Saturday, January 28, 2006

beginning my studies

here is a lovely poem by walt whitman:


Beginning my studies

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.


it seems that certain kinds of reflection often help us to love life. much good writing, both fiction and non-fiction, does this. there is something about talking about life that helps us to love it. in telling a story well, in hearing a scene described with skill, we come to appreciate and to enjoy what is there. by sitting back and reflecting on life (whether real or imagined), we may come to see what is good and beautiful in it. i think the poem above works this way.

the visual language is instructive: good writing helps us to see what is before us, but which we have somehow missed. perhaps this is because such writing slows us down and thereby allows us to attend to things. perhaps it is because such writing is written from a perspective of attending to things, a perspective of concern and sensitivity toward what is being described, and in reading we are drawn into this perspective. and in being thus drawn in, we find our own souls transformed, infused with the same sensitivity to the things before us. this is part of what makes maryline robinson's novel 'gilead' so wonderful to read, and why the novel has a devotional quality: the reader unconsciously begins to adopt the narrator's way of seeing the world, and that way of seeing is infused with tenderness, exquisite care, and love of life.

at the same time, of course, abstract and theoretical reflection can also kill any wonder we have. probably all of us have experienced the way that academics can take something one finds instinctively fascinating and turn it into something dull and dreary. and we feel that there is something wrong about this. i think that is why we find whitman's poem to be charming, and why something in us wants to say "yes!" when we hear the poem. we feel that it is right to have a sense of wonder at the objects of study; we believe it is good to be pleased by nature and by life. and we sense that to lose this pleasure is to lose something deep and true in our way of engaging the world.

the propensity of theoretical reflection to destroy our delight in things may have something to do with the distance between ourselves and what we are studying. abstract reflection somehow separates us from the thing. we step back from it, we keep it at arm's length, we put it under the microscope. whitman's point, i think, is that such a stance of distanced reflection can cause us to lose track of the feel of the thing, the sense of it. the point is not that we should just feel the world, rather than think about it, but that there is a kind of thinking that maintains a connection to a sense of wonder, that is infused by such wonder, whereas our "studies" often give us knowledge at the cost of our ability to wonder and delight in the objects of study.

perhaps the issue is one of objectivity, of taking up the view from nowhere. if this is our goal, then insofar as we achieve it, we disappear. but wonder and awe involve feeling our place in things -our smallenss, our ephemerality, our connection to what is around us. we are awed at something else, but this involves a sense of ourselves before the object of our awe. thus, insofar as we pursue a knowledge given by the view from nowhere and we do not step back from nowhere into the somewhere of human life, into the somewhere of our own particular life, to just this extent we may find ourselves unable to wonder and delight at what we are studying.

and what, finally, is the good of a wonder-less knowledge? here, i think, is the fundamental challenge of whitman's poem: are not our studies valuable because they are a part of living well, and if they destroy our sense of wonder and thereby cause us to live poorly, why should we have anything to do with such studies? what, after all, is the kind of life we want for ourselves -one of dreary, joyless study, or a life of ecstatic songs? if we have, at the expense of wonder, discovered some truths about the world, we will have paid the price of living truly, of being truly human.

of course, whitman's poem is not as ornery and argumentative as i am sounding now. it is a simple burst of happiness, playful and alive.

Monday, January 16, 2006

the reverend john ames

there is a connection between loving life and sensing the mystery of life. this is true for loving one's own life, and also for loving the life of others.' in moments when we feel a deep love for life, we also sense the mysteriousness of our lives, and the strangeness of life itself. but by 'mystery' i do not simply mean that we are puzzled by what life is, or that we are at a loss to explain its cause. rather, what i have in mind is a puzzlement that is filled with wonder and with appreciation.

it seems to me that marilynne robinson's novel 'gilead' is an extended meditation on the wonderful mystery of life, and on what it means to love life, even as one prepares to leave it. the book's narrator, the reverend john ames, returns again and again to the mystery and sacredness of living things, especially other people. this sacredness is inseparable from the particularity of things.

wonder and mystery and sacredness and particularity are bound together:

"there is a reality in blessing, which i take baptism to be, primarily. it doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. i have felt it pass through me, so to speak. the sensation is of really knowing a creature, i mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time."

"any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it."

"when people come to speak to me, whatever they say, i am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'i' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want', and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'i' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.'


there is also a connection between our sense of mystery at something -our awareness of its sacredness- and our attending to it. in 'gilead', this attention pervades reverend ames' descriptions of the 'ordinary' things in his life and the life of his town. his descriptions and observations are rarely given in elevated language, but they are full of such care and tenderness that they often gave me shivers of delight when reading.

perhaps it is impossible to sense of the mystery of something and not wish to see it, to observe it, to experience the existence of the thing. and there is something holy in this kind of attending, and i think this is why ames is a kind of saint. perhaps what is holy in this sort of attending is the self-forgetfulness it involves (again, i am thinking of simone weil here). but perhaps what is holy is precisely the delight in things that is behind this way of attending to things. it is a love of existence itself, a love of the existence of this particular thing. as ames says in his letter to his son:

"your mother could not love you more or take great pride in you. she has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as god does, to the marrow your bones. so that is the honoring of the child. you see how godlike to love the being of someone. your existence is a delight to us."

Sunday, January 08, 2006

learning to love life

"for the ones who had a notion,
a notion deep inside
that it ain't no sin
to be glad you're alive..."
-b.s.

last week i turned in a paper i had been working on for the past six months. the paper looks at some of Socrates' statements about death and the fear of death. as i was working on the paper, i kept thinking that the fear of death couldn't be really understood apart from the love of life, and that it wasn't possible to grasp why death is an evil without seeing how life is a good.

we each seem to love our lives in a way that belongs to our biological, or animal, natures. i'm thinking here of our instinctive recoil from death and danger, our "pre-reflective" tendency toward self-preservation. to say we love our lives in this sense is to acknowledge a kind of drive or force within us. but its also true that, at least for humans, there is a love of life that belongs to our rational, and not merely biological, natures. this kind of love of life can be shaped by reflection and by habit. it is not like a blind force that we encounter within ourselves, but it is a kind of desire that shapes, and is shaped by, how we think about and perceive ourselves and the world.

what i have in mind is the idea that love of life, including the love our own lives, is the kind of thing that can be done well or poorly. it can appear in either virtuous or vicious forms. thus, it is not something that we are simply born with, but something that must be learned. of course, the idea of loving one's life may turn out to be so diffuse and complicated that it doesn't shed much light on the question of how to live well. i suspect that this is not the case, however, and that considering the proper way to love life may prove quite helpful.

when i think about a proper love of life, several things come to mind:


-it is possible to cultivate a love of life, and it is important that we do so. this was part of what i appreciated about don quixote: i felt it helped me to love life more. as i read, i found myself taking an appreciative pleasure in things i think i would have otherwise ignored. i was thankful for human life -including human silliness- in a new way.

-there is the issue of self-love. doesn't jesus say that the one who loves his life will lose it? aren't we all inclined to love our lives too much, and isn't love of our lives precisely what the gospel calls us away from, toward love of god and love of neighbor? of course self-love is a very tricky question, but i'm inclined to say that we ought to think that there is a love of life implicit in proper love of god and our neighbor, and that what we are called to is a truer way of loving our lives.

-connected to the previous point, there seems to be a connection between love of life and humanism. by 'humanism' i mean a conscious appreciation and affirmation of human existence, a cultivation of human possibility and celebration of human excellence. increasingly, i am inclined to say that what christians should work toward is a more vibrant christian humanism -the recognition that what the gospel proclaims us to is not the negation of humanity, but rather the possibility of being truly human. to think of christianity as the true humanism is not to downplay the notions of sin, repentance and judgment, but it is to make those notions secondary to -in the sense of being understood in terms of- the concepts of creation, redemption, new creation.

-in thinking theologically about the love of life, i keep returning to the incarnation. the life of god joined to the life of humanity, that the life of humanity might be raised up into the life of god. i grew up in a theological tradition that thought of redemption first in foremost in terms of atonement, and that understood in the incarnation in terms of the atonement. such an outlook tends to stress the forensic notions in scripture (law, debt, etc.) , and to overlook or downplay the organic notions (living water, fruit, etc.). but it is possible to think of redemption in a way that foregrounds the incarnation rather than the atonement, or, better, think so the atonement in terms of the incarnation.

-one of my first posts on this blog was about our responsiveness to the world, and to the feel of things. this point about how to feel the world seems connected to the love of life. i think the connection is at least two-fold. first, there is a point about delight. to love something is to delight in it, and when we love life we delight in being alive, we respond in a joyful way to the things within our life. (i am thinking here of augustine, but also of what aristotle says about the pleasure of perception and the pleasure of knowing that you are alive.) second, there is a point about attention. to love something is to attend to it, to focus one's concentration on it. (i am thinking here of simone weil). a love of life somehow seems to spill forth into a desire and an ability to attend to things, whether this means looking at a beautiful tree or building, or attending to one's own life.

-for a human, to love life well means that one does not love only one's own life, but also loves and values the life of others. this is true, of course, for other human lives. but it is also true, i think, that for a human to love life well means recognizing the value of non-human life. perhaps this is an instance of some more basic principle -that flourishing life spills out beyond itself, and it spills out in a way that is appreciative and upbuilding of what surrounds it.


my thoughts here are clearly quite scattered, and what is here is pretty much the first things that come to mind. but i would be quite interested to know if any of this resonates with other people, or what thoughts others might have.