or way of being in the world. It is an openness and a sensitivity to certain kinds of experience and to certain dimensions of reality. Because of this it resists description and facile reduction to the terms of a cost/benefit analysis. Consequently, it can be difficult to convincingly defend a sensibility to those who know nothing of it. Maybe it is best described as a “seeing the world as” or, perhaps better still, a “feeling the world as.” A sensibility is a posture toward life, a way of inhabiting the world.
What all of this groping for words may have at its center is the experiential quality of a sensibility, and experience is, after all, incommunicable. Unless, that is, two people share the sensibility and then words may even seem superfluous. In this sense, those who share a sensibility, share the world. Those who lack or fail to appreciate the sensibility Gurnstein articulates know only to shake their heads in condescending bemusement. What those, like Gurnstein and her poet friend, who grieve the passing of a culture that nurtured their sensibility fear may be the onset of a long loneliness.
Several years ago I came across a well-known line from Erasmus: “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” Apparently this is a variant, the line from one of Erasmus’ letters dated 1500 runs thus: “I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.” Although the variant is more pithy, the sentiment seems to me largely the same in either case. I clipped the quote and stuck it in my wallet. It would serve as a gentle reminder of where the money went. Book shops perpetually tempt, and used book stores in particular tempt beyond my power to resist.
All that is fine and well. It may be a vice, but it is a splendid vice. However, there is a dark side to the book shop; entering therein incites a certain anxiety and sadness. A sign should hang over every book shop declaring, “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter in … you cannot read it all.” The sentiment is ancient. Ecclesiastes warned, “of making many books there is no end” … to say nothing of reading them. I’ve thought in the past that I had overcome this anxiety, this psychological burden of the unread. In “The Pleasures of Reading,” Joseph Epstein’s writes,
Gertrude Stein said that the happiest moment of her life was that moment in which she realized that she wouldn’t be able to read all the books in the world. I suppose what made it happy for her was that it took off a fair amount of pressure.
And so I thought, upon reading that testimonial, that I too had now suddenly come to terms with the awful realization. But no, it was a false dawn. While the angst fades, it still abides and from time to time reasserts itself with a certain gleeful vengeance. Epstein went on to say,
I have finally come to the realization that I shan’t be able to read even all the good books in the world, and, far from making me happy, it leaves me, a naturally acquisitive fellow, a little sad.
I rather sympathize.
With all of that in mind, consider Will Self’s column in the New Statesman that came to my attention via Alan Jacobs this morning. Here’s a sampling:
Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.
Now, just as the possibility of joyous congress among the stacks retreats on hushed puppies, so the idea of all those unread books has become a screaming torment. Even the most innocuous of local libraries feels to me like Borges’s library of Babel, with its infinite number of texts ….
If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?
It all puts me in mind of the Cha’an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil’s overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of – yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.
There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil – Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.
Unintentionally, yesterday’s post on sport as religion dovetailed suggestively with the preceding one, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” In that post I had continued a series of reflections on Nicholas Carr’s analysis of the Internet’s impact on our brains in his latest book, The Shallows combining a brief rejoinder to a strand of criticism frequently directed at Carr with strikingly apropos lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Distraction was the recurring theme. The Internet according to Carr habituates our mind to perpetual distraction, and in the long run our ability to think deeply and creatively suffers. Eliot already laments a culture of distraction in the mid-20th century and seems to be describing us with eerie foresight.
Whether or not we finally judge sport to be a kind of religion, it is certainly a distraction; more precisely, it is a diversion. As one comment noted, perhaps a bit harshly, it is escapist entertainment diverting us from ordinary life. Sports may be more than this, and I will suggest that it is, but it is at least this. And as our embrace of Internet-empowered distraction also demonstrates, we love to be distracted and we crave diversion. We can hardly stand it if we are without either distraction or diversion for more than a few moments at a time. We complain incessantly about our busyness, but were it all to stop we would hardly know what to do with ourselves.
This is not, however, a new problem. Although the condition may now be intensified and heightened, it has been with us at least since the 17th century, and almost certainly before then. It was in the 17th century that Blaise Pascal began assembling a series of notes on scraps of paper in preparation for a book he never wrote. When he died at the age of 39 he left behind hundreds of barely organized notes which were later collected and published under the French title Pensees, or thoughts. Pascal is today remembered, if at all, either for his law of fluid pressure or an argument for God’s existence known as Pascal’s Wager. Neither quite does justice to the depth of his insight into what it is now unfashionable to call the human condition.
Pascal knew that we needed our diversions and distractions and that without them we would be miserable. His description of the younger generation sounds wholly contemporary:
Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.
But Pascal is not merely an old crank berating a younger generation he fails to understand. Pascal applies the same analysis indiscriminately. Young or old, rich or poor, male or female — for Pascal it just comes with being human. “If our condition were truly happy,” he explains, “we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.” As things stand, however,
Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things …. What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.
We need distractions and diversions to keep us from contemplating our true condition, frail and mortal as it is. For this reason we cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts and seek to fill every moment with distraction. Pascal’s view is admittedly rather grim even as it resonates with our experience. Yet, Pascal knew there was more than this to the human condition. There was also love and passion, knowledge and creativity, wonder and courage. Pascal knew this and he insisted that we recognize both the glory and the misery of humanity:
Let man now judge his own worth, let him love himself, for there is within him a nature capable of good; but that is no reason for him to love the vileness within himself. Let him despise himself because this capacity remains unfilled; but that is no reason for him to despise this natural capacity. Let him both hate and love himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.
Pascal insists that we reckon with all that is good and all that is bad in us. It is our awareness of the possibility of goodness, however, which heightens our misery. And, yet again, it is our awareness of our misery that is part of our glory. In the end Pascal believed that “God alone is man’s true good” and Christ the “via veritas.” With St. Augustine, whose influence permeates Pascal’s thought, he would have prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” Perhaps this is why at times spirituality and the language of worship suffuses our most prominent and powerful diversions.
Augustine and Pascal in turn both helped shape the thought of Walker Percy, a 20th century Roman Catholic novelist. Percy blended Pascalian insight with a touch of existentialism in his best known novel The Moviegoer (1960) in which the main character, Binx Bolling, finds himself on a search. “What is the nature of the search? you ask.”
Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life …. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Near the middle of the novel throughout which Bolling has been amassing clues he thinks are somehow related to the search, he despairs:
… when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it — but disaster.
However, through a rather tortured relationship with a very broken young woman named Kate whom he has come to love, Binx begins to see grace in the ordinary. Near the very end of the novel, while he and Kate are sitting at a service station discussing marriage and the worries that still fill Kate’s mind, Binx notices a man coming out of a church. It is Ash Wednesday. Binx watches while the man sits in his car looking down at something on the seat beside him. The man’s presence puzzles Binx:
It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.
If sport diverts us from ordinary life, what do we make of it? Is it as Pascal would have it a mere distraction which facilitates our unwillingness to acknowledge our true condition? Or, taking a cue from Percy, might it be a rupture of the “everydayness,” the ordinariness of our lives that may awaken us to the possibility of the search? My sense is that they are both right; each is a possibility. Sports can be merely a distraction conducive to living in bad faith in denial of the truth of our situation. It is odd, however, that something very much like a spiritual or religious aura so often surrounds sport. Maybe it is because bursts of grace and beauty appear suddenly and unexpectedly even in the midst of our diversions to remind us that we ought to be searching for their source. Maybe it is because “through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one” we receive “the other as God’s own importunate bonus?”
L.M. Sacasas 