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.
Showing posts with label fairy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fairy. Show all posts
Friday, May 25, 2012
Thursday, May 26, 2011
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.
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.
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