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.

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.