Life

Shared Sensibilities

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express myself.  “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 some time 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.

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Nota bene: This post was first published in early July of 2010. I re-publish it today because the Gurnstein essay had been on my mind, because I think it makes a point that bears repeating, and because I imagine that my audience is now quite different than it was nearly a year and a half ago. I have edited some of the temporal references accordingly.

The Most Dangerous Gift

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

More  advice from Belloc:

“Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships, and precious stones as you can possibly manage to do. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay home and hear in one’s garden the voice of God.”

This is, initially at least, a curious piece of advice, recommending as it does two seemingly opposite forms of life as being, one or the other, the very best. But something about it rings true. If I contemplate each possibility, I can feel the lure of both; each in their own way make their claim upon my imagination. Although, I suspect that by confessing to find the latter homebound life at all compelling I likely find myself in a very slim minority. We have a much easier time sympathizing with the “pilgrim soul” and the wayfarer. Americans infuse the road with the mystique the English attach to their gardens. (Although the English have had their fair share of adventures on the sea and abroad.) In Bellloc’s formulation what unites both possibilities is the purposeful abandon of each, the thoroughgoing commitment each path entails — and, I believe, the disclosures made possible by this sort of commitment. It is easy to see the possibilities for disclosure that attend the wayfarer’s life, but harder for us to imagine what might be disclosed by a lifetime in one place. I’m tempted to say that one discloses the world while the other discloses the self, but I don’t think this is right. Both disclose the world and the self in their own way. Few have written about a life committed to a place as well as Wendell Berry, and so I will borrow his words:

“… our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible … A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.”

Perhaps the best life refuses the choice, it takes its adventure but makes it home again. “There and back again,” Odysseus, and all that. But those stories remind us that you never come home again, really. So perhaps then we must choose. But none of us chooses anymore, not in this sense anyway. We make countless small choices, some significant to be sure, but never one overarching choice.  We do not strike out with purpose to be a pilgrim soul, nor do we strike deep to anchor ourselves to home that we might cultivate our own inexhaustible fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure. Consequently, the world does not disclose itself to us nor do we know ourselves truly. Aiming at both, we achieve neither.

What we have sought to maximize is choice, not experience. Perhaps we’ve confused the one for the other; but they are not identical, and they may be antithetical. Maximizing choice is another way of refusing commitment and refusing commitment is another way of guarding our hearts, sealing them off from experience and its joys and sorrows. Or perhaps, we have refused commitment because we cannot bear the responsibility it entails. But without commitment there may be only endless alienation.

And so we are neither pilgrim souls nor those who hear the voice of God in our garden. We are wanders in the worst way, led about not by wonder but by anxiety and the lure of small, safe, and ephemeral satisfactions and by choices others have made for us which we have not been brave enough to challenge.

Elsewhere Wendell Berry has written, “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is a measure of our disorder that we are likely to read “given” as “fated” rather than in relation to “gift.” But it is also true, as Chesterton remarked, that “the most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive.” Our temptation it seems is to refuse the gift because of the attendant dangers. This may in the end be a safe life, but it certainly will not be a good one.

Commit.