I suppose most people have heard “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” sung by the drug dealer Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The song voices doubts about certain passages in the Bible. But the title phrase is applicable to a range of assumptions well beyond that.

It is, for example, widely assumed that Earth cannot possibly be the only life-bearing planet in the universe, given how vast the universe is and how many planets there must be. In fact, of 2,326 planets so far spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, 10 are said to be about the size of Earth and orbiting their suns in what is called a “habitable zone.” Kepler-22b in particular looks promising. Temperature there seems to be around 72 degrees and it circles a star much like our sun.

I don’t really get emotionally engaged by this. It’s fascinating either way.

But if there’s anybody out there like us, they sure have been hearing from us for a bit. We’ve been transmitting radio waves their way for decades now. But they don’t seem to have called back.

That doesn’t mean they’re not there, however.

C. S. Lewis wrote a space trilogy involving Earth, Mars, and Venus. Mars, it turned out, was called Malacandra by its inhabitants, and it was a world that had never fallen from grace, in the sense that the Abrahamic religions posit that mankind did. Perelandra, as Venus would come to be known to its inhabitants, is portrayed as facing trial, the outcome of which will be whether it is fallen or not.

Well, obviously an unfallen world would be wary of making contact with a fallen one. And another fallen one like ours could prove highly problematic. Its inhabitants might actually be worse than we are and more intelligent and technologically advanced. Bad news for us.

I find the opposite theory more interesting. I am fascinated by the possibility that we are the only things like us in all the world. Maybe it takes an entire universe to come up with anything like us, inconsistent and contradictory, at odds with each other and ourselves, smart and mean, needful and grasping. Maybe we’re the sour cherry on the sundae.

Or maybe we’re just perspective figures — those little humans placed in a lower corner of a landscape painting in order to give the viewer some sense of the height of the waterfall those little people are standing in front of.

I think that theists are especially comfortable with this. After all, God, being himself a singularity, would naturally create something singular, something once in eternity. And he wouldn’t have to mull over possibilities, or try out different models. That’s one of the perks of being omniscient.

There is something else to consider: This presumption that we are not alone is grounded in false humility. If we are alone, and there is no God, then we are a fluke, pure and simple, and that offends our vanity. That we, wonderful we, should be the merest accident cannot possibly be the case. And so we piously recite our solemn credo that we are not alone.

We do, as noted above, have some evidence that there are other places like our own. There is, however, no evidence at all that anybody lives there.

My last column served up a modest proposal regarding the philosophy curriculum, suggesting that larval philosophers supplement logic with the experience of making meatloaf.

I’d like to continue in that vein with a further suggestion: That they try to arrange, from time to time, to fill in for the janitor.

I am not being frivolous.

The other day I spent a couple of hours putting our patio garden into order for the winter. This involved a lot of sweeping, an exercise that almost magically brings mind and body into coordination, the body being occupied just enough to keep you from trying to take control of the mind. This allows the mind to be itself, namely, something we ought to listen to rather than manage. What you get while you’re sweeping is a satisfying physical sense. There’s a rhythm and a tempo that you have to discover — but when you do, you find yourself just watching and listening to the content of your consciousness. That consciousness is a dimension of yourself every bit as substantial as the physical. But the two are not identical. And neither one is yourself.

What we take to be ourselves is the current alternating between the two.

Anyway, small wonder so many Zen tales relate of someone achieving satori by sweeping up or being told to sweep. For there is, as I have tried to suggest, an almost wondrous fusion of mind and body while sweeping (maybe this is where women used to derive their wisdom, back when women were wise). Discover the way to comfortably sweep, and you can keep it up forever, maybe even long enough to reach infinity.

All this comes about, strangely enough, because, when mind and body work in balance, you stop thinking about things. You are simply aware of them. The hesitant, deliberative you has disappeared.

We think that to think means to determine the course of our thought. But suppose to think means simply to pay attention to what is going on and let whatever intelligence one has process the information so provided without interference from others and, maybe most of all, ourselves. In other words, just see what’s going on.

You won’t see what is going on if you subscribe to accounts of what is going on provided by anyone else. You can learn a lot from other people, but only if what they tell you turns out to be true, and you can’t know that unless you have, all by your lonesome, developed the habit of paying attention, for no particular reason, to whatever happens to be going on around and in front of you.

The key is to bring nothing besides yourself to the encounter. Especially leave behind your ideas and theories. Ideas are wonderful, and theories can be. But trouble starts when the idea about something starts getting in the way of the thing itself.

C.S. Lewis has written something that seems oddly pertinent to this: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

This is not unlike the Zen saying to the effect that if you cup yours hands gently together, you can raise water to lips and drink, but if you clutch the water, it just spills onto the ground.

In other words, we tend, throughout life, to try too hard. We also tend to operate on the assumption that the way to solve any and all problems is to figure them out intellectually. Actually, if you stop interfering with your mind, and just take up a broom and sweep the patio, you may discover that your mind has figured it all out for you already.

W. H. Auden says somewhere — I believe in one of the essays gathered in The Dyer’s Hand, which I do not happen to have at hand — that he preferred systems of irregular measurement. In other words, inches, yards, and ells to, say, the metric system.

I share that preference, principally because such irregular systems do not pretend to a precision that is in fact unattainable.
Consider the circle.

 Its circumference is arrived at by multiplying pi by the circle’s radius squared. But pi is an irrational number whose decimal representation can neither come to an end nor repeat. It can be expressed only approximately. Given that a key factor in arriving at the circumference of a circle is itself an approximation, it would seem to follow that the circumference of a circle can only be known approximately. Just one more thing we can’t quite be certain of. (Since the ancients knew this, I wonder if that is why they thought of the circle as an emblem of perfection, its ultimate unknowability being analogous to God’s.)

Pi is also a mathematical constant. It figures in a lot more formulae than the one for calculating circumferences. Since it is, fundamentally, an approximation, it follows that whatever solution arrived at by means of it can only also be an approximation. An exceedingly close approximation, of course, but an approximation nonetheless. Not precisely accurate.
I happen to think that it is precisely because they are, however slightly, imprecise that such calculations accurately reflect reality, which I happen to think cannot be precisely grasped. In fact, it is real because it cannot be precisely grasped, which is another way of saying that it is, to ever so slightly paraphrase e.e. cummings, a world of born and not a world of made, something alive and not constructed.

No living thing can be reduced to mere quantity. That is the delusion of scientism, as opposed to science. For the scientist, quantity is a means to an end. For the scientistic, it is an end in itself.

You will no doubt be surprised to learn that these cosmic lucubrations of mine are but the prelude to a discussion of some things ostensibly much humbler — soup, stew, and meatloaf.

Recently, I posted on my blog an account of my having improvised a soup, in the course of which account I remarked parenthetically that “I have long thought there is something in common between putting together a good soup or stew and arriving at an authentic, personal philosophy.” To which my friend Lee Lowe, also a soup aficionado, responded: “… soup is usually tasty, and a great way to get kids and now grandkids to eat vegetables. But I can’t say it’s helped me to arrive at an authentic personal philosophy. Sadly.”

So I think I should explain what I meant.

When I was in my 20s, I had some time on my hands and thought I would figure out exactly what it was that I was sure of, to serve as the basis for my procession through life. I know now that this not only sounds ridiculous, but was ridiculous. But in those days, having just put college behind me, I was more enthralled with pure reason than I have been for a long time.
I got nowhere with my project, because every time I tried to decide what I was sure about doubts cropped up. The desire for precision is a correlate of the desire for certainty and both are really cravings, not simply desires, and both, I think, derive from lacking a sense of nuance. It’s sort of like wanting to be hip.

Wanting to be hip is a powerful indication that hip is what you are not. The authentically hip are never deliberately so. They’re just people who have a pretty good sense of what’s going on, have their own idiosyncratic take on it and go with it. There are, at any given time, a fair number of such people around and, since they all have a sense of the same thing — what’s going on — their individual takes on things tend to have a lot in common. So they get noticed. And the next thing you know, there are, say, a bunch of young women sporting long hair and black turtlenecks sipping espresso in coffeehouses, as was the case in the ’50s. I remember them well — if only because I lived with one for nigh on 20 years.

The next thing after that, of course, is a story about them in the Timesstyle section, by which time the style is becoming passé (one reason why people who rely on the Timesto find out what’s going on tend to be so unhip).
The thing about soup and stews and meatloaf is that they turn out best when the cook doesn’t rely on recipes and measuring cups and spoons Recipes are a fine source of ideas. I read them all the time. As for measuring, when I cook a soup or a stew, I use a glass I have that is shaped like a chalice, and I never quite fill it up. I pour an amount that looks good. I also eyeball the amount of herbs I add. I pour into the palm of my hand an amount of salt that looks about right. I gauge the texture by stirring (or, in the case of meatloaf or meatballs, from mixing the ingredients by hand). I always make sure to put in less of an ingredient than may be needed, because I can always add more. But I can’t subtract if I’ve put in too much.

These are all culinary commonplaces, and any experienced cook, reading the preceding paragraph, will probably say to himself, “Wow, no kidding?”
So what does any of this have to do with philosophy, authentic or otherwise?
Well, philosophy has come to be thought of primarily as an intellectual undertaking, an arrival at an understanding of things by rational means alone. It’s like trying to cook something by strict attention to a recipe and careful measurement of ingredients. Both techniques are too abstract.
The most important detail in what I just said about cooking a soup or stew is that bit about tasting as you go along. In cooking, as in life, it’s experience that counts. It also counts in philosophy. Experience is the only way you get a feel for things, which is what tends to be lacking in a purely intellectual understanding of them.

I almost always find myself thinking philosophical thoughts when I cook, and they tend to be among the most tolerant and humane thoughts that I have. Cooking may not make me wise, but it does give me some feeling of what it might be like to be wise, to have a sense, not of the measurement of things, but of their many and varied nuances.

And that, to conclude, is why I think philosophy majors would do well to punctuate their courses in logic by endeavoring to turn out a flavorful meatloaf or minestrone.

Have you heard the latest neutrino jokes?

Here’s one:

Neutrino.

Knock, knock.

And here’s another:

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” said the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

Don’t get them? Well, in a Wall Street Journal column, physicist Michio Kaku put it this way:

Physicists fired a beam of neutrinos (exotic, ghost-like particles that can penetrate even the densest of materials) from Switzerland to Italy, over a distance of 454 miles. Much to their amazement, after analyzing 15,000 neutrinos, they found that they traveled faster than the speed of light—60 billionths of a second faster, to be precise. In a billionth of a second, a beam of light travels about one foot. So a difference of 60 feet was quite astonishing.

Cracking the light barrier violated the core of Einstein’s theory. According to relativity, as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, you get heavier, and you also get flatter (all of which have been measured in the lab). But if you go faster than light, then the impossible happens. Time goes backward. You are lighter than nothing, and you have negative width. Since this is ridiculous, you cannot go faster than light, said Einstein.

In other words, in neutrino jokes the punch line comes before the setup.

I happened to be thinking about this the other day when I looked up and noticed a flock of pigeons flying over the Italian Market. Not that pigeons have much — or anything, so far as I know — in common with neutrinos. No, what came to mind when I saw the pigeons was augury, the ancient practice of gauging the divine will by studying the flights of birds.

What a different way of regarding the world! And, before you brush the notion away on the presumption that our ancestors were all damn fools, remember that this was common practice among the Romans, those guys who built aqueducts and roads that are still in use today. People whose practical skills hold up very well against our own. Hardly damn fools.

To the extent that the flight of birds interests us nowadays, it has to do with the how and the why of it. We do not think there is any meaning to be discerned in it. Early man seems to have felt otherwise. But then, early man had a different, more direct connection with nature than we have. He seems to have drawn less of a distinction between himself and the rest of things.

We, on the other hand, have come to think of things in terms of quantities and parts. We weigh and measure things, take them apart, see how they work, and think that tells us all we need to know about them.

But is anything ever just the sum of its parts? Do the parts not work together in synergy, achieving thereby an effect none of the parts could independently?

In Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which I reviewed, Barnes buys into a notion of materialist determinism that I think may have some bearing on this. He says that “far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off.” Later he quotes a “specialist in consciousness” who said on the radio that “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”

I wrote in my review that the upshot of this was that we were all but end-points of chains of causation reaching back to the Big Bang and that upshot of that was that no viewpoint could be considered either right or wrong. Each just is.

But thinking this over recently, I realized I should have followed the chain in the other direction, back to its source. For if we have a sense of self, it must be because a sense of self is inherent in being, going back all the way to that Big Bang. And that brings to mind this, quoted in John Blofeld’s Taoism: “From the Tao all the myriad objects derive their being, their illusory separateness being wrought by the interplay of yin and yang.”

If this be so, it is not the sense of self that is illusory, but the sense of separateness. And if that is the case, early man’s failure to draw a sharp distinction between himself and the rest of the world may not be so strange after all.

Remember that the next time you notice a flock of pigeons.

This year marks the centenary of the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milowsz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980. To mark the event, Cynthia Haven of Stanford University has put together a collection of essays called An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Contributors include Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, W.S. Merwin, and Robert Pinsky.

I’ve only just read Haven’s introduction, “From Devenir to Etre,” and one passage in particular has grabbed and held my attention. Ten years ago, Haven interviewed Milosz at his home in Berkeley, Calif., and asked him about être and devenir. His reply was evasive: “My goodness. A big problem.”

And so it is. It has to do with the Ur-question of Western philosophy, posed and pondered by Parmenides (“what exists is uncreated and imperishable, for it is whole and unchanging and complete”) and Heraclitus (“the only thing permanent is change”): How reconcile the one and the many, being and becoming, essence and existence, être and devenir? Parmenides and Heraclitus do not really disagree. Heraclitus simply insists that the nature of being is dynamic, not static, that it is a process, not a thing, something on the order of what his older contemporary Lao Tzu called the Tao (for Heraclitus it was the Logos).

Milosz eventually does get around to talking about this: “We are in a flux,” he tells Haven. “We live in the world of devenir. We look at the world of être with nostalgia. The world of essence is the world of the Middle Ages, of Thomas Aquinas. In my opinion, it is deadly to be completely dissolved in movement, in becoming. You have to have some basis in being.

“In general, the whole philosophy of the present moment is … the complete undoing of essences, of eternal truths. Postmodernism consists in denying any attempt at truth.”

For whatever reason, this brought to my mind something Meister Eckhart said, which I recently posted on my blog: “There exists only the present instant … a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.”

This in turn brought to mind, by way of contrast, Krishnamurti’s notion that what is happening right now has never happened before and will never happen again, which is why we call it “new.”

For Milosz, obviously, the issue underlying all this is not merely academic, but vital. Failure to engage it undermines values, which is another way saying that it deprives us of our humanity, our essence, that ingredient of being that makes us who we are.

But that essential humanity must be something rather different from our ordinary, everyday humanity. For that humanity is the one enamored of rules and regulations, given to drawing up shopping lists of do’s and don’ts, always on the lookout for the moral equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

So, while I am at one with Milosz in deploring “the undoing of essences,” I can’t quite agree with the sharp distinction he draws between being and becoming. That “present instant” Eckhart speaks of is like the vast and always-moving, ever-changing ocean, wondrously placid one moment, dangerously violent the next, able to take us from continent to continent, equally able to destroy cities.

There are no cut-and-dried rules for living. Most of us know without having to think about it what would be really wrong to do. We need techniques, not rules. A note-perfect reading of a score does not make music. That comes from proper phrasing, just the right tempo, a bit a rubato here, a trill there. These can be taught and learned, but cannot be notated.

I also think that Milosz is right about postmodernism, that it “consists in denying any attempt at truth.” But the undoing of essences is a consequence of this, not its cause. The postmodernist apprehends neither being nor becoming. He apprehends only ideas. He is, as Beckett puts it in Ohio Impromptu, “buried in who knows what thoughts … profounds of mind buried in who knows what profounds of mind, or mindlessness, whither no light can reach, no sound.”

“The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.” Thus spake Leo Tolstoy, who made it to 82.

It is hard to disagree, especially if you find yourself, as I do, on the cusp of three score and ten, the so-called Biblical age. Of course, old age is not surprising in the sense that it is unexpected, but rather that it turns out to be so different from what you may have expected.

When I was young and found occasion to ponder the prospect of growing old, I tended to think of it in terms I can only describe as airbrushed: the hair would turn a lustrous gray, and the lines in my face would deepen in just such a way as to suggest a certain gravitas. I failed to factor in the slight paunch and the somewhat sagging cheeks, to say nothing of the exquisite aches my knees have lately been visiting upon me.

But the biggest surprise, at least for me, has been how much my past is tending to impinge on my present. I am not an especially sentimental person, so I am not much given to nostalgia. I’ve always been more interested in what’s going on now than in what happened whenever. But recently, just about everything I lay my eyes on has reminded me of something in the past.

I found this both puzzling and not altogether pleasant. In fact, I didn’t find it especially pleasant at all. Then, last week, I read something Alan Watts wrote that seemed to have some bearing on it:

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past is going to happen next, and so we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn’t explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship, and eventually disappears.

That is certainly true of my past: Most of it has largely disappeared. So what am I to make of these various bits and pieces that seem to be floating to the top of my consciousness all of a sudden? What Watts says leads me to think that they have been with me all along.

Most of what happens to us on any given day we leave in our wake. But not everything. We take some things along with us. We accumulate as well as discard. As Faulkner noted, a lot of what happened in the past isn’t really past. It’s the ingredients of who we are.

But you can only accumulate so much for so long. At a certain point there are things you just aren’t looking for anymore. The result is a definite change in perspective. You really do see things differently.

I have noticed, for instance, that when I see a young woman these days I am more aware of her imperfections than I ever would have been when I was her age and looking for that someone a young woman like her just might have been.

This is more than just surprising. It is downright unnerving. You suddenly realize that you have arrived at ripeness. But ripeness is the point of climax, after which comes the dénouement. The ripe apple’s days on the bough are numbered.

I think this is may have something to do with why the late work of great artists becomes spare. Superfluities may be permissible, even necessary, when one is learning a craft, but eventually they simply get in the way.

So I surmise that, as I grow ever older, a process of paring down is in order. Little else needs to be taken on and a good bit needs to be discarded.

That is not exactly surprising. What is surprising is that this ripe you turns out to be so different from what you may have expected that you have to make an effort to get to know him.

Recently, I posted on my blog as a “thought for the day” this quote from Jean de La Fontaine: “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”

My own life offers evidence in support of this. I was the editor of my college newspaper (co-editor, actually: I shared the duties with a colleague, because I was also the main editorial writer), but when I graduated I had no intention whatever of becoming a journalist, principally because the idea of facing deadlines on a daily basis did not appeal.

I was notorious among my colleagues on the college paper for somehow always managing to meet deadlines at the very last moment. But the college newspaper was a weekly. To have to meet a deadline immediately — to be told at 3 in the afternoon that a piece needed to be done by 5 — well, that sort of pressure wasn’t something I wanted any part of.

As it happened, of course, I ended up working for a newspaper for the greater part of 30 years. I even grew sort of fond of those tight impromptu deadlines. Like the prospect of hanging, they focused the mind wonderfully. You couldn’t even think of procrastinating. And no one expected literature. You didn’t have to pause from time to time and second-guess yourself, because your editor would do that for you when the time came. All you had to do was the best you could under the circumstances. Surprisingly, what you came up with as often as not was as good as what you would have had you had more time.

Actually, I’ve never gotten very far in life by devising any plan of action. I’ve mostly just taken advantage of whatever opportunity came my way. I’m also the sort of person who tends to make the best of whatever situation I find myself in. At any rate, it was just such an opportunity that got me into the newspaper business and that, of course, eventually led to my landing a job I had wanted since I was in high school: that of book review editor for a newspaper.

But do I contradict myself? I dreamed of becoming a newspaper book editor, but had no interest in journalism? The contradiction is only apparent. Once I realized what was involved in writing for a newspaper, I just figured the idea of being a book review editor was not realistic.

I have always preferred to follow the course of least resistance. You need a job. So find one that you don’t dislike and that pays reasonably well. Then get on with the business of living. (Oddly, I never wanted to be one of those people whose jobs were the focus of their lives, and yet that is pretty much how it turned out for me anyway. As Henry Miller said, happiness consists in finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time: I ended up passing a good deal of my time working at a job I happened to enjoy.)

I doubt if any grand inference can be drawn from any of this, but I am reminded of a book that more people should know of: Georg Groddeck’s The Book of the It. Groddeck (1866-1934) was a German physician who specialized in the treatment of the chronically ill. He was quite unorthodox and something of a pioneer in the field of psychosomatic medicine. The Book of the It is written in the form of letters to a lady friend and its point, very broadly stated, is that we do not live as deliberately as we like to think. Rather, we are lived by what Groddeck calls the It, which I think it fair to describe as the unconscious personified. The It knows better than we do and often leads us where we would not of our own volition go.

In a collection of his writings titled the Meaning of Illness, Groddeck wrote that “he who draws the conclusion that I mentally medicate a human who has broken his leg is very true — but I adjust the fracture and dress the wound. And then — I give him a massage, make exercises with him, give a daily bath to the leg with water at 45°C for half an hour and I take care that he does neither gorge nor booze, and every now and then I ask him: Why did you break your leg, you yourself ?”

Of course, it is not the conscious self that broke the leg, but the It, which is more you than yourself. I suppose I owe my career to mine.

Somewhere in Sexus, the first installment of The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller writes that “imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything.”

I don’t suppose Miller is taken very seriously as a thinker. Neither is Colin Wilson. Or Alan Watts. Perhaps that’s because none went to college. Watts did attend the King’s School and, later on, an Episcopal seminary prior to being ordained a priest, and I rather suspect that Miller’s secondary education made him as well schooled as most people with a college diploma these days. Wilson, who dropped out of school at 16, is the one among the three who can be thought of as an autodidact.

For two years in college, I had a pretty thorough training in scholastic philosophy, as well as an equally thorough grounding in existential phenomenology. I certainly accumulated more than enough credits to have gone on to graduate school, and I did, in fact, briefly consider applying for admission to Dusquesne, which was at the time the best place to study continental philosophy in this country.

The principal teacher under whom I studied, Edward Gannon, S .J., was probably the most influential person in my life. From him I learned that philosophy isn’t primarily about terms and propositions and syllogisms, but has to do with engaging life with the fullness of one’s being. Thinking certainly figures, of course, and it is essential to know how to reason properly, but understanding life comes from living it, not just thinking about it.

And that is why I like thinkers like Miller and Wilson and Watts. I’ve read my share of academically acknowledged philosophers, though the ones I prefer tend to be those who are among the less approved — Santayana, Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Berdyaev, Shestov, and Unumuno.

Anyway, the whole premise of this column is to follow a train of thought inspired by something someone has said to wherever it happens to lead me. Not to where it necessarily leads, mind you — whatever that may mean — but to where it leads me at the time of writing. For one of the things I learned from Father Gannon is that, to be authentic, philosophy must be philosophy for me. Better to imperfectly think my way to a conclusion that satisfies me than to precisely parrot the notions of someone else.

The Miller quote that I began this column with popped into my head a couple of days after an odd notion suddenly occurred to me as I crossed the street to my house on my way home from shopping. Suppose, I wondered, that we are to God as the characters in a novel are to that novel’s author? Everything we know about Mr. Micawber can be directly traced to the imaginations of Charles Dickens, right? Maybe my entire being, down to the least detail, is being made up by God.

Of course, the relation of an author to his characters is not as simple and straightforward as one might think. I remember Peter Straub giving a talk in which he said that, while every writer enters upon a project with a clear plan and specific intentions, if the writer is smart, he will pay attention to the characters he has consigned to the periphery. He might just see one waving his arms and shouting, “Forget about that other guy! I’m the one you want to write about.” According to Straub, if the author knows what’s good for him, he’ll take the hint.

So maybe Micawber and Dickens inhabited Dickens’s imagination together, and Micawber had a certain measure of autonomy.

God, presumably, would be able to exercise greater control, indeed total control. But perhaps he is too good a creator to do that. But then he would have to consent to being led to some extent by his creatures. And might this not make him complicit in our misdeeds?

Oh, I know the conventionally religious would likely find this notion blasphemous. But perhaps it is even more blasphemous to think that God in any way lacks the courage of his creativity. Maybe he really is willing to dare to create anything.

Recently, I watched a DVD of Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest, in which Prospero is renamed Prospera and is played by Helen Mirren. I rather liked it. The Tempest is my favorite Shakespeare play, and I am always moved to tears by those great lines toward the end:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

The very last lines, in particular — “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” — have always seemed to me koan-like in their suggestiveness.

It is easy to think that “rounded with a sleep” is equivalent to Nabokov’s formulation in Speak, Memory, that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” But Shakespeare doesn’t say “darkness.” He says “sleep.” One cannot sleep and dream unless one is alive.

Of course, there is no suggestion in Shakespeare’s line that it is we who are sleeping or dreaming. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is we who are the ingredients of the dreams being dreamed by some sleeper or other.

Or maybe not. The clue may lie in that word “rounded,” which is usually thought to mean surrounded, but that I think can just as easily be taken as “rounded off.” This would suggest — and I believe this is a common interpretation — that Shakespeare was saying much the same as his younger Spanish contemporary, Pedro Calderon, says in one of his most famous plays, that life is a dream:

What is life? A frenzy.

What is life? An illusion,

A shadow, a fiction,

And the greatest profit is small;

For all of life is a dream,

And dreams, are nothing but dreams.

I do not usually remember my dreams, and those I do remember tend to be pedestrian. But I have had enough experience of them to make what I think are a couple of sound observations. The most interesting thing about them is the way in which they recombine the details of everyday life in something new and strange, often terrifying. I also think it is interesting that, while we sometimes wake in the middle of one, as often as not the dream is rounded off by just plain sleep. It is this, perhaps, that Shakespeare had in mind.

But what are we to make of this? That our being is a sleep punctuated by dreams? Talk about evanescence.

Of course, Shakespeare wasn’t practicing philosophy. He was writing plays, and the thoughts his characters express can really only be attributed to them — the characters. Prospero (or Prospera) is a magician. Small wonder he (or she) would see reality in terms of illusion.

For those of us in the audience, the value of those lines I quoted at the start lies in the richness of their ambiguity, the way thinking about them causes one not only to find them puzzling, but also just as puzzling the life to which they refer. This is great poetry precisely because it does not offer any solutions or explanations. It doesn’t just prompt one to think on the mystery of things, but to feel that mystery as part and parcel of being alive.

Perhaps the essential note of being alive is never to be quite sure what is going on.

I think the best thing that has ever been said on the subject of prayer was said by the medieval mystic known as Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”

This, of course, is precisely the most difficult prayer to utter when you are not feeling at all reverent …and yet it would seem the one most necessary at precisely such a time.

I have been in something of a funk lately. Several different things seem to have contributed to this. Walking to and from work, I have been more acutely aware than before of the changes that have taken place in Philadelphia over the years. There are so many buildings there now that were not there when I was growing up, and those that were there when I was growing up, if they have not been demolished, have been spiffed up almost beyond recognition.

I am not especially averse to change, especially change for the better. But the sudden realization that a world I had known so well for so long had been transmogrified was unnerving, especially since I had scarcely noticed the change taking place.

But there were other, grimmer things contributing to my funk. I received word that a college chum had died. Though younger than I, he had been ill for some time, enfeebled by strokes. I remembered how handsome and high-spirited he had been.

Next a neighbor died, a very nice fellow who lived only a couple of doors away. Then, only yesterday, I learned that a woman I had known since her teens — a friend of my oldest stepdaughter — was being treated for breast cancer. And just today I was told that another woman whom I have known a very long time may have early onset dementia.

Obviously, I have a lot to be thankful for, since I am in pretty good health and am still productive. I could easily match the foregoing litany of woe with one of good fortune.

But I don’t think thankfulness for good fortune is quite what Meister Eckhart had in mind. It’s easy to say thanks for good fortune. What about life in toto, with all of its misfortunes, disappointments, and pain?

The prayer of thank you Eckhart was suggesting, I think, is an unconditional one. And there can be nothing glib or sentimental about it. To utter such a prayer would entail an unusual leap of faith, in fact. For this is to say thank you come what may. And to utter that, it seems to me, is almost to tempt fate. At least for an ordinary mortal like myself.

So Eckhart’s formula is one of those things that looks great at first glance, but upon closer examination reveals itself as not only not as easy as it sounds, but also quite possibly perilous.

To reach a point where one could utter it, one would have to, in Eliot’s phrase, “apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time.” And that, as Eliot goes on to point out “is an occupation for the saint — / No occupation either, but something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love.”

As one who can scarcely claim to have given my lifetime over to death in love, I suspect I had better steer clear of uttering Eckhart’s cosmic affirmation just yet.

We yearn for satori because we think we would feel so much better if we were enlightened, amd could see into the depths of things and know, as Julian of Norwich said, “all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.” But we fail to realize that the premise for such enlightenment is — again, the words are Eliot’s — “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).”