The Searcher

Bill smiled to himself.  The symbolism could not have been clearer.  (Or was it symbolism?  Bill had forgotten nearly everything from his college semiotics class.  In any case the meaning was obvious.) There was the answer staring him directly in the face.  His thoughts jumped back to last night.  Not that they had far to jump.  All day thoughts of last night had been rolling around in his head.  Last night had been one of those rare, wonderful moments in time that you can't really be sure will ever happen again.  If Bill had counted the moments like this that he could remember (moments that were by definition unforgettable), they would have fit on one hand for sure.  Close friendships are rare enough, he mused.  But then there are those moments, that you certainly cannot control or try to make happen, when those barriers that keep even kindred spirits apart are removed or let down.  Perhaps it was the calm of the night. (It was almost always at night, wasn't it?)  Perhaps it was the impermanence of their situation.  No, this was not their final parting of ways, but the impending, albeit temporary, spatial separation was in someways a microcosm of a much more permanent separation they knew would eventually be coming.  Whatever it was, the conversation ran deeper than usual.  "The meaning of life" would be an apt way to describe its content, although Bill meant that in the most inclusive sense possible.  Bill had decided long ago that the meaning of life had something to do with music, religion, and sex.  No other things have quite the power to captivate and are so central to the human experience.  (If you are a tone-deaf, impotent atheist, you probably don't have much to live for, Bill figured.  Bill also liked having an excuse to introduce people to the term "hemidemisemiquaver.") But it was obviously more than just the content of the conversation that made last night so special, Bill thought.  It had to be the people he was with.  Maybe he should add friendship to his "meaning of life" list.  He had never wanted so much just to pause time.  He didn't care that he was now doing manual labor on barely two hours of sleep.   Bill would have gladly done it all over again.  It just added to the a strange, wonderful, indescribable, and oddly dissatisfied feeling had pervaded him all day.  Yes, dissatisfied.  That was the part that Bill hadn't quite understood until now.  Strange, because they had even talked about this very thing, about Augustinian restlessness, about how humans can't quite ever be satisfied, and about how the best sources attest that the most ecstatic human experiences only make the ache, the longing, the dissatisfaction even worse.  Hadn't C.S. Lewis called this Sehnsucht?  Hadn't Tolkien mentioned "regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness"?  Of course, Bill had felt this restlessness before, and accepted the received wisdom that it only gets stronger the more ecstatic your experience.  But he had never felt it to quite this extent before.  Usually, it was the chance sighting of a pretty face that would drive him crazy.  But the happiest things he could remember?  Not so much.  This was probably why he didn't know what to make of his dissatisfaction, until now.  But there it was, the answer staring him directly in the face.  (It's all in Lewis, all in Lewis! He was right after all!)  Or perhaps more correctly, pounding his eardrums. Someone nearby was playing music.  Overall, not a bad selection, Bill had thought.  It sort of makes the day less monotonous.  But then a song by U2 came on.  Bill had always enjoyed U2, and this song in particular, but hadn't really paid close attention to the lyrics until now. 


I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you...


...I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her finger tips
It burned like fire
I was burning inside her...


...But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for


Bill couldn't help but smile.  It all made sense now.  Last night was but another reminder that no matter how much we seek, even though we reach the very heights of human experience, we won't ever find quite what we are looking for.  Not in this lifetime, anyway.

Signification

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

-Hamlet

Last night, the post-sunset sky was beautiful.  Overhead was a deep blue canopy with just a few of the brighter starts poking out.  Near the horizion the blue gradually changed to the deep orange which was touching the horizon.  It was lovely in its own right, but I think part of its beauty was it reminded me of when I was in Assisi and how the sky looked just the same that night right after the sun set.  Last night's sky visually quoted what I had seen before.  It's funny how our memories work like that.  I think Fall is one of my favorite seasons partially because there are so many memories which are associated with its sights and smells.  These memories aren't necessarily concrete either, but there is a certain emotional memory that becomes active.  There is something that stirs within me.  But this happens not just with Fall.  All the other seasons, particularly at the change of the seasons, have their own associations and their own different feelings.

Dusk in Assisi, Italy

These feelings are often inarticulate.  You can't really describe them, or why they are so moving.  Explaining them is about as difficult as explaining beauty.  But it's as though when you experience Fall, you experience not just this Fall, but all your Falls.  Indeed, if you stop to think, you might realize that its not just your Falls either, but all the Falls in the history of the world.  For the season are all part of this circle of life, an experience our fellow humans have shared for centuries.  It seems to me that every Fall, not only is the immediate experience there, but implicitly all of those other Falls are present as well.  They are re-presented. 

This phenomenon is recreated in many ways.  At the weddings of others, couples remember their own vows with joy.  At funerals, the sadness of loss is compounded as people recall other loved ones that they have lost.  When you see a wonderful sunrise, you think of other such sunrises.  Certain places have associations, perhaps that treasured place in the woods or the experience of being on a hill or at the seashore in general.  It happens when we see ourselves in someone younger because we were one like that, or when we recognize patterns in our own behavior.

This is the nature of a symbol.  It brings with it not just itself, but all the other things it represents as well.  It shouldn't be surprising that the good art makes heavy use of symbol, for symbols endow life with meaning and significance.  Think even of subtle ways art does this.  In Wagner's Ring, his delightful series of operas, there are musical themes which are associated with different characters or places.  These musical themes not only reinforce the significance of these characters or places, but also work in the opposite direction, bringing the places or characters into the music.  The same thing is used in well written movie soundtracks, such as the Lord of the Rings.  I need not list more overt artistic symbols, but the Scartlet Letter itself comes to mind.  Again, we need not be able to explain how these symbols work, but we somehow know that they bring extra meaning with them.  (P.S. If anyone has ideas about what the deer crossing the tracks in the movie Stand by Me was all about, let me know.)

As I have reflected elsewhere, the Lord of the Rings (the books, not the films) is effective perhaps because of the smallness of the events in the book.  Yes, the War for the Ring is exciting and the biggest thing to happen in any of the characters' lifetimes, but it is set against the background of a deep history of Middle Earth.  Sauron isn't the greatest evil that has even existed, but is a mere shadow of Melkor, the fallen Vala.  Aragorn and Arwen are only fully understood in the light of Beren and Luthien.  But symbols are also dynamic.  They can articipate the future.  One could make the case that Beren and Luthien can't be understood without Aragorn and Arwen either.  The reality goes much deeper than the surface.

As the literary symbols show us, we need not be conscious of the symbolism for it to work.  The characters of a book certainly don't have to know they are acting symbolically for it to be so.  This is reinforced by the fact that symbols are dynamic and can reach into the future.  So while many of my examples suggested that symbols have a reality that is only contained in personal memory and consciousness, this is not entirely true.  I want to suggest that symbols carry a certain meaning, regardless of whether anyone be aware of them.  However, memory is extremely important, because this is the way in which individuals become aware of the deep reality which surrounds us.

Because memory is so important, and I suppose something could be said about the way in which corporate memory can also help to preserve symbols and their meaning.  I mention, as once before, the importance of memory in the Christian and Jewish traditions, in particular giving meaning to the Eucharistic meal or the Passover meal respectively.  These symbolic meals are not 'mere symbols,' but are understood to make present the reality which they symbolize.  But, without taking away from the special significance of these religious memorials, I'm not sure that there is a such thing as a 'mere symbol.'  Symbols all seem to contain what they signify to varying degrees.

I guess the point of all this is that there is meaning all around you, if only you open your eyes and look for it.  Reality runs deep.

(Note: Something should be said about my use of the word 'symbol.'  In most, if not all, instances where I used the word, 'sign' might be an appropriate substitution.  Symbols are strictly defined as things with represent another thing, but are distinct from it.  So language is a symbolic system, where there is no intrinsic relationship between the sound of the word and its meaning (except perhaps in cases of onomatopia).  The word 'cat' could easily have been used to refer to what we call 'dog.'  This stricter use of the word 'symbol' gets blurred and acquires meanings similar to the word 'sign' in more common parlance.  I use the word 'symbol' in this other way. Hopefully, the reader has understood what I meant throughout the post.)

Concerning the Name

My favorite word is "Mooreeffoc."  You won't find this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (I checked).  However, this word is associated with the likes of Dickens, Chesterton, and Tolkien, and represents a wonderful concept.  Tolkien defined mooreeffoc as "The queerness of things that have become trite when they are seen suddenly from a new angle" in his essay "On Fairy Stories."  The ability to see things from a fresh perspective is integral to the value of a fairy tale, as well as a pretty important element in G.K. Chesterton's thinking on life in general.  Enamored with this concept, I decided to name by blog after it.  What follows is a reflection on mooreeffoc.

Today we live in a world of wonders.  I can contact almost anyone I want to almost anywhere in the country almost instantly, by means of a cell phone.  I could be almost anywhere in the world is less than a day, by means of a jet airplane.  I can find much of the information that I want about countless subjects by pushing a few buttons.  If I hadn't grown up in a world with such wonders, these things would be almost unimaginable.  Less than 150 years ago, to go around the world in 80 days was unthinkable.  Yet we have become so accustomed to things like cell phones and airplanes and Google, that we no longer find anything remarkable in them.  They have become trite.  It takes something like being deprived of them to make us realize how fantastic and wild these things really are.

Yet, these modern marvels are really the most insignificant of the things to which we become habituated.  They are just the easiest to recognize because we know there was a time when they didn't exist and because we can actually live pretty well without them.  It's things like breathing oxygen, walking on green grass, and having two legs that are at once the most amazing and the most easily overlooked.  But the fact is that the world could have been such that our bodies needed an element other than oxygen for metabolic processes, that most vegetation was red, and that you were born without legs.  The world is a great "might have been."  Yet we so easily lose our sense of wonder at life.  Fairy stories allow us to reclaim that sense of wonder.  Their value is partly therapeutic.  "These tales," Chesterton wrote,  "say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Recognizing that the world is contingent, that things could have been other than they are, properly leads to a feeling of gratitude.  Because I might not have been, I have reason to be thankful that I am.  Indeed gratitude is a natural response to wonder at life.  But we naturally want someone to whom we are thankful.  Chesterton wrote, "We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers.  Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?"  This feeling of gratitude leads us naturally to God, as the object of thanks and praise.  Gratitude is also connected to morality.   Reality itself is construed in such a way that happiness depends on certain conditions.  This is another thing that fairy tales teach us.  "A box is opened, and all evils fly out.  A word is forgotten, and cities perish.  A lamp is lit, and loves flies away.  A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.  An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone."  But because the world is a gift, who are we to question the conditions whereby that gift is given?  Gratitude naturally leads us to act morally.  "Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman."  If this isn't clear to us, what we need is to see the world with the fresh eyes of a child.  What we need is, in a word, mooreeffoc.

Being able to see things with fresh eyes also informs Chesterton's apologetic for Christianity.  In The Everlasting Man, he wrote that "the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it."  When we are far enough away from Christianity, detached as it were, we can see Christianity unprejudiced and for what it really is.  The Christian faith is nothing less that remarkable, for it claims that God has become man.  A sense of wonder at the mysteries of the faith is not only important for leading people into Christianity, but is also something which Christians needs to reclaim.  How often does prayer and liturgy become trite as we become habituated to it, how often do the paradoxes of the faith fail to move us?  If we could attend every Mass as if it were our first, how awestruck would we be at what is happening?  And how grateful would we be?

This is the power of mooreeffoc.  Mooreeffoc allows us to see the beauty that is everywhere, but which we have forgotten.  It gives us the eyes of a child, who wonders at the world and has learned at a young age to say "thank you."

Unless noted in text, all quotes came from the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" from the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.
To see the selections in Chesterton and Tolkien where the word "Mooreeffoc" is discussed, see this post from the American Chesterton Society blog.  I suggest you check it out.

Living in a Story

"I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?" -Samwise Gamgee

When asked what my favorite book is, as I was this past week, my answer is The Lord of the Rings.  I think the reason this book resonates with me, is that its ending is the most powerful and satisfying that I have ever read.  Upon recently concluding my second reading of Tolkien's novel, I was left with a perfect feeling of awe.  What contributes first to the potency of the ending is the epic nature of the work.  A lot is at stake in the book, and many different interconnected threads are brought together.  The Lord of the Rings is able to take that powerful build up and resolve it in the most fitting way imaginable.  The novel takes the time (6 chapters) to really tie up every imaginable loose end.  This might drive some people crazy, but to me it seems necessary after the hundreds of pages of build up.  This combination of a complex, yet well connected story with a well-contrived, fitting and smooth ending is something The Lord of the Rings does exceptionally well.
 
As amazing and satisfying as the Lord of the Rings is, I want to propose that even the Lord of the Rings has a certain dissatisfaction, but that this dissatisfaction is true to life.  The problem?  The story has to end somewhere.  At some point, Tolkien had to stop writing.  When it's all said and done, after all the loose ends are tied up, we are left with Sam sitting in his home, wondering how life will go on.  We are left to ponder if he will ever join Frodo across the sundering sea and what life will be like for him and Rosie and his children.  How will middle earth get on after Aragorn is dead?  Although Frodo and the elves going into the West seems fitting, why did the elves have to leave and will Frodo be fully healed of his wounds?  Even if we did continue the story to learn how many children Sam had and to learn if Sam was reunited with Frodo, there would always be more we could say. What about Sam's grandchildren?

This dissatisfaction is the very thing Tolkien prepares us for by his characters' understanding of themselves as part of a larger story:
 "'Don't the great tales never end?' [asked Sam].
'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended.'"
Sam and Frodo know they are a small part of an ongoing story.  In fact the whole 'story' of the Lord of the Rings is only a small part of the larger story of Middle Earth.  The writing itself reflects the smallness of the events which are happening.  Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, is only an old servant of Morgoth, the one who first brought evil to Middle Earth.  Shelob, the spider-like creature which Frodo and Sam encounter, is only a child of Ungoliant, the original such creature which destroyed the trees of the Sun and the Moon long ago in Valinor.  Aragorn and Arwen are but a reminder of Beren and Luthien, the original romance between a mortal and an immortal.  The events in the Lord of the Rings are hardly the most important that have ever happened in Middle Earth.  They are just a small part of the story.

This is why we can never be truly satisfied with any story.  The story is never actually over, and we can only ever tell or listen to a part of the greater story.  Tolkien’s writing reflects this.  I want to propose that our feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with storytelling is true to our experience of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life.  As amazing and exciting as all our plans and achievements are, at the end of the day we are dissatisfied.  This is true no matter how complete or how fulfilling we think they will be and how satisfying they actually are.  There is always a lingering dissatisfaction.  This is because the things we do are just part of the larger story.  After we graduate, life goes on.  After we win the Nobel prize, life goes on.  When our lives our complete, our story comes to an end, but new characters enter the story and the tale continues.

Are we doomed to be forever dissatisfied?  And if we are just small players in an enormous story, does it really matter if we play our part well?  What was even the point of everything that happened in the Lord of the Rings and what is the point of our lives?

Recall the experience Sam had nearly despairing deep in the heart of Mordor:
"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." 
Sam could have given up because the shadow was only a passing thing, but instead the realization filled him with hope.  He had hope that good would triumph in the end.  Assured of that, all he could do was his best.

If we find our efforts frustrated, dissatisfying, or pointless, our greatest source of hope is remembering that we are part of a great story.  Goodness will triumph in the end, and all our human efforts can help bring that about.  When goodness finally triumphs and the great story, the story behind every other story, comes to The End which is beyond our imagination, then we will find true satisfaction.  This, I suggest, is the tale we have fallen into.  We are living in a story.