Not Something to be Grasped

So, I finally got around to reading Leisure, the Basis of Culture.  It didn't quite have the content I would have guessed, but nevertheless it helped me pull together some things I had been reflecting on.  The question, my friends, is one of outlook.  How are we to approach the world around us?  Last summer and indeed last fall, I struggled with a certain restlessness.  It's hard to describe, but is this not in any way the 'good' kind of restlessness I associate with the sublime, with that yearning for still something more found at the very heights of human experience.  No, this was something more akin to boredom, probably having its proximate cause in not having enough to do.  I had all this time to do what I wanted, and yet I wasn't happy.  In the worst moments, I didn't really even want to do anything.  It took a visit to Carmel, a nudge from St. Thérèse, and a blast of autumn air to draw me out of it, although I don't think my recovery was completed until recently (assuming full recovery is even possible, "inquietum est cor nostrum" etc.).  What Joe Pieper's book did was help me to understand that experience.  You see idleness and its fruit restlessness are so far removed from the leisure and true rest, they are its very opposite.  Idleness is marked by countless diversions, designed simply to kill time.  The only point to them, if there is one, is to distract from work and to take a break from being 'productive.'  The person who is idle doesn't really have a goal in mind, except perhaps to snatch little bits of pleasure while he can.  I suppose what such a person is really going after is happiness, but there is a certain aimlessness to idleness that makes this pursuit impossible.  So there I was, filling my free time with countless diversions.  At the same time, I was concerned with gathering up all the pleasant experiences I could.  I was grasping after good things.  And this attitude of grasping is directly opposed to true leisure.  This is related to the difficulties I've always had with trying to hoard into my mind good ideas or good memories/experiences.  This very act of mental possessiveness often prevents me from enjoying the things in the first place.  An analogous thing happens when you put a camera into my hand so that I can document experiences, which often leads to an obsession of getting photos of good things, rather than enjoying them in the moment.

The very opposite of this attitude or grasping is one of opening up or of letting go.  Consider how restlessness and sleeplessness are related.  To fall asleep you must let yourself go.  The same is true with true rest or leisure.  You must let yourself go.  It is this posture of receptivity, or openness that allows for one to enjoy good things, to receive them as a gift or a blessing.  Just as, in the words of the psalmist, God gives good things to His beloved while they sleep, in the same way, as Pieper writes, "greatest, most blessed insights, the kind that could never be tracked down, come to us above all in the time of leisure."  Truth, goodness, and beauty cannot be seized.  They are more to be passively received, just as one passively perceives things with the senses.  And where does this receptivity, which allows for good things to be enjoyed, come from?  It comes, first of all, from a sense of wonder.  Philosophy, poetry, art, and love all begin in wonder.  It is this sense of wonder that goes beyond scientific rationality, the empirically verifiable, what can be 'proven.'  Wonder transcends this, and breaks in with the intrusive question "why is there anything rather than nothing?"  To wonder is to see the world through the eyes of innocence, the eyes of a child.  To wonder is to be amazed that things exist at all, to see all things as new, and to delight in each as it comes into view.  To wonder, above all, is to recognize everything as a gift.  We could also say then that wonder is the beginning of morality.  It is by looking at humanity with wonder and looking with at nature with wonder that we lose all desire to misuse these good things, to grasp at them, to bend them to our own will, to make them means for our selfish ends.  This sense of wonder is the essence of fairy-tale morality.  This is why Chesterton said "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”  This, my friends, is why mooreeffoc is so valuable.  Mooreeffoc is all about reclaiming this gaze of innocence, which allows us to receive things as gift.

This, then, is the way to enjoy life and to head towards that ever elusive goal of happiness.  It is to experience the present moment as a sacrament, as a gift.  It is to reclaim that sense of wonder so that you can to stand with a posture of receptivity to the world.  It is to let yourself go, to give yourself over to the good things you experience, without trying take hold of them.  To put an image to this, life is to be approached not with a fist tightly closed as if to hold on to something, but with arms wide open as if ready to receive an embrace.

Ineffable Beauty

Obviously, I can't explain this to you.  I just have to trust you know what I'm talking about.
































I sometimes wonder if all art, all literature is simply an attempt to express what is ultimately inexpressable.  Words just can't do some things justice.  But this raises the question: why do we try at all?  Also, why do we listen to other people try?

Maybe reality itself is trying to express something (a deeper reality?) that is unexpressable.

Pensées

Sometimes lots of good ideas just hit you at once.  Indeed, it happens to me quite often that I'm overwhelmed with all the good things I want to do, the things I want to plan, the books I want to read, and the things I want to write.  The main problem is they can't all possibly be done at once, so it just leaves me in a frantic rush to do as much as I possibly can and then fizzles out by the time my alarm goes off the next morning and I don't feel like getting out of bed.  My goal here, writing today, is simply to write a few scatter thoughts that have been on my mind, each worthy of a blog post in their own right.  A big problem for me is that I am too meticulous in my writing.  I try almost too hard to express precisely what I want, when in fact no words will be perfect in describing what it is I'm talking about.  I spend too much time trying to find the perfect phrase, etc.  So I am trying to do the exact opposite right here and now.  I'm just simply going to write.  I hope my scattered thoughts you might find interesting, but in someways I just want to get them down on (virtual) paper.  It's quite possible that this way of writing might just be the perfect way to make ideas stick.  Peter Kreeft, philosopher at Boston College, thinks that Blaise Pascal's Pensées is one of the best books ever written precisely because it is unfinished and scattered.  If it had been completed and followed a perfectly logical progression, it would have been ruined.  So God in his mercy killed Pascal before his book was finished.  I don't know whether I agree with Kreeft, but Pensées is pretty good and if I volunteer to write down unfinished thoughts, maybe God will spare my life.

One things that's been on my mind is the idea of self forgetfulness.  There is another answer to the riddle which I proposed in my last post.  The Self.  The only way to find one's self is to completely forget one's self.  Get so caught up in what you are doing, that you become completely unselfconscious.  Self-consciousness is generally a bad sign.  If you are self conscious, you can never truly be yourself in social situations.  If you are self conscious about the kind of job you are doing, you are probably doing a bad job.  To paraphrase Kreeft, no one ever made a good impression by trying to make one.  Just think about the absentminded genius.  They are so lost in their work, that they forget to take care of themselves or they even forget where they are.  Learning to become disinterested to even one's own desires and happiness is moving swiftly down the road to joy.
I love the change of the seasons.  Much to my joy, I've discovered that the smell and feeling of Fall is the same in London, England as it is in Southeast Michigan, or South Bend, Indiana.  The first days of any change in season are always so wonderful.  The smell brings back memories of the same time in years past, as does the feel of the wind or the weather.  Running around the nearby park has brought back memories of playing high school soccer on windy days in October.  It reminds me of my backyard during fall, both in Michigan and even dimly in Indiana, though I was seven or younger at that time.  I think of playing kickball in the backyard with friends.  I think of the leaves falling around the lakes at Notre Dame, and driving up Notre Dame avenue just after Fall break, the golden dome in view.  I am reminded of beautiful faces.  Fall makes me feel lovesick and homesick at the same time.

Friends.  It's struck me that those friendships which I most especially value are those which make me feel completely humbled.  I've been blessed through my life to meet many wonderful people.  Sometimes I just wonder to myself in sort of awe, "How is it that I am so lucky?"  There isn't anything that I could possibly have done to make myself worthy of this friendship.  And so I experience their friendship as pure gift.  Friendship is a gift you give, but more importantly is a gift that you receive.  When I go wrong is when I think "shouldn't these people want to be my friend.  Yeah, I've got lots of great personal qualities."  The reality is that I do not deserve to have friends and that I can't make anyone be my friend.  It is pure gift.  It's about standing in receptivity to the gift of another person.  For a Christian, I think friendships are particularly important because they teach us how to be a receiver, the relationship we always stand in towards God.

I think this bit about friendship ties in nicely with the theme of self-forgetfulness.  In a true friendship, the self-consciousness of meeting someone has fallen away.  You no longer think about thinks like "What sort of questions should I ask this person?  What should I say?  What do they think of me?"  Ironically, it is losing this self-consciousness in relationship that allows one to be oneself and to actually share more of oneself.  Deep friendships have reached the point where sharing deep truths about one's self is easy and natural.  It's as though the barrier of the self has broken down.

What about love?  (Upon reflection, that questions terribly deals with the ambiguity of our language.  Let me rephrase: "What about Eros?")  I have found it difficult to think about marriage in terms of this ethic of self-forgetfulness.  In my present thinking, I haven't been able to see the married state as something which does enough to "draw one out of The Self."  I'm not saying the problem is with marriage, but rather the problem is with my own inadequacy.  When I look a marriage, I see a good thing, a beautiful thing.  There are many things I find attractive about that state of life.  But were I drop everything and get married today, I would be pursuing it as something that I want, something that I think would make me happy.  I want this woman to love me and I want to love her and spend time with her because that gives me joy.  Thought of like this, that is hardly a drawing out of the self.  But like I said the problem is with me.  I've never reached the state (or if I have, I don't remember it particularly well), where I've been so transported by the joys of Erotic love that my own desires have melted away and my self so forgotten so that the 'I' becomes 'we.'  I've not reached that place where lifelong love and commitment becomes not something that I want as I, but as some completely natural and seemingly inevitable next-step to join together a selfless 'we.'  Perhaps I'm romanticising love too much.  However, it does make perfect sense to me when older, happily married couples say that "We've more in love now that when we were first married."  It's because they lived through so much together, and have been required to make so many sacrifices, that they most certainly had to forget themselves and their own wants.  I mean they have made sacrifices not in a petty, "We'll do what you want because it makes me feel good to give you what want," sort of way, but in a way which requires real pain.
(Edit: I don't mean to introduce a discontinuity between friendship and Eros.  Indeed, I think a true romance will inspire a feeling of humility just as a true friendship does, and that romantic love will be experienced as a gift, just as friendship is.  I also think they pose a similar challege, in that both are often initially sought in response to a personal desire, but in both that desire can be transcended.  What I wrote about Eros could easily have been written by someone else about friendship.  Perhaps, I should just retract the whole paragraph.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that perhaps because there is greater attraction to Eros and the possibility for self-transcendence is even higher, it is more difficult to initially escape the self-seeking element.  The reflection above betrays the subjective state of the author and should be understood accordingly.)

The last paragraph took me an outrageous amount of time to write compared with the rest of the post.  If it's the worst paragraph, it certainly proves Kreeft's theory.  In anycase, I hope I can return to a more free-flowing style for the last few thoughts here.  The first is, when thinking about self-forgetfulness and such over the past few days, its occured to me that perhaps I should blog less.  While blogging might initially seem more other-directed than simply journaling, for me this is entirely not true.  Way too often I am motivated to blog in part by a vain desire to have others admire what I've writen, combined with a need to share what I am thinking.  But perhaps what is even more annoying, is that when I have an awesome thought, I can automatically think to myself "Boy, that would make a great blog post.  Won't people think I'm awesome for having such a great thought."  That spoils the thought as a thought in its own right, and is pretty vain to boot.  Although, if I decided just to journal about these thoughts, I'll probably still have an intrusive complusion to journal.  Perhaps the easiest solution to allay some of these qualms is to just check my Blogger stats much less often.

Finally, related to the blogging/thought hoarding problem, I've often gotten frustrated in my past trying to obsessively seize with my mind beauty things or cool experiences.  The worst is when I have a camera, which becomes an extension of my mind, and I begin to take pictures complusively, trying to save the memory of what is there.  Not that I discourage picture-taking, but I've found the enjoyment of a thing is often spoiled by trying to enjoy it.  Better just to be receptive and to let things come as they are.  Then you'll be surprised what you can enjoy if you are not trying.

Later Dudes (and Dudettes for those feminists who claim that the word 'dude' excludes 'dudettes.'  Actually, why do some feminists insist that terms like 'waiter' works now for both 'waiter' and 'waitress,' but get really mad if I don't specify 'woman' in addition to the term 'man?'  Perhaps they would get offened that I specified 'dudettes.'  I'm so confused.  And I wish everybody would stop making generalizations.)!

The period of time when the sun is below the horizon

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.  ~Lemony Snicket

There is something I simply love about the night.  In the night, the busy concerns of the daytime fade away.  The world changes to a calm, quite place.  At night, when we can see the stars and the moon, our very place in the universe is put into perspective and questions about what it means to be human come to the fore.  We can enter into the depths of our humanity.  What am I?  Who am I?  Where am I going?  These are the questions of night.  Night is also the time for intimacy, the time when the depth of one's humanity, the movement of one's heart in response to the questions of the night, can be shared with another.  One human grows closer to another as they together discover the sameness of their response.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.  ~Henry Beston

Perhaps this is why I've become the sort of person who stays up fairly late, at least more often than I ever imagined I would.  But "blessed are the owls, for they shall inherit the mystery and magic of the night," says an anonymous person.

This is all not to say that the day doesn't have its own beauty.  Day brings the return of hope of victory in battle, and the renewed possibility of life and rebirth.  It's all part of the cyclical universe, where each part of the cycle communicates its own mystery.

Every night, when I go to sleep, I die. Every morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the some of the characters escape from civilization into what is called the Green World, a forested place of enchantment.  It is here in the Green World, away from the constraints of society where love is able to flourish.  Granted, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Green World is not quite so simple as that.  There is plenty of romantic confusion until the lovers finally end up with the right people.  But my point here is not to provide a literary analysis of Shakespeare's Green World.  Rather, I want to seize upon the basic point (or at least the point I want to make): reaching the place of true love and enchantment requires movement away from other considerations and into the wilderness.

The lesson, as I take is, is that we all need to spend time in the Green World, able to completely forget about the cares of society.  We need a chance to eschew work, school, and all the familiar places. It is the Green World, where we learn to fall in love again.  Here, we learn to love the beauty against which our hearts have been hardened.  We learn to love life itself once more.  We learn to love the people around us once again (or for the first time).  Here, we learn to love God.

In a phenomenon which may be related, I've recently experienced the desire to surround my self with beauty.  This past week/weekend I was stuck in a car for several hours I had nothing better to do but listen to Bach and read Evelyn Waugh (at the same time!).  The Bach and the Waugh were amazing, and filled me with a desire to spend all my days immersed in beautiful things like those.  Then a rainbow showed up.  Ahh!  These are the moments we live for, moments that pierce the soul.  I hope I'll remember that moment forever, just like I remember going to see Jeremy Denk and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform one of Beethoven's Piano Concerti (No. 1 in C Major, I believe).  It was absolutely stunning, but perhaps not as memorable as Denk's encore piece, in which he played a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  He executed the piece so well, that the audience literally laughed out loud at one of Ives' musical jokes.  Real laughter came from my mouth because of what someone played on a piano!  Or I remember the time I was able to go backpacking in the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  One incident in particular from that trip I remember.  We were on a precipice, several thousand feet up, from which we could the place where the mountain range on which we were standing began to rise out of the plain below.  The rock on which we were standing was most unusual: it was pitted.  We're talking softball sized holes that held rain water.  There must have been hundreds of them in the surrounding area.  They were made, so I was told, by lightning which naturally strikes the highest point in the area.  And as I was standing there, staring at the beautiful scene below me, I could feel energy start to build in the atmosphere behind me, that exciting, stirring change, which signals a storm is approaching.  I could see the thundercloud swiftly approaching.  Something was so exhilarating about that moment, on the verge of extreme danger and extreme beauty.  The situation also seemed to serve as a living reminder that all things are passing away, that we have to come down from the mountain eventually.  It's moments like these which we remember most, which we are forever grateful we experienced, which shape us into better people.

Now comes the plug for Aristotelian Ethics.  Like experiencing the Green World, experiencing the beauty described above requires a movement away from the ordinary.  It requires, in a word, leisure.  We do not recreate so that we can be a more effective production factor in our capitalist economy.  No, we work precisely for those moments of leisure so that we can nourish the soul, and learn what it really means to be human.  This is why civilization kicks barbarism's butt.  Civilization allows the flourishing of the arts.  When people are just trying to stay alive, living in a subsistence economy, the arts can't flourish.  It is only when a culture has 'left over' time, after keeping everyone alive, that time can be devoted to artistic pursuits.  We get individuals who can devote their time to nothing but creating beautiful things, and others who can take the time to appreciate them.  Here the arts flourish.

The astute reader will have noticed that I described the Green World as necessarily a place of removal from civilization, while at the same time praising civilization for giving us the arts.  Is there a contradiction somewhere in here?  I expect any seeming contradiction is resolved upon realizing that both natural beauty and artistic beauty are necessary at times to help us get in touch with that part of us which is most human, to sharpen our sensitivities, and to help us love.  Leisure is needed for both.

Thought: Philosophy is parasitic, just like the arts, coming out of society's collective leisure time.  It has a lot to do with love and beauty as well.  Lurking somewhere here might be a justification for my academic discipline.

Note to Self:  Read Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

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.