Loren Eiseley: The Long Loneliness (from The Star Thrower)

Loren Eiseley
"The Long Loneliness"
an essay in The Star Thrower

The first two paragraphs of "The Long Loneliness,"  one of the essays in  The Star Thrower.


There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.  He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates.  He has entered into the strange world of history, of social and intellectual change, while his brothers of the field and forest remain subject to the invisible laws of biological evolution.  Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend.  To their minds there is no past and no future.  There is only the everlasting present of a single generation--its trails in the forest,  its hidden pathways of the air and in the sea.   

Man, by contrast, is alone with the knowledge of his history until the day of his death.  When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible.  Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood, the rabbit was left on the lawn, the dog was relegated to his kennel.  Only in acts of inarticulate compassion, in rare and hidden moments of communion with nature, does man briefly  escape his solitary destiny.  Frequently in science  fiction he dreams of world with creatures whose communicative power is the equivalent of his own.

Later in the essay, he introduces  the research of Dr. John Lily and his studies on the porpoise.  So far, we haven't been able to determine whether porpoises actually communicate as we do or whether they have simply evolved a complex signaling system with little or no flexibility.   Maybe, some day,  we will find that we aren't as alone as we think. What will it be like to encounter another sentient species in the universe?

I wonder if this sense of isolation has anything to do with the prevalence of talking animals and fairies and trolls and dragons and all sorts of talking creatures that don't exist.  Most cultures have myths and legends and tales filled with talking animals, some of whom actually exist,  while others are products of creative and imaginative minds..  Tradition has it that King Solomon owned a ring of power that enabled him to understand and communicate with animals.  


Eiseley's comments also resonate with much of SF.  Stories about aliens are very common in SF, and there's even a subgenre called "First Contact."    How will we communicate with them?  Or, can we?   And, what is behind the belief in UFOs so prevalent today?  Is that another sign of that loneliness?


In many SF tales of contact with aliens, it is often observed by someone in the story that this will be the most important event in human history.  Is it and why?

It seems to me that we as a species spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about   communicating with other species, real or imagined.  In addition we also spend a lot of time trying to communicate with other species here on this planet and attempting to detect signs of communication out there among the stars.

Eiseley states, There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.  Is he right? 

Loren Eiseley: The Star Thrower

The blurb on the back page says it better than I can:

Long admired for his compassionate, probing meditations on the natural world, Loren Eiseley completed this volume of his favorite writings shortly before his death in 1977.  In includes many selections never before published in book form and spans Eiseley's entire writing career--from his early poems through The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe to his most recent essays--providing a superb sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist. 

 If there is an overriding theme in the twenty-three essays and ten poems that comprise this work, it is that the facts and data elicited by science are not the final statement  of our view of the natural world.  Those facts are the frontiers that we must go beyond in our study of the natural world.  His essays show us just what this means if we are to gain a fuller understanding, even if it is only a limited understanding of the natural world.




The Judgment of the Birds  

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper  sort, he will return with a message.  It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.

The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted.  We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves to be quite ordinary creatures.  Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life.  His great news services, his worldwide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give--a natural revelation.



The above are the opening paragraphs of some thoughts about several experiences  he had involving   ravens, pigeons, and various species of small birds in the countryside and from his room on the twentieth floor of a hotel in New York City.

Normally I don't bother with the back cover blurbs, except to wonder frequently whether the author(s) of the blurbs had actually read the work, but I have to quote another one:

This book will be read and cherished in the year 2001.  It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations.  Loren Eiseley's work changed my life.  -- Ray Bradbury --

 
As I have said before, numerous times I believe, Loren Eiseley is an author who has been a major influence on my ideas, beliefs, and philosophy.  His works are those that would join me on that famous (infamous?) desert island.

The essays in   The Star Thrower  are too varied to try to summarize it, so I will limit myself to posting quotations from and brief commentaries on various essays in the book over the next few weeks or months.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Too simple to be profound?

It often happens that while reading a story or a novel or an essay, which is moderately interesting, the author will say something that stops me immediately.  I go back, read it again, meditate a bit, and move on. Yet, even as I move on, that statement or comment will remain in the background.  And it will remain with me for several days or even longer.  Such is the following brief comment or analogy by Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his essays:

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child .  .  .


Robert Louis Stevenson
"A Gossip on Romance"
from The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays


There are innumerable essays, theses, books on the nature of fiction and its popularity or the reason for its existence.  I think a collection could easily take up several very large bookcases.  I have read a number of essays and have several books gathering dust in my TBR bookcase which I will get to, probably, one of these days. But, Stevenson's brief comment--Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child .  .  .  so resonates with me that I may never get to those dusty books awaiting me.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."  We read this in the King James Version of Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, and it seems to fit.  Many adults put away those childish things, one of which is play, and they become very serious and solemn; life becomes a grim struggle.

But, this isn't true of all, for some (and that includes me), have exchanged that childish play for fiction.  A child at play is lost somewhere in there, and that child is thoroughly wrapped up in the game, whatever it may be.  The child is now on a different plane of existence.    How different is this from when I settle down with a book and travel off to far planets or to the future?  or work out how someone managed to murder a thoroughly nasty character and escape from a locked room?  or follow the destinies of a young man or a young woman who struggles to become a mature adult and not just a carbon copy of the neighbors? 

As a child, the call to "come out and play" was an invitation to another world; as adults, some of us have substituted "Once upon a time.  .  ."
 

Robert Louis Stevenson: "The Philosophy of Umbrellas"

Robert Louis Stevenson
"The Philosophy of Umbrellas"
from The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays

I stumbled across an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson some time ago which surprised me.  I was most familiar with his fiction and wasn't aware that he had also written a number of essays.  I searched around and found a collection of a number of his essays, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays.  "The Lantern-Bearers" was the essay that I had encountered, so I decided to invest some money and, now, some time in the book.  My tentative plan is to work my way slowly through the book and occasionally report on an essay that strikes me fancy.  It turns out that this, the very first essay in the collection, is one that does so.  The following is the first paragraph of the essay.

"It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius, -- that our climate is essentially wet.  A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.  A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability.  The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of social position."

While reading this I couldn't help but think of the Avenger's John Steed, the epitome of respectability, even though he is a secret agent.   The leather-clad Mrs. Peel presents a somewhat different image.

The remainder of the essay follows along the course set by the  first paragraph--a mock solemnity with tongue firmly planted in cheek.  Stevenson tells us that Robinson Crusoe, instead of rigging up a belfry and "a mimicry of church-bells," shows that "Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with."

However, Stevenson also warns us that the umbrella isn't an infallible sign of one's civilized or respectable status for "...alas! even the umbrella is no certain criterion.  The falsity  and the folly of the human race  have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty.  .  .(some umbrellas) from certain prudential motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition.  A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation . . . Might it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with a lie in their right hand?'

All in all, "The Philosophy of Umbrellas" is a fine, worthy, and instructive effort with which to begin this assemblage of reflections on the human condition.

Some Great Books Read in 2014

The following are books that I really enjoyed reading during the past year, and, if granted time, there's a good chance I will read them again. 

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time, Movements 1 and 2.
--We start with Nick Jenkins as a school boy just after WWI and follow him and his friends and acquaintances up to just before the outbreak of WWII.  A fascinating look at English life between the two world wars.
--Movements 3 and 4 will probably cover WWII and after.  I've got them and they're just waiting for some free time. 
--Link to post
 http://tinyurl.com/lbyystr

 Adrian McKinty:  The Cold Cold Ground and I Hear the Sirens in the Streets
--the first two of McKinty's four mysteries set in the Time of the Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Books 3 and 4 are on my TBR list.  It's 1981, and Sean Duffy is one of the few Roman Catholics in the predominantly Protestant police force in Belfast and is viewed with suspicion by both Catholics and Protestants.  Complex plots and local color set against a background of a city at war with itself in an undeclared civil war make this a must read series.

M John Harrison:  Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space: A Haunting,  the Kefahuchi trilogy
--a space adventure that ranges from the late 20th century to the 25th century.  Strange things happen, and some of them never get explained, especially those involving aliens.
--The three novels  are relatively independent of each other, but I would recommend reading them in the published order.
--Humans in space, in Harrison's trilogy (in fact in most of his novels), encounter aliens that are truly alien, not just humans in Halloween costumes, as are so many in other works involving aliens.  Some are harmless, some helpful, some dangerous (some deliberately and some ??), and many inexplicable.
If you're looking for something different, try this series.

.

Michael Stanley:  Death of the Mantis and Deadly Harvest.
--Books 3 and 4 of the cases of Detective "Kubu" of the Botswana Police. Good mysteries, good plots, interesting characters, and fascinating lore about the people of Botswana and southern Africa in general.  Waiting now for Book 5.  The novels are independent of each other, so they can be read out of order.  If you can read only one, then choose Death of the Mantis. 

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House
--the best haunted house novel I have ever read.  
--see post on Oct. 31, 2010, made the first time I read it.  The post also contains some comments about the 1963 film.
 http://tinyurl.com/mkoy6qj

Gregory Benford: Anomalies
--a great collection of short stories, covering a wide variety of topics: adventures involving time travel, black holes, cryogenics, high tech warfare, a mix of science and religion, and several cosmological theories.
Link to a number of posts about the stories.
 http://tinyurl.com/nf3tjja

David Brin:  Existence

--Brin's most recent novel.  A new look at the First Contact theme and its possible threats.
--he uses multiple narrators to provide a variety of viewpoints responding to the first contact.
--link to post
http://tinyurl.com/on9w5vq


Loren Eiseley:  The Night Country
--I joined the Time Reading Program after seeing an ad about the program which featured one paragraph from another of his books.  After reading that one, The Immense Journey, I searched for everything and anything written by him.
--See link to various posts about this work.
http://tinyurl.com/k4g9muh

Kobo Abe':  The Face of Another
--a man whose face is terribly scarred from an industrial accident creates a lifelike mask, that seems to take on a life of its own when he wears it.

The following link leads to posts about the novel and the film

 http://tinyurl.com/pvdmbjt


Franz Werfel:  Star of the Unborn
--little known and mostly ignored SF novel about a man who dies and is resurrected 100.000 years in the future and presented as a wedding gift.
--fascinating picture of future humans and their culture
--stuffy and somewhat pompous narrator adds to the fun.  He reminds me of the narrator in Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus.
--link to posts about the novel

http://tinyurl.com/o3dr7vd

Eric Hoffer: dissipation

#9

"DISSIPATION is a form of self-sacrifice.  The reckless wasting of one's vigor is a blind striving to 'liquidate' an unwanted self.  And as one would expect, the passage from this to other forms of self-sacrifice is not uncommon.  Passionate sinning has not infrequently been an apprenticeship to sainthood.  Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner."

-- Eric Hoffer --
from The Passionate State of Mind


In other words, dissipation is an indirect form of suicide.  This seems reasonable to me.  Or perhaps  it's a way of punishing oneself for some sin or transgression.

Does this seem reasonable to you?


That great sinners sometimes become saints has been noted before.   One of the most famous examples is St. Augustine who, after spending many years in dissipation, converted and became one of the most respected leaders of the early Christian Church.

This is the point made by C. S. Lewis in his great satirical work, The Screwtape Letters, specifically in the section titled  "Screwtape Proposes a Toast."  Screwtape is responding to complaints by other devils that the souls served up at the banquets recently have been bland and tasteless, flabby and insipid.  He agrees, but he then points out that while the quality of souls has decreased, the quantity has considerably increased.  There is no risk of famine today because of the great number of souls that just sort of end up in hell without even choosing to do evil.   The reason for the diminished quality of souls is clear:


"The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints."

This, I believe, is the same point Hoffer is making at the end of his statement.  Strong or passionate feelings are the same, but what makes the difference in them is the focus of those feelings.  There are ways of measuring the intensity of one's feelings, but there's no way of identifying the focus of those passions, short of asking the individual.  Emotions are much the same in all, but what makes the difference is the focus of those strong passions.

Barbara Hurd: from "Refugium," Pt. 2

"Those who are fond of retreats--writers, ecstatics, parents with young children--often comment on the silence such time away allows.  Silence becomes something present, almost palpable.  The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decibel distance to letting more of the world in.  Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion.  He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues.  Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty.  To Aquinas's wisdom I'd add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge' the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes.  We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground."

-- Barbara Hurd --
from "Refugium"
Summer: A Spiritual Autobiography of the Season

Silence is rapidly becoming eligible of being listed as an endangered species today.  Everything seems to ring or ding or whistle at us.  It's impossible to get away from the siren calls of mobile phones, and I don't even have one.  It's getting harder and harder to walk through a parking lot without having some vehicle warning us to back off, or else.  Restaurants now seem to be designed to magnify noise, forcing patrons to shout at someone sitting across the table, just a few feet away.

But what's truly frightening is that I know people who don't like to leave the city because it's too quiet out there.  Isaac Asimov wrote a novel, Caves of Steel, in which people now lived in huge cities that were covered over.  They never saw the sky,  All lighting was artificial.  As a consequence the population was agoraphobic, afraid to enter a large open space.  Are we becoming afraid of silence today?  Are we becoming afraid of being alone with only our own thoughts and nothing to distract us? 

Barbara Hurd: from "Refugium," Pt 1

Barbara Hurd has some interesting thoughts on retreats or refuges, a place to get away from it all so that we can get a better look at ourselves and the world around us, free from noise or distractions. Some retreats last only a short time: a few hours perhaps, while others may go on for a weekend or even a week or two. Sometimes though, a retreat may go on indefinitely.  Michael is a friend of hers who is busy "dismantling his identity as a artist living by the edge of a swamp."

"We talk for hours on the boardwalk at Cranesville.  Michael isn't going into hiding; he's retreating from a path that wasn't headed toward what, for him, is being fully human.  He's not sure what that means except a  quiet letting go, a deliberate choice to go toward some kind of refuge that nourishes his spirit.  All the great spiritual leaders have done it,  from Buddha to Christ to Gandhi.  They've withdrawn for a few days or weeks to sit in caves and under trees, to wander in deserts, alone, packing as little as possible into their knapsacks.  They're after, I think, some moments of trackless quiet, a chance to blur the footprints, the sense of having been someplace, of having someplace to get to.  A chance to see what happens when the past and the future stop tugging on the leads and the present opens like a well."

-- Barbara Hurd --
"Refugium"
from Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season



"A chance to see what happens when the past and the future stop tugging on the leads and the present opens like a well."

This is a central theme in many Eastern traditions, including Buddhism and Taoism.  We should avoid the trap of living in the past or living for the future, and instead, concentrate on living in the present, the Now.  We should focus on what we are doing now and on what is going on around us Now.


"Trust no future, however pleasant!
 Let the dead past bury its dead!
 Act, - act in the living Present!

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
from "A Psalm of Life"

Barbara Hurd: Some kind words for swamps

".  .  .We love high drama in this country, mountain peaks and soap operas.  They offer us something to tilt our lives toward--that triumph of ascent, that heart-pounding eye-to-eye intensity, that feeling of being wildly alive.  Our nature aesthetics sound like movie reviews.  We thrill to the surprising twist in the road that reveals the vast panorama, the unexpected waterfall.  We canonize beauty that can be framed on the walls, in the camera, or on the postcard.
     To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised.  And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.  Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs  where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.  It should come as no surprise that the most common carnivorous plants are found in wetlands.  Here there is room for the thought not fully formed to stretch, roll over, poke its eyes above water.  Here is the valley of split-pea soup where what floats like a chunk of ham might lift its meaty head out of the muck and haul itself onto the log next to you. blinking in the sunshine."

-- Barbara Hurd --
from Spring: A Spiritual Autobiography of the Season



I must confess that I'm one of those high drama lovers that Hurd writes of and who seldom spends any time contemplating the virtues of a bog.  And, I never thought of comparing our subconscious where those half-formed ideas germinate and play  to a swamp or bog, but it does seem to fit somehow.   Some of those ideas probably should never escape from the bog, but there are others that should be nurtured for awhile before being exposed to the harsh realities of  the outside world.

Robert Grudin: An image of change

I've read a number of attempts to describe the way change happens or at least the way we perceive it, and I think Robert Grudin's is one of the best.

I.12

"In late November of 1968, I spent a few days in a hotel just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice. At 6 one morning, hearing the loud warning bells, I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera and rushed out to see the famous Venetian flood. I stood in the empty and as yet dry Piazza and looked out toward he Gulf, for I expected the flood tides to come in from the open water. Many minutes passed before I turned to see that the Piazza was flooding, not directly from the Gulf, but up through its own sewers. The indented gratings in the pavement had all but disappeared under calm, flat silver puddles, which grew slowly and silently until their peripheries touched and the Piazza had become a lake. That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally , the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that it has occurred within us."

-- Robert Grudin --
from Time and the Art of Living



My experience has always been that the changes I talk about are always the ones that have already occurred. Perhaps others are more perceptive than I am. Unfortunately I've never met them.

Lin Yutang: "Earthbound" conclusion

"The situation then is this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon the earth.

. . . .


"Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body. It is high time that some among us made the straight admission that we are animals, an admission which is inevitable since the establishment of the basic truth of the Darwinian theory and the great progress of biology, especially bio-chemistry. It was very unfortunate that our teachers and philosophers belong to the so-called intellectual class, with a characteristic professional pride of intellect. The men of the spirit were as proud of the spirit as the shoemaker is proud of leather. Sometimes even the spirit was not sufficiently remote and abstract and they had to use the words, 'essence' or 'soul' or 'idea,' writing the with capital letters to frighten us. The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine into a spirit, and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of essence, forgetting that even alcoholic drinks must have a 'body'--mixed with plain water--if they are to be palatable at all. And we poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence of spirit. The over-emphasis on the spirit was fatal. It made us war with our natural instincts, and my chief criticism is that it made a whole and rounded view of human nature impossible. It proceeded also from an inadequate knowledge of biology and psychology, and of the place of the senses, emotions and, above all, instincts in our life. Man is made of flesh and spirit both, and it should be philosophy's business to see that the mind and body live harmoniously together, that there be a reconciliation between the two."

-- Lin Yutang --
from The Importance of Living


We are not ghosts in the machine, a soul trapped in a sinful or evil body, as so many religious traditions insist. We are both body and soul (whatever that term may mean to you) and we should accept this. As long as we cannot accept this, any sort of true lasting harmony will be impossible.

Lin Yutang: "Earthbound" part 2

"The situation, then, is this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth.

. . . . .

For we are of the earth, earth-born and earth-bound. There is nothing to be unhappy about the fact that we are, as it were, delivered upon this beautiful earth as its transient guests. Even if it were a dark dungeon, we still would have to make the best of it; it would be ungrateful of us not to do so when we have, instead of a dungeon, such a beautiful earth to live on for a good part of a century. Sometimes we get too ambitious and disdain the humble and yet generous earth. Yet a sentiment for this Mother Earth, a feeling of true affection and attachment, one must have for this temporary abode of our body and spirit, if we are to have a sense of spiritual harmony.

We have to have, therefore, a kind of animal skepticism as well as animal faith, taking this earthly life largely as it is. And we have to retain the wholeness of nature that we see in Thoreau who felt himself kin to the sod and partook largely of its dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring, who in his cheapest moments was apt to think that it was not his business to be "seeking the spirit," but as much the spirit's business to seek him, and whose happiness, as he described, was a good deal like that of the wood-chucks. The earth, after all, is real, as the heaven is unreal; how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!"

(to be concluded)

Lin Yutang: "Earthbound"

The following excerpt doesn't really describe too many people in this country, does it? Or at least, it's not the way I hear people talking today--attempting to show how they are the real Americans.

"The situation then is this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed aside. Let not the spirit take wings and soar to the abode of the gods and forget the earth. Are we not, mortals, condemned to die? The span of life vouchsafed us, threescore and ten, is short enough, if the spirit gets too haughty and wants to live forever, but on the other hand, it is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise an fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, "It was a good show,' when the curtain falls."

(To be continued)

-- Lin Yutang --
from The Importance of Living

Suppose a person who followed this sort of philosophy were to run for public office. I wonder what that person's speeches would be like. What would this person do in a debate?

Joseph Wood Krutch, more thougts on Joy

J0seph Wood Krutch in his Baja California and the Geography of Hope expresses some unusual ideas, (well, they are unusual today) on joy and its presence in nature. Obviously this is not a scientific view of nature, for when was the last time anyone heard a scientist say anything about joy in nature--that would be unscientific. But, fortunately, Krutch is not a scientist and therefore he can see this in nature--in plants and animals.

Joy is the one thing of which indisputably the healthy animal, and even the healthy plant, gives us an example. And we need them to remind us that beauty and joy can come of their own accord when we let them. The geranium on the tenement window and the orchid in the florist's shop, the poodle on the leash and the goldfish in the bowl, are better than nothing. In the consciousness of the city-dweller, they ought to play a part no less essential than that of the sleek chrome chair and the reproductions of Braque and Miro.

Here [in Baja California] I have, literally, God's plenty. Everything reminds me that man is an incident in nature rather than, as one comes to suppose in the city, that the natural is, at most, an incident, surviving precariously in a man-made world. If I do on my own a little of that peeping and botanizing which Wordsworth scorned, I think that I profit less from what I learn about nature than I do from what I should prefer to call the example she sets me--the example, I mean, of confidence, of serenity, and, above all, of joy. In the city, perhaps especially in the city of today, one may pass whole weeks without meeting a single joyous person or seeing a single joyous thing. One may meet laughter there, and wit--sometimes, perhaps, a fragment of wisdom. These are all good things which I would not willingly do without. But joyousness, as distinguished from diversion and amusement and recreation, is so rare that a whole philosophy has been developed to make a virtue out of its absence.

This world, we are told, is a terrible place, and it is wicked not to be almost continuously aware of the fact. Diversion in limited quantities is permissible as a temporary relaxation, but moral indignation should be the staple of any human life, properly spent. Yet it seems to me that Joy and Love, increasingly fading from human experience, are the two most important things in the world, and that if one must be indignant about something, the fact that they are so rare is the thing most worth of indignation.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope

I wonder what would happen if one of the candidates in the primaries being held this Spring of 2012 should begin to criticize The System today because of its limited, materialistic view, that there is something more important than economics and religious prohibitions and struggles for world domination. Just suppose that that candidate began to argue that our outlook on life (and not merely just a particular religious doctrine) and that our relationship to the world we live in is just as important, if not more so, than economics and social controls and world preeminence.

I think that person would labelled a nut. What could be more important than jobs and proper religious behavior and world domination?

Michel de Montaigne: an observation

I generally consider Michel de Montaigne to be a realist, but at times I wonder if he is also a bit of a cynic.

It is well to be born in a very depraved age; for, in comparison with others, you are reckoned virtuous at small cost. He who, in our days, is merely a parricide and sacrilegious is withal a worthy and honourable man.

-- Michel de Montaigne --

from "Of Presumption"
The Essays of Montaigne



In our day, how many times have you heard someone attacking a politician and someone, in defense, will say: "Well, at least, he/she hasn't . . ."? It's sad when the best defense one can offer is that the individual could be worse.

Eric Hoffer: Reflections

#5

Due to the imperfection of man's instincts there is a pause of faltering and groping between his perception and action. This pause is a seedbed of the apprehensions, the insights, the images, and the concepts which are the warp and woof of the creative process. A shrinking of the pause results in some degree of dehumanization. This is as true of highly grained specialists and dogmatic True Believers as of the mentally deficient.

Both iron discipline and blind faith strive to eliminate the pause of hesitation before action, while the discipline that humanizes and civilizes aims at widening the interval between impulse and execution.

Art humanizes because the artist must grope and feel his way, and he never ceases to learn.

-- Eric Hoffer --
from Reflections on the Human Condition



Some interesting thoughts here.

One could speculate that during that widening pause between impulse or perception and action or response, people could conceivably think differently than they did the last time and therefore might change their ideas. That suggests that changing one's mind now and then when felt necessary is more human than never changing one's mind at any time. So, those who insist on attacking others for changing their minds are actually complimenting them, are calling them more human and civilized. A strange thought.



Michel de Montaigne put it much more succinctly.

Only fools are certain and immovable.

Something to think about

Since philosophy has been able to find no path to tranquillity which is open to all, let every man seek it for himself.

Michel de Montaigne (Feb. 28, 1533--Sept. 13, 1592)
from "Fame"
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne


I guess Montaigne has never listened to any of those social-political-religious prophets who are always preaching that "one size fits all" is the only path to paradise.

Loren Eiseley: from The Immense Journey

Loren Eiseley: Sept. 3, 1911--July 9, 1977


I have read many works in which the author discussed or lamented what is variously called the human predicament, the human situation, or the human condition, and usually treated from an existential or a moral or a theological or even a literary point of view. Below, Loren Eiseley writes about the human predicament, but from a slightly different perspective--a sociobiological perspective perhaps or maybe even an epistemological perspective. What would you call it?


We are now in a position to see the wonder and terror of the human predicament: man is totally dependent on society. Creature of dream, he has created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits, and customs which buttress him about and replace for him the precise instincts of the lower creatures. In this invisible universe he takes refuge, but just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man's cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, at an individual level, the confused mind may substitute by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love.


As another author once said, we live in a virtual world, for we have given up the real or natural world for a world of ideas. We don't interact with things, but with the ideas of things. Eiseley also differs from other writers in that, while others see humans as victims of an uncaring universe or deity or fate, he suggests that we have created our own predicament, and we may be victims, but we are also the perpetrators of our situation.

John Fowles: from Wormholes

I'm slowly working my way through John Fowles' collection of personal essays, literary criticism, memoirs, and other writings. The following are quotations from an essay "I Write Therefore I Am," which he wrote in 1964.


In January of 1963 I decided to leave work. I can't imagine myself as a professional writer. Writing has always been with me a semireligious occupation, by which I certainly don't mean that I regard it with pious awe, but rather that I can't regard it simply as a craft, a job. I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill, and experience; with something from outside myself.

Inspiration, the muse experience, is like telepathy. Nowadays one hardly dares to say that inexplicable phenomena exist for fear of being kicked in the balls by the positivists and the behaviorists and the other hyperscientists. But there is a metatechnics that needs investigation.

I don't think of myself as "giving up work to be a writer." I'm giving up work to, at last, be.

To a career man, I suppose, the decision would seem lunatic, perhaps even courageous. But a bank vault is secure; an atomic shelter is secure; death is secure. Security is one of the prison walls of the affluent society; even since the pax Romana, being safe has been an unhealthy mega-European obsession.


Back in 1964, anyway, he probably would be considered a bit of a romantic--writing as a form of being, inspiration coming from somewhere else, outside himself; disdain for the positivists and "hyperscientists. I could see him getting along comfortably with Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, LeFanu, Blackwood, or M. R. James.

Michel de Montaigne: on Montaigne

The following quotation is from Montaigne's Introduction to the first edition of his Essays.


"To the Reader"

This is an honest book, reader. It gives you to know, at this outset, that I have proposed to myself only an intimate and private end; I have not considered what would be serviceable for you or for my renown; my powers are not equal to such a design. I have devoted these pages to the particular pleasure of my kinsmen and friends; to the end that, when they have lost me (which they must do ere long), they may find herein some touches of my qualities and moods, and that, by this means, they may cherish more completely and more vividly the knowledge thy have had of me. Had I purposed to see public favour, I should have better adorned myself, and presented myself in a studied attitude. I desire to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday guise, without effort and artifice; for it is my own self that I portray. My imperfections will be seen herein to the life, and my personal nature, so far as respect for the public has permitted this. I assure you that, had I been living among those nations which are said still to dwell under the benign license of the primal laws of nature, I should very readily have painted myself quite completely, and quite naked. Since, reader, I am thus, myself, the subject of my book, it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on so trivial and empty a matter.

So, farewell. From Montaigne this first March, 1580.




Montaigne says elsewhere that he knows that others hold different opinions, but he has no intention of convincing or converting others to his way of thinking. He is simply telling the reader what he himself thinks.


So, here is Montaigne on his subject: Montaigne

My purpose is to pass quietly and not laboriously what remains to me of life. There is nothing I care to weary my brains about, not even learning, however great its value. In books I seek only to give myself pleasure by worthy entertainment; or, if I study, I then seek only the learning which treats of the knowledge of myself and which instructs me how to die well and to live well.

. . . . .

If I meet with any difficulties, I do not bite my nails over them; I give them up, after attacking them once or twice. If I sat down to them, I should waste myself and my time; for I have a nimble wit. What I do not see at the first attack I see even less by persisting about it. I do nothing without animation; an continuation and too earnest effort confuse my judgement, dispirit and weary it.

. . . . .

If this book wearies me, I take up another; and I give myself to it only at times when the irksomeness of doing nothing begins to lay hold upon me. I care little for new books because the old ones seem to me fuller and stronger; nor for those in Greek, because my judgement can not do its work with imperfect and unskilled comprehension.

Michel de Montaigne
February 28, 1533 -- September 13, 1592
"On Books"
from The Essays of Montaigne

The last sentence of the quotation refers to Montaigne's imperfect knowledge of Greek rather than to any imperfections that may be in the books themselves.