Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella concludes a blog post titled “On Hitchens and Death”,  by suggesting that “if materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?”

Paul Tillich, on the other hand, wrote that “being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.”

Of course, Tillich presumed that truth is a value precisely because he did not believe — as I presume Vallicella doesn’t, either — that materialism is true.

But suppose someone pursued the truth “religiously” and concluded, to his great hurt, but inescapably, that materialism is true. This would lead him, presumably, to reject “religion” in any conventional sense. But that would be the “religious” thing to do, if Tillich is right and the passionate inquiry into the meaning of existence is what religion is all about. Hard to see how finding out that the answer to the question is that existence has no meaning would change that.

The problem with the notion that a life-enhancing illusion would be preferable to such a truth is that once one knows something to be true it is pretty hard to counter it with what one knows to be an illusion. People may believe things that are not true, but not because they are untrue.

There is another problem as well, and that is that truth is not exclusively — or even primarily — a matter of thought. The only truth worth embracing is a living truth, one that is a product of experience, not ratiocination.

I am not an irrationalist. I have the greatest respect for the intellect. I use it all the time, I hope correctly.

I also like philosophy. But philosophy as an academic discipline is not the same as philosophy as a way of life, and a professor of philosophy may not necessarily be a philosopher. I’m sure there are people who are both, but I have met a number of people with graduate degrees in philosophy who struck me as being among the least philosophical of humans.

I am writing this in a cabin in the middle of a woods overlooking a stream that, this summer, had mostly dried up — though now, thanks to a steady, ongoing rain, it has swollen to something more than its usual burbling self.

I have been reading Basho up here. The great haiku master is a perfect companion for a trip to the mountains. Reading him, though, I got to thinking about why I read him.

In large part, it is because — like the Zen masters and certain mystics — he prompts you to feel that the key to the meaning of life is right there under your nose — in the sound of a frog jumping into a pond, at the sight of some blossoms scarcely visible beneath a hedge — just waiting to be noticed. He certainly reminds us that truth is something to be encountered, not figured out.

We imagine that if the sort of encounter Basho hints at over and over could happen to us we could make our way through life serene and content, unperturbed by its slings and arrows, pitfalls and pain. In other words, our pursuit of enlightenment is another subset in our pursuit of pleasure. We do not want to know the truth for its own sake, no matter what. We want to know it because we think it will make us feel good.

Basho’s life was by no means serene. His health was frail He died at 50. The pilgrimages he undertook in the final decade of his life were often arduous:

Exhausted

Seeking an inn:

Wisteria flowers.

This is Robert Aitken’s translation, in A Zen Wave: Basho’s Haiku and Zen. Aitken notes that “Basho traveled on foot, often in rather poor health,” and he translates a passage from Basho’s journal describing the experience leading up to this poem:

Most of the things I had brought for my journey turned out to be impediments and I threw them away. However, I still carried my paper robe, my straw raincoat, ink stone, paper, lunch box, and other things on my back — quite a load for me. More and more my legs grew weaker and my body lost strength. Making wretched progress, with knees trembling, I carried on as best I could, but I was utterly weary.

Basho’s exhaustion was real, overwhelming and not at all pleasant. It was also integral to the experience recorded in the haiku. His joy in the wisteria blossoms is inseparable from the pain he endured.

This haiku seems to me a perfect illustration of truth as something that must be experienced, not simply thought about. But the experience can only be hinted at. No one can tell you the truth, because the truth for you must be something that you encounter on your own. Basho can point you in the right direction. But you have to make the pilgrimage yourself, on your own dime.

Recently, as I sat in a booth at my favorite luncheonette — Mr. G’s at 12th and Callowhill — waiting for my lunch to arrive, I did something I actually don’t do very often: I read the City Paper.

The big piece seemed to be one written by someone named Jeffrey C. Billman suggesting that we get serious about the national debt. One of the sub-heads caught my eye: “Spending cuts are not the answer.”

To be fair, the article itself does say that “spending cuts may be part of the equation.” That still didn’t strike me as being especially serious. After all, one sure way to cut down on debt is to stop spending so much. It’s not just part of the equation; it’s the essential part.

But the sentence that really arrested my attention was this: “The 2001 tax cuts cost $1.35 trillion over 10 years; that dwarfs Obama’s $787 billion stimulus.” The tax cuts cost? Cost whom? Certainly not the people who didn’t have to pay them. What Billman means, of course, is that the cuts cost the government revenue.

His source for this is something called CBPR. I wondered what that was, so I Googled it, and found that it is something called Community-Based Participatory Research.

Maybe Billman should have used something a little more official, such as the Congressional Budget Office. Had he done so, he would have found that in January the estimate for the stimulus package had been upped $75 billion to $862 billion.

As for the cost of those tax cuts, CBO figures indicate that while a $325 billion surplus for fiscal year 2006 had been projected in 2000, the actual figures for 2006 registered a $247 billion deficit. Add those figures together and you get a whopping $572 million net drop.

Only it had little to do with tax cuts. Historical averages of federal tax revenues range between 17. 9 percent and 18.3 percent of GDP. Federal tax revenues in 2006 were 18.4 percent of GDP. The reason for the deficit was that government spent $237 billion more than had been projected. The CBO had, by the way, projected that the tax cuts would result in a $188 billion drop in revenue; the actual drop was $58 billion.

I have no interest in engaging in a statistical pissing contest over this, however. You can find the whole story by reading this CBO report: The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2001-2010.

What interests me is the thinking that underlies that phrase “tax cuts cost.” The presumption seems to be that the primary function of  citizens is to underwrite the government. Actually, that is not the function of citizens. That is the function of subjects.

Another presumption underlying the thought that tax cuts “cost” is that government ought to be doing all sorts of things for which it is manifestly unsuited. If you think education in this country has improved since the establishment of a federal Department of Education, then you need to read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education.

You can visit the Gulf to see what a great job the Department of Energy has been doing.

On the whole, the government neither makes anything nor sells anything. It is largely unproductive. And when it tries to be otherwise, the results are not pretty. In April, for instance, the Government Accountability Office issued a report declaring that the United States Postal Service was no longer economically viable. And those of us who live in Pennsylvania already know what a fine job our state does when it comes to selling wine and spirits.

State stores start by tacking on a uniform 30 percent markup on the price of every bottle. Next, they add a $1.40 handling charge. Then, there’s the 18 percent Johnstown Flood Tax. The flood referred to isn’t the legendary 1889 one. The PLCB didn’t exist then. No, this was the 1936 Johnstown flood. No matter that the town has since recovered. None of the tax collected goes to Johnstown anyway. It goes to the state’s general fund. Oh, and originally it was 10 percent. There’s also something called “the round-up.” But I’ll let this video explain that. On top of all of which there is the 6 percent state sales tax. Together, these practically double the price of a $10 bottle of wine. If any private seller tried this sort of thing they’d be prosecuted.

In a strange way, though, Mr. Billman is right. Spending and taxes aren’t really the problem. They’re just symptoms. The problem is that we now have a political class that has come to think of itself as a ruling class. According to Rasmussen Reports, 58 percent of those polled favor repeal of the recently enacted healthcare legislation. That’s four points higher than the number who opposed the legislation before it was passed. Polls also indicate that Americans overwhelmingly approve of Arizona’s immigration law. Yet the political class — including the President, Justice Department and, so far, one federal judge — beg to differ.

This column usually focuses on a famous quotation. Today I end with one. What Talleyrand said of the thick-headed Bourbons applies perfectly to today’s political class: “They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.” It’s time the citizenry got around to teaching them a thing or two.

In the July 14 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, David Wheatley begins his review of Letters of Louis MacNeice by noting that “the Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs.”

I am not sure if I ever knew this, and had long since forgotten it, but I do know that I have often thought this way. It has long seemed to me that when we are born we get in line behind all those who are already here, and those who come after get in line behind those of us who have already arrived.

This is but one of a number of odd ways I have of looking at time. I also have this notion that we really only experience one full year of life — our first. Our second year represents one-half of our lives up to that time, our third year a third, and so on. I am now living one-sixty-ninth of my life. This, I think, explains why time seems to go faster the older we get.

Time is the measure of duration, which is characterized by change, often not for the better. Things wear out the longer they go on. I was astonished recently to come upon a picture of myself from 12 years ago. My hair was still dark brown, my beard but a mix of brown and gray. Now the beard is white and the hair is gray tending to white.

Yet people still tell me I look younger than my years. If this be so, it must be because I still walk with a youthful swagger: I don’t feel old yet.

I am listening just now to a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. My first recording of this was by the Philadelphia Orchestra with Philippe Entrement as the soloist. At the time it was made, I believe, Entremont was a very handsome young man in his 20s. He is now a portly gentleman of 76. Looking at a photo of him as he looks today it is impossible to see any trace of the dashing young man he once was.

One of the characters in Strindberg’s great play The Ghost Sonata is called the Mummy. She once was a beautiful young woman. In fact, a statue of her as she was when she was young and beautiful is on display in the house where the action takes place. The Mummy herself, however, old and wizened beyond recognition, now lives hidden away in a closet. At one point the Student, who is the play’s protagonist, encounters her looking at the statue. He is stunned to learn that the statue is she as she once was. “Yes,” she tells him, “life does that to us.”

It is an unforgettable scene.

The Greeks’ view of time goes a long way toward explaining why the passage of time so often takes us by surprise: It is creeping up on us from behind.

And then … there is that feeling we have, when we think over our lives, that less and less of it is before us and more and more behind. Past and future alike creep up on us from behind.

What I find interesting in all of this is the metaphors we use for time. The Greeks were right, of course: We enter upon a show that has been going on long before we made our entrance and will likely continue going on for a good long time after we have made our exit.

On the other hand, once we make that entrance, we go off on our own and the metaphor shifts from an event we have joined to a journey we are taking.

All of this makes clear only one thing: That time, the measure of our living duration, is peculiarly mysterious, and that its mystery mirrors the mystery of being in the first place.

Many years ago, when I was a senior at what was then St. Joseph’s College, the college drama club mounted a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

I have no acting ability. I can only play myself (which means, I suppose, that I am — at least potentially — a star). But the members of the club were a part of the set I hung out with, and I spent a lot of time backstage. In fact, I had a modest role in that production of Much Ado: I was the prompter, standing every night in the little box at the center-front of the stage, reading along as the actors spoke their lines, ready to help them out if their memories faltered.

I don’t recall ever having to prompt anyone, so I ended up just reading the script every night. You would think I would know the play better than any other, but mostly what has stayed with me are some lines of Dogberry’s, in particular these: “Well, God’s a good man. An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.” This has always struck me as the nearest thing in Western literature to a Zen koan.

Dogberry, of course, is the night constable given to malapropisms (”Comparisons are odorous,” he declares). But Dogberry and his fellow watchmen, bumbling though they may be, are the ones who inadvertently uncover Don John’s plot and in so doing set the play on its course toward a happy ending.

So in retrospect Dogberry’s silly remark about God can be taken as having more weight than at first seems the case.

It’s the image that has always intrigued me: God as the horseman and man as the rider clinging to him from behind. What a way of portraying Providence.

Some would probably consider it irreverent, but all it really does is convey the comic aspect of man’s relation to God, something too little is made of. I sometimes think God himself must grow weary at times of the reverence incessantly directed his way and long for some down-to-earth candor. “If this is how you treat your friends,” St. Teresa of Avila once prayed, “then no wonder you have so few of them.”

God must have found having someone tell him how she really felt in no uncertain terms an immensely refreshing change from the usual obsequious blather.

When I was growing up, the joke about Catholics was that they didn’t read the Bible, only the New Testament. The vernacular Mass, however, now includes plenty of passages from the Old Testament, and I must say I don’t find many of them edifying. Recently, for instance, there was the story of Athaliah, who upon the death of her husband, King Jehoram and her son, Ahaziah, had all of her grandchildren killed (except Joash,  who was secretly saved by Athaliah’s sister) and took the throne herself. When Joash came of age, he was hailed as the true king and Athaliah was deposed and executed.

Great story, though I am at a loss to figure out what its place during Mass might be. On the other hand, I have always thought that the book of Job was not without its humorous elements. Oh, I know that what happens to Job is literally God-awful. But the premise of the story — God making a bet with Satan, who seems to have heavenly visiting privileges and be on quite cordial terms with the deity — has always struck me as at least a tad comic.

The same may be said of the book’s conclusion. Job never does curse God — who thereby wins the bet — but he does curse the day he was born. God apparently takes umbrage at this — after all, Job exists, like everything else, because God chooses that he exist. So God decides to disguise himself as a whirlwind and upbraid his ungrateful creature.

What is funny is that he offers no real justification for what he has done other than that he could do it. “Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?” In other words, I’m God, and you’re not, and I’m not answerable to you or anybody else.

I gather, by the way, that those who insist on Scripture’s being taken literally are likely to gloss over such details as God’s and Satan’s chumminess and God’s ostensible amoralism. I’m not a Biblical literalist myself, but I think it worth pondering all of this in light of Dogberry’s quip: Just what kind of a horsemen is it we’re hitching a ride from?

I know I am not the only person who, upon being intrigued by an idea encountered in a book or during a conversation, finds himself subsequently running into said idea over and over again.

Earlier this year, in Josef Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas, I came upon this: “the reality and character of things consist in their being creatively thought by the Creator.” This prompted me to begin thinking of myself as “being creatively thought by the Creator.” Lo and behold, I began running into like notions in the days and weeks that followed.

My last three columns have had to do with looking at the world minus the labels we attach to its contents. Well, last week I read a book — re-read it, actually; I first read it about 40 years ago — in which this sentence, not surprisingly, popped right out at me: “It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, aspects of things.” Then, on the very next page, there was this: “Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make them the current coin of experience ….”

This book advocates that we “‘purify’ the senses” in order “to make them organs of direct perception,” adding that “this means we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences” and “escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life, where everything is classified and labeled.” Such a life of “pure sensation,” the book suggests, “would mean that we should receive from every flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the label ‘flower’ has been affixed, but the full impact of its unimaginable beauty and wonder.”

I could hardly disagree with any of this since I had been entertaining similar notions here for three weeks running. (Once again, I must remind readers that the point of this column is to record trains of thought, not to advance theses and argue on their behalf. If I have learned anything from writing the column it is how quaint this practice has become. Discourse seems to have devolved almost entirely into advocacy of one sort or another. The notion of thinking of yourself as “being creatively thought by the Creator” just to see what that feels like, and irrespective of whether or not you believe in a Creator, is apparently alien to many people these days.)

Anyway, about that book I was reading. It is called Practical Mysticism and is by Evelyn Underhill, best-known for Mysticism, a Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness.

I hadn’t thought of the ideas I discussed in my three previous columns in terms of mysticism, either practical or otherwise, but I had mentioned the sense of mystery I experienced when I tried looking at the world as best I could unencumbered by the categories of thought. One of the more interesting things about Underhill’s book is that, from the start, her position is that what is called “mysticism” is really about encountering what she calls “Reality.”  Her point is that the world seen in terms of pure sensation, unmediated by abstractions, itself provides an experience of transcendence:

Real knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more or less intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension, the union: and we, in our muddle-headed way, have persuaded ourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge — that it is, in fact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it. But when we get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitive activities through which our mental kitchen gets its supplies, we see that the distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and intuition. The question which divides them is really this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon — with what aspects of the universe shall it “unite”?

From this passage you can see that Underhill, as a writer, was no airy-fairy dreamer. She has a clear, direct, and down-to-earth style. And it looks to me as if she got across what I was driving at better than I did.

Patterns are not categories. This thought occurred to me not long after I finished my last column. I was walking along Lombard Street past a parking lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. I looked down and noticed that next to the fence some flowers were growing and that there was a shallow pile of yellow leaves around the bottom of each and that the wind had formed each pile into a similar pattern.

My last column had much to do with categories, arrived at by classifying a group of individuals in terms of the features that they share (and ignoring all the ones they don’t share). Categories, it seemed to me, were purely mental constructs, useful to a degree, but also misleading. A pattern, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon. One discerns a pattern. One does not construct it.

My friend Harold Boatrite, the composer, likes to distinguish between a pattern and a form. He points out that the diatonic scale, with its perfect fifth at the beginning and augmented fourth toward the end, constitutes a form. That perfect fifth has a very strong tonic root, whereas the augmented fourth has no discernible root. That sets up a problem that is resolved upon reaching the octave, which returns you to the tonic.

By way of contrast, the whole tone scale — and the chromatic scale — is simply a pattern, a series of notes.

What is important here is that these patterns and forms are real, not mere mental constructs. This got me to realize that not all categories are the same. Those based on discernible patterns and forms are different from those based on what the schoolmen would have called accidents of being. It is important to know that a given poem is a sonnet and not a villanelle, because the two forms shape what is being said in quite different ways.

The point of these columns, as I said in the very first one, is to follow the method of  Montaigne by taking a subject — usually expressed in the form of a quotation — and tracking the train of thought it initiates. It is, in other words, a record of experience, and, as Bryan Appleyard recently observed, “Our experiences seem to be the central fact of our existence.” Moreover, as he also notes, “My experience of a Vermeer is just that: my experience. And telling me why it happens is not the same as saying what it is.”

This column and my two preceding columns have tracked a train of thought initiated in my mind by Lichtenberg’s observation that “Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua.”

I arrived at what I think may be the terminus ad quem of that thought train the other day when it brought to mind what God says to Moses in Exodus, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” This has been variously translated as “I am who am” or “I am that I am,” though I gather that it literally means something like “I will be that I will be.”

It is certainly a mysterious utterance and has always seemed to me rather a sophisticated notion for some tribes wandering the desert all those many years ago to have hit upon. I presume it is what inspired the theologian Paul Tillich to define God as “the ground of being.”

But what occurred to me was that there might be another and perhaps even better way of interpreting it. Perhaps God is the ground, not of being, but of identity. What’s the difference? Merely to be is one thing, but to know that you are and who you are — well, that is something else again.  Perhaps — to change but one word in Lichtenberg’s formula — it is God who creates, not genera and species, but individua.

It is hard to imagine how else the ground of identity could create.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a follow-up to any of these columns, but I feel the need to elaborate somewhat further on what I said in my last one. In particular, I have been thinking quite a lot about one sentence in the passage I quoted from one of G. C. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books: “Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things at the same time.”

I think this is precisely right and that we ought to ponder it more deeply. Darwin may have thought he figured out the origin of species, but the fact remains that no species had its origin as a species. Each must have begun with a single individual. Interestingly, the mythic tales of man’s origin — including the one in Genesis — all begin with the creation of … a particular individual, from whom all the rest of us are presumed to descend.

Nevertheless, we have all become accustomed to looking at things in terms of the categories by which we classify them. We walk down a street in the commercial district of the city we live in and see a bunch of guys dressed in three-piece pin-striped suits and naturally assume that all of them are businessmen or professionals on the way to the office.

We are probably right, but how much of value does that tell us about the individuals themselves? No doubt very little. And suppose that among them is a professional hit man dressed like all the rest so as not to draw attention to himself while stalking the mafia lawyer he has been hired to blow away.

The only thing individuals really have in common is also the thing that differentiates them from every other individual: their uniqueness. To return to the religious perspective, if there be a God who created us, who he created would be you and me, him and her, never us. God, the ultimate singularity, wouldn’t do species, only individuals. Indeed, would not our uniqueness constitute that image of him in which we are said to have been made? (This, by the way, would poke yet another hole in intelligent-design theory.)

Anyway, it is worthwhile trying to see the world divested of its man-made categories, and instead as the aggregate of individuals that it actually is. Who knows how deep down the individuality runs? Perhaps the trees’ leaves regard themselves as individuals, perhaps our own organs — heart, liver, brain — and the cells of which they are composed think the same.

But look about you as you stroll around town and remind yourself that it’s not a sea of humanity you are moving through, but a multitude of individuals, you among them. I have been trying to do this since I wrote my last column. You might think this would heighten the sense of one’s own isolation. But actually, what it heightens is the sense of mystery. Stripped of those categories, the world seems much less comprehensible than before.

And that, I think, is good, since those categories provide a false sense of security. They lead us to see things strictly in terms of how we classify them. What’s wrong with that? Well, you classify different individuals according to what they have in common. This means that you must necessarily exclude everything else that they do not have in common. To view the world in terms of categories is to view it in a profoundly incomplete and skewered fashion. That’s bad enough. Worse is the sense this gives us that we actually arrive at some real understanding of things that way.

I usually start each day by attending morning Mass. I find it useful for drawing myself into focus for the day. Lately, during Mass, but especially during the time that I spend sitting quietly afterward, the aforementioned sense of mystery has preoccupied my thoughts. I find myself enveloped in doubt, the sense that I am not really sure of anything, and that no one else is, either, however vehement they may be about what they think they know.

And that is when I experience — not merely realize intellectually — what John Henry Newman meant when he said that “faith means being capable of bearing doubt.” The upshot is that I leave the church invigorated by the sheer incomprehensibility of being. Suddenly, it all seems such a grand adventure.

I began this column on May 12, the same date on which in 1895 J. Krishnamurti was born. I had chosen a quote from him for the “Thought for the Day” feature on my blog: “A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.”

I thought I might take that as my point of departure for the column I was planning for last Tuesday. But then I started looking at some other things Krishnamurti had said. I came upon a talk he gave in Bombay in 1948 in which he said that “ideas create only further ideas.” Later in that same talk, he says, “When do you have creative moments, a sense of joy and beauty? Only when the thinker is absent, when the thought process comes to an end. Then, in the interval between two thoughts, is creative joy.”

In other words, you can’t think your way to truth. Or, to put it another way, you can’t arrive at the truth by thinking about it. Krishnamurti goes even further: “Truth cannot be invited. It must come to you. To search for truth is to deny truth.”

I found all this singularly disconcerting. After all, what else was I doing, writing a column, other than countering ideas with other ideas, and seeking truth by thinking about it?

This proved to be more than something getting in the way of meeting a deadline. It really stopped me dead in my tracks. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, and the one thing it seemed I ought not to do about it was think about it.

As it happens, I have a pretty good capacity for “sitting quietly, doing nothing,” as one Zen master phrased it. And that is pretty much what I did, along with puttering about in the garden, taking long, aimless strolls, and cooking.

I even read aimlessly. That first night, while straightening up my home office, I came upon a copy of the NYRB edition of R.J. Hollingdale’s selections from Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. I’ve never been that impressed by Lichtenberg, but I have to say I was taken by Item No. 3 on Page 1 of Notebook A:

With many a science the endeavor to discover a universal principle is perhaps often just as fruitless as would be the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover a primal universal substance out of which all minerals had arisen. Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things in the same time. These conceptions become more and more inaccurate the larger the families we invent for ourselves are.

This resonated with me because I have always thought that what makes this person or thing who or what he, she or it is is precisely what he, she or it does not have in common with anyone or anything else. Species, therefore, are categories of thought. Individuals are the genuine article.

I was, of course, thinking again. And what I was thinking was this: Suppose the proffered explanations of life and the world — religious, philosophical, scientific — are all, not so much wrong, as simply inadequate to the task. Some may be truer than others. Some may be completely wrong. One may be the best of the bunch, but still fall woefully short in all sorts of ways.

I found this somehow exhilarating. I found myself walking about looking at a world that had become newly and deeply mysterious, perhaps impenetrably so.

Then, over the weekend, my friend Dave Lull sent me a link to a post about Arts Education on a blog called The Frontal Cortex. I posted the link on my blog and commented that I thought “the most obvious justification for arts education would be the glories of art.” Certainly, Anna Karenina, Mozart’s C Major Mass, or Michelangelo’s David need no neuroscientific justification. They are their own justification.

And that was that until a couple of days ago, when I was among some pedestrians crossing Vine Street at Broad. We were crossing against the light, but the only cars headed our way were pretty far down the pike on the other side of Broad Street. I was pulling up the rear and noticed that one of those cars was moving much faster than the others. It was in the middle lane and whizzed by me just after I stepped out of the left lane onto the sidewalk. The driver of the car had never slowed down a bit. I suddenly realized that, but for a matter of inches and seconds, I could easily have been punted down Vine Street across the goalpost of life.

This momentary frisson of fear was followed for some reason — or none — by a complete non sequitur. I suddenly realized that what I had said on my blog about art was also true of life. It is its own justification. Religion, philosophy and science do not explain life, because they are contained by life. They are among the many things that life, in its human dimension at least, does.

Life needs no explanation. Just as a poem means precisely what it says precisely the way it says it, so life means what it is just the way it happens.

This was, for me, a kind of satori. Not that I experienced any blazing sense of transcendence. No, it was quite matter-of-fact, actually. As another Zen master explained: Before you enter upon the way of Zen, a tree is just a tree. But once you enter upon the way, a tree is no longer a tree. Should you arrive at satori, a tree is just a tree.

But what a tree.

Every day, on my blog, I post a “thought for the day.” Usually, it is something said by someone born on that date. On April 26, for instance, the quote was from Ludwig Wittgenstein, born on April 26, 1889: “For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”

I’ve thought about this a good deal since I posted it, and have come to the provisional conclusion that it demonstrates considerable insight into the nature of the truly religious man but noticeably less into the nature of tragedy.

The truly religious man — who may not necessarily be a regular churchgoer — leads a life grounded in faith and hope. His outlook is fundamentally life-affirming. I use the somewhat clunky term “life-affirming” because I do not want to suggest that such a man is simply an “optimist” who has somehow convinced himself that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

No, the fundamentally religious stance toward life is to rejoice in it on precisely its own terms. John Hall Wheelock puts the matter quite simply:

Was it not worth it to be born,

To have felt this sun, to have drawn this breath!

Is life not worth the price of death!

Wheelock also says, in another poem, that

… the nature of things is tragic

And meaningful beyond words, that to have lived

Even if once only, once and no more,

Will have been-oh, how truly-worth it.

Now it may seem at first glance that if Wheelock’s outlook is truly religious — as I think it is — then Wittgenstein is simply and entirely wrong. But I don’t think that is the case. Wittgenstein correctly understands that the truly religious man sees things differently. But he incorrectly assumes that this involves a failure to recognize the tragic, whereas it is precisely the tragic that the religious man sees differently.

Thanks mostly to Aristotle, the term tragedy is generally thought to refer to the downfall of a great man brought about through a flaw in his character. Cast in the crudest terms, it is a story with an unhappy ending. Dante called his great poem Commedia (it was Boccaccio who tacked on the Divina) because God’s creation must necessarily resolve itself in harmony.

Nevertheless — and Aristotle notwithstanding — the Greek plays that gave us the notion of tragedy did not exactly end unhappily. True, Oedipus the King ends with the high and mighty ruler of Thebes self-blinded and driven into exile. But that is only the beginning of the story. The conclusion takes place in the grove at Colonus where the fallen monarch, having achieved enlightenment through suffering, is for all practical purposes assumed into heaven. The myth resolves itself in harmony.

The keyword in all of this is meaningful. The nature of things is not merely tragic. It is also, as Wheelock says, meaningful. And not merely so. It is “meaningful beyond words.”

To separate the tragic from the meaningful is to misunderstand both, and to not merely think this, but to have a deep-seated faith that it is so and live accordingly, is what it means to be truly religious. Absent that, scripture, tradition, and ritual together amount to nothing more than St. Paul’s sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Such a faith, of course,  also stands directly counter to a purely naturalistic and mechanistic view of life and the world — which, like it or not, comes down to thinking that everything at bottom is a fluke and will play its ineluctable causal way out to eventual entropy.

As for me, I prefer to hope that Julian of Norwich is right, and that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I have been paging through a book I first read many years ago when I was in college, a collection of poems by Denise Levertov called O Taste and See. It is a New Directions paperback (for I mean the actual book, now nearly half a century old).

I bought it in the long-vanished Arcade Bookstore, which was located in the ground floor of the Commercial Trust Building (also long-gone) on 15th Street between Market and Chestnut. I read it on the El on my way home (I didn’t live on campus; I commuted, which was cheaper).

I can still remember being curled up in one of the corner seats on the way to the Bridge Street Terminal and coming upon one poem in particular that clutched the short hairs of my soul.

It’s called “The Old Adam” and tells of  an  “old man who has failed his memory … who thought the dollar was sweet and / couldn’t make a buck,” and who has come to the end of his days asking

… what it’s too late to ask:

‘Where is my life? Where is my life?

What have I done with my life?’

I remember looking up and staring out the window and thinking to myself, “I sure as hell don’t want to end up like that.”

Of course, I realize now that we all end up like that, at least those of us with an introspective bent. I don’t mean that we all end up thinking we’ve wasted our lives, but we are all likely to weigh ourselves in the balance and, if we are at all honest, find ourselves — to some degree at least — wanting. After all, nobody bats a thousand and a mere three out of 10 puts you at the top of the lineup.

In short, you start out wondering what life is all about, and end up wondering what it’s all added up to.

The funny thing is, I am not so sure I could have made more of my life even if I had tried. I suspect I would have simply made something different of it. And, for two reasons, I can’t regret not having done that: First, I am not altogether displeased with how my life has turned out, and second, I have no way of knowing if a different life would have proved better than the one I have lived.

No, if I have any regrets — and I’m not really given to such, or to nostalgia — they would have to do with not making the most of things, of taking for granted too many people who did so much for me and too many things that gave me joy.

Actually, though, now that I think about it, as I edge nearer the Biblical age, what bothers me most is not what I could have done or didn’t do, but that I necessarily have comparatively little time left in which to do anything. Every walk I take has a valedictory quality to it. Mothers with their children seem so young and I realize how young I must have seemed years ago to those whose age I have reached.

Recently I was walking down a stretch of 13th Street in Center City and I noticed how upscale all the shops and cafes and restaurants had become. A closed-up dive was the only remnant of the charming seediness that distinguished the area when I first got to know it in college. I suddenly became cognizant of all the changes that had accrued over the years and I realized I no longer quite recognized my native city. The factories that flourished when I was a kid are now either empty or have been turned into condos. Even the South Philly neighborhood I live in now is becoming gentrified.

A few minutes ago, I took a break from writing this column to do a turn on the patio. While I was there I did some weeding in one of the flower beds. One of the earliest clear memories I have is of helping my mother in the garden when I was about 4, and to this day yard work is among the most satisfying activities I can think of.

I can understand why Henry Miller wrote, late in life, that if he had it to do over again he would be a gardener.

So might I.

Even people who don’t read much poetry tend to be familiar with the lines that conclude Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I suspect most readers think of this as poetic hyperbole, charming enough in its way, but hardly to be taken seriously as a philosophical proposition. After all, what it is proposing is that beauty and truth are convertible, and while it may be that what is beautiful is necessarily also true, it seems a stretch to suggest that what is true is necessarily beautiful. But I think this is because we tend to confuse fact with truth.

It is a fact that the Civil War took place. But to call that war an example of truth seems somehow inappropriate. And when something purported to be a fact turns out not to be one, the falsification that has taken place is itself true

In other words, just because something is true doesn’t mean that it can be taken as representing truth. Truth, fundamentally, refers to some bedrock sense underlying and encompassing things. One reason the fact of the Civil War cannot be equated with truth in this sense is the sheer, overwhelming ugliness of it all, the utter absence of beauty. To be sure, things took place during the war, as in every war — acts of heroism and sacrifice — that can be thought of as beautiful. But not the war itself.

Beauty itself, of course, isn’t always pretty, either. Laocoön is among the greatest of sculptures, but what it depicts is horrifying. The Greek tragedies are among the most beautiful works of literature. But they remain tragedies. Nothing pretty about Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes.

What Keats was getting at, I think, was something akin to what physicists mean when they talk of equations or hypotheses as being “elegant.” Rationalists insist that reason is the primary and decisive factor in arriving at truth. But this has long seemed to me to be slightly dotty, if only because it runs counter to experience. You can have all the known facts down in place as a sound basis for well-crafted arguments, and yet … you don’t feel quite convinced. You have a gnawing suspicion that something has been left out, or overlooked, or misunderstood. These suspicions prompt you to take a fresh look at the problem and, lo and behold, everything suddenly falls into place and you just know you’ve got it at last — and it isn’t as you had reasoned it to be. That falling into place happens because you have grasped the aesthetic component.

To doubt reason’s primacy is not by any means to advocate irrationalism. Reason is an essential tool of human life. But precisely because it is a tool, it can only be used for certain things — a wide range of things, to be sure, but nonetheless distinctly limited in number. Reason understands things solely in terms of itself. It factors out large swaths of life as we actually experience it, namely, emotion and sensation. Oh, it takes them into account for sure, may even grant them a degree of importance, but dismisses out of hand any notion that they play a significant role in understanding.

Reason does not feel. It sees nothing, hears nothing, touches nothing, paints no pictures, tells no tales, sings no songs, though it does play a part in the construction of such things. Emotion and sensation are, in their way, just as limited as reason. By themselves these faculties can only apprehend a part of truth. Each offers only a single dimension of it, and from one particular angle.

The faculty of human consciousness that enables us to put them together is imagination. Thomas Aquinas listed three primary qualities for beauty: integrity, proportion, and  clarity. Reason, sensation and emotion in consort, choreographed by the imagination, enable us to know things and persons — not merely figure them out — in terms of their integrity, proportion, and clarity. This is to encounter what Aquinas calls splendor formae, radiance of form, form in this case meaning, as Jacques Maritain puts it, “the principle which constitutes the proper perfection of all that is, which constitutes and achieves things in their essences and qualities, which is, finally, if one may so put it, the ontological secret that they bear within them, their spiritual being, their operating mystery.”

That operating mystery is what truth is all about.

In March 1894 Jules Renard wrote in his journal that “in order to be truly successful it is necessary, first, that one get there oneself, next, that others do not.” In May, he refined this thought a bit: “It is not enough to be happy: it is also necessary that others not be.”

Both quotes bring to mind one attributed to Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

It is easy to imagine Vidal coming upon Renard’s journal, adapting the Frenchman’s thought, and palming it off as his own. It is certainly easy to see why the mean-spirited Vidal would have taken to the sentiment.

But I sense a slight difference between Renard’s and Vidal’s outlooks. I think Renard was being merely grimly realistic about himself, whereas there is a kind of gleefulness in Vidal’s take. Renard may have felt that way, but I doubt if he was proud of it.

The problem with such a view, of course, is that it makes your success dependent upon what happens to others. Specifically, it renders your satisfaction proportional to their disappointment.

The only success worth having is success on your own terms. Though I am fond of quoting Spike Milligan’s quip that “all I ask is the chance to prove that great wealth won’t corrupt me,” great wealth has not in fact exerted enough of a lure for me to do anything in its pursuit. As for fame, that has never held any appeal for me.

My own terms for success will no doubt strike most people as either becomingly modest or uncommonly frivolous: I ended up doing exactly what I decided I wanted to do in high school. Back then, Philadelphia had a newspaper called The Bulletin.  The Sunday edition had a modest book section — a couple of pages inside the Entertainment section. But a feature on the book pages was a column called “A Writer’s Diary” written by a Canadian author called Robertson Davies. (Davies was not yet as well-known a novelist as he would become. I was in high school in the ’50s and Fifth Business, probably his most famous novel, didn’t come out until 1970.)

His column was wonderful, written in a style as fluent as the best conversation, filled with all sorts of fascinating information, studded with opinions that always seemed truly meet and just. I read it — I do not exaggerate — religiously. And I thought to myself, “Now that is the job I would like to have — reading books and writing about them in the Sunday paper.”

It is, of course, what I ended up doing. I wrote my first professional review just a few months after I finished college. By 1976 I was writing freelance reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1980 I became an Inquirer staffer, then, in 2000, its book editor. I even got that weekly column in the Sunday paper (and now I have a Tuesday one here).

In other words, I did not set out to achieve much, but I did manage to achieve it. Henry Miller says somewhere that a good bit of happiness consists in nothing more than finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time. Since most of us have to spend the lion’s share of our time earning a living, finding a way to make ends meet doing something you like certainly gets you a leg up on the pursuit of happiness.

It also spares you any need to take pleasure in others’ disappointment.

Recently, I was looking at a list of quotations having to do with skepticism. Most were unexceptional platitudes either for or against. One, however, was extraordinary: “In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.”

The first thing that is odd about this is the grouping of cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. Then there is the contrast between those and living musically. And of course there is the question as to what “to live more musically” means.

The author of this peculiar utterance was Vincent Van Gogh, who has come to be regarded as the archetype of the mentally and emotionally unstable artist. But those who have read Van Gogh’s letters know that he was also a remarkably lucid and insightful writer. The quote I have cited may seem odd at first glance, but it richly repays a closer look.

To begin with, there is a brand of skepticism that is merely cynical and amounts to little more than humbug. It is routinely on display at cocktail parties, art openings, and on television talk shows. It is the main ingredient in what is called conventional wisdom, and amounts to nothing more than ideas diluted into fashion statements.

It must be accounted among the wonders of the contemporary world how one can move from a conversation over dinner to a chat in a theater lobby to a brief exchange in a supermarket checkout line and hear different people saying the same things about the same subjects in pretty much the same terms. It’s as if everyone were all reading from the same script. Among a certain set, conversation has devolved into a game of Chinese whispers. One is reminded of Yeats’s poem “The Scholars”:

All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.

It is easy to see why Van Gogh would have contrasted the version of this he was familiar with to music. What could be more unmusical than saying what everybody else is saying?  There is a place for unison in music, but no place for monotony, absence of variation, no change of tempo, and — above all — lack of invention.

But Van Gogh’s point actually has little to do with the terms of contrast and everything to do with the relation between the things being contrasted. He does not suggest that we do anything about the cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. He says only that eventually we will have had our fill of them.

Notice, though, what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that, when we have had our fill of them, we will live more musically. He says only that we will want to. It is a subtle point, subtly made. There is a wistfulness to it, a gentleness, that makes the sentence itself — which is perfectly shaped — seem almost like a melody.

So what might it mean, to live more musically? Well, to spell it out in any great detail would, I suspect, be most unmusical. Think instead of song and dance, of themes and variations, of counterpoint, how voices and tunes can weave in and out among each other, and think of how life — or at least the living of it — could more nearly resemble those.

In the meantime, we are left having to put up with a badinage of talking points.

One commonly writes about something because one is interested in it, and one commonly reads about something for the same reason. But the two lines of interest do not necessarily coincide: What I find interesting to write about you may not find interesting to read about. Write a weekly column and you’ll see what I mean.

Judging by the comments, the column I wrote last week garnered more interest than I expected it would. When I wrote it, I was laid up with maybe the worst cold I had ever had — either that, or I hadn’t had a cold in so long that I had forgotten how unpleasant they can be. At any rate, all I wanted to do was finish writing it and send it off to my long-suffering editor. The column was about labels and I would have labeled the column “adequate.”

Having since discovered that the subject at least, if not my writing about it, is of some interest, and having had time to think further about it while in a far better frame of mind and body, I have decided to expatiate further upon the topic from a somewhat different angle.

My Jesuit mentor, Edward Gannon, S.J., gave a lecture once on the difference between essentialism and existentialism. That lecture was one of the most important events in my life. To this day it influences the way I think and feel and act. The point of it was that essentialism has to do with categorizing, distinguishing one thing from another, which is both necessary and useful, but no way to live.

One illustration that Father Gannon used grabbed me then and has stayed with me since: You get on a bus. You hand the driver your fare, he hands you a transfer, you find a seat and sit down. No words have been exchanged. This is a perfect example of essentialist behavior: The whole transaction has been reduced to a mechanical function. So have you and the bus driver.

The simple insertion of the words “please” and “thank you,” along with actually looking at the driver, would have transformed it into a human encounter, something existential and not merely categorical. My column last week had mostly to do with an essay by Albert Jay Nock in which Nock suggested that political labels tended to be misleading and were best dispensed with. But now that I have had time to think about it, I wonder if the problem is not more serious.

I was talking politics the other day with someone who prefaced his remarks by saying, “The problem with Republicans is …” I have other friends who would preface their remarks by saying, “The problem with liberals is …”

Well, the problem with all of this is that those terms apply to millions of individuals. It is really those individuals you are talking about when you use those terms. Unfortunately, when you use them in the manner cited it is precisely those individuals’ individuality that you are factoring out. In other words, while labels can certainly be useful, they do pose the danger of dehumanizing those you happen to disagree with.

I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a friend of ours — a genuinely caring person — who had spent some time living in rural Kentucky. She went on at some length about how religiously narrow-minded the people in that neck of the woods were. I asked her if she had ever talked to any of them. She thought for a moment, and then admitted that, no, she and her husband had kept to themselves and their academic friends and colleagues. Her view of the natives, it turned out, was based mostly on bumper stickers noticed in parking lots.

I worked for nearly 30 years at a newspaper where most of my colleagues had a faith in the state as a force for good that I could never share. We got along fine. They are good people. And our aims were not all that different: We agreed that steps should be taken to alleviate poverty and disease and injustice. What we differed on was the means that should be employed to deal with these things. We could air our differences in a good-humored way because we knew each other as persons.

So the next time you find yourself inclined to dismiss a large swathe of left- or right-wingers, remind yourself that those are persons you are talking about, persons you should maybe take some time to talk to and get to know.

Even wise and learned people are capable of saying stupid things. I was reminded of this recently when I came upon something once said by Jacques Barzun — who is certainly wise and learned enough: “A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.”

It is actually hard to know quite what to think of this. It would seem to suggest that the difference between a liberal and a conservative is that the former is a fool and the latter a klutz. Oh, I know, I know. True-blue liberals will say that it only suggests that liberals are idealists and conservatives are, well, ill-spoken dolts (hardly a description of the late William F. Buckley, Jr.).

Have it your way if you like, but if I were given the choice — admittedly unappealing — I think I’d rather be a Mr. Malaprop than someone standing on his head all day.

Be that as it may, one person I am sure would object to Barzun’s differentiation is someone he and I both admire: Albert Jay Nock. Here is what Nock has to say on the subject:

Conservatism is a habit of mind which does not generalize beyond the facts of the case in point. It considers those facts carefully, makes sure that as far as possible it has them all in hand, and the course of action which the balance of fact in that case indicates as necessary will be the one it follows; and the course indicates as unnecessary it not only will not follow, but will oppose without compromise or concession.

Do not think that this is a case of a conservative defining his position to his own advantage. This definition appears in a essay called “A Little Conserva-tive.” The essay was prompted, Nock says, because “I was mildly astonished to hear the other day that a person very much in the public eye, and one who would seem likely to know something of what I have been up to during all these years, had described me as ‘one of the most intelligent conservatives in the country.’”

The reason for Nock’s astonishment was that “for more than a quarter of a century I have been known, in so far as I was known at all, as a radical.” When called upon “to label myself with reference to particular social theories or doctrines,” he had described himself as “an anarchist, an individualist, and a single taxer.”

Nock’s essay takes its title from a patter song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe:

I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liber-al
Or else a little Conserva-tive.

The point of his essay is that such labels are invariably misleading and that we should simply stop using them and ignore them when they are used by others. In the case of conservatism, precisely because it is a habit of mind and not a coherent philosophy, it is ‘unserviceable” as a label. It is, he says, “easily weaseled into an imposter-term or a term of reproach, or again into one of derision, as implying a complete stagnation of mind” (which would seem to be what Barzun was doing).

Politicians and the media use such words, Nock suggests — and I heartily agree — in order to short-circuit thought among the citizenry. A good way to start pushing back against this, I think, would be to consider another distinction Nock makes. It is common to suppose that the word conservative is the antithesis of the word radical. It is not. The antithesis of radical is superficial. What could be more superficial than to turn one’s thinking and acting into an array of pigeonholes?

Some weeks back I mentioned Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Science,” which is a meditation on the development of the atomic bomb. It ends thus:

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?

This, of course, is merely a 20th-century gloss on something Alexander Pope said a long time ago: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It is a sentiment that has done yeoman’s service as the premise of story after story, from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, and I have no intention of challenging its fundamental wisdom. But I would suggest that there is a corollary question connected to it that has been largely ignored: Just how much knowledge is enough?

Take, for instance, the ongoing debate about climate change (neé global warming), regarding which many insist that the “science is settled.” Of course, since a cache of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s University of East Anglia were posted on the Internet late last year, the science has seemed to many to be noticeably unsettled. According to a memorandum submitted to the British Parliament by the Institute of Physics, “the CRU e-mails as published on the Internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.”

The real question, of course, has to do with this business of the science being settled. When is the science about anything ever settled? Are there areas that we no longer need to investigate? One encounters a similar sense of dogmatism with regard to evolutionary theory, which is rather odd considering that Darwin’s original formulation has long since been revised to account for genetics.

And, speaking of genetics, it has always seemed to me that the really great 19th-century natural scientist wasn’t Darwin, but Gregor Mendel, whose years of patient and meticulous experiment and observation gave us the knowledge of genetics that in turn gave us that new and improved evolutionary theory. And if Mendel’s discoveries made it necessary to revise Darwin’s original formulation, isn’t it at least possible that some new discovery might necessitate further revision?

On another front, think for a moment about all the things regarding health and diet that have been bandied about in the media over the years. Stay out of the sun, we were told, or else slather on the sun block — except now we are being told to get at least 15 minutes of exposure to the sun every day. Remember the oat bran craze? I always thought that particularly amusing, since all you really needed to do was eat whole oats, which includes the bran — that’s why they call it “whole.” Of course, the craze proved much less amusing to the people who got a grievous bout of constipation eating the bran minus everything else.

There are plenty of other examples besides these. How about all that we’ve heard, back and forth, about fats, supplements, sweeteners, alcohol? It all has one thing in common: the belief that we knew enough to do something, followed by the discovery that, well, maybe we didn’t.

The underlying problem may be that we have come to think of knowledge solely in terms of data and information and of the intellect as simply a passive receptor of same: We take in the facts and figures, process them, and act accordingly. I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that. To study something in depth is to see the subject of one’s study opening out and getting deeper — like the ocean. Genuine learning is a process of initiation into the mystery that lies at the heart of everything. True knowledge invariably confers a measure of humility, which in turn tends to be prophylactic against undue or hasty action.

I have been reading the Journal of Jules Renard, as translated and edited by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Originally published in 1964, it was reprinted a couple of years ago by Tin House Books. The complete journal runs to more than 1,200 pages. The Tin House edition, at 304 pages, provides a representative sampling.

Renard is probably best-known in the English-speaking world for his autobiographical novel Poil de Carotte (French for “carrot-top” — Renard was a redhead). But the journal has had its admirers, too, among them Somerset Maugham and, more recently, Julian Barnes. It is a mix of literary gossip (”[Goncourt] is moved, and when you shake his hand, it feels soft and wavering, as though filled with the water of his emotion”); self-examination (”Your sole preoccupation is to be sincere. But don’t you find this constant search for sincerity a little false, untruthful?”); shoptalk (”Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”); random musings (”It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish”); and verbal snapshots (”A bird enveloped in mist, as though bringing with it fragments of cloud torn with its beak”).

It is a perfect book to read at bedtime, which is what I was doing the other night, when I came upon this most peculiar entry:

One should operate by dissociation, and not by association, of ideas. An association is almost always commonplace. Dissociation decomposes, and uncovers latent affinities.

This sounds good until you think about it long enough or try to follow through on it. I went back and read it again the next day. In particular, I wondered how one might go about doing it.

The first thing it occurred to me to think about was prose and poetry. I think I was looking for a pair of opposites. Only prose and poetry aren’t opposites. They’re complements. At any rate, they are closely associated with one another.

What I thought of next was Rimbaud’s phrase about “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (a long, immense, and thought-through disordering of all the senses). But that clearly came to mind by association with what Renard had to say about dissociation, which was proving harder to do than it sounded.

What to do? Well, what I did was put it out of my mind completely.

A couple of days later I was sitting in a luncheonette near the Philadelphia Inquirer that serves a very good cheesesteak. While I was waiting for mine I had a cup of coffee and, at the very first sip, had a Proustian moment: The coffee tasted exactly like the coffee that had been served decades before in a diner my grandmother and I used to stop into every morning.

In December 1949, when I was 8, we moved from North Philly to Torresdale, which is as far northeast as you can go in Philadelphia and still be within the city limits. I was in the middle of the third grade at St. Veronica’s and my mother decided I should finish out the year there before switching to St. Katherine’s.

As it happened my grandmother still worked in a factory in our old neighborhood. So every morning my mother dropped her and me off at the trolley loop at Torresdale and Cottman Avenues, where there was this classic, stainless steel diner. That was the place whose coffee the sip I had the other day brought back to my mind.

Of course it brought all sorts of other things, too, mostly memories and the feelings associated with them. One thing that wasn’t associated with any of it, but that came to mind anyway, was that passage in Renard’s journal. I thought of it, I’m pretty sure, precisely because it had no association whatever with those experiences of mine, which was just what I had been on the lookout for. Of course, once I made the connection, some association was immediately established.

So far as I can tell, my mind works exclusively by association. I have a sneaking suspicion everybody else’s does, too, and that what Renard was proposing is impossible. Maybe that’s why he didn’t provide an example of what he was he talking about. I don’t think there are any.

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

Well, no one will ever accuse Nietzsche of thinking systematically. I actually don’t have much regard for him as a thinker at all. He has brilliant insights that he expresses brilliantly, but a good deal of what he says is pretty goofy — though even that is usually entertaining.

But I have no problem with the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. In fact, I’m as mistrustful of systems and systematizers as he was. For one thing, I am not a systematic thinker myself. But that is not the only thing. There are good reasons to be skeptical of intellectual systems.

When E.E. Cummings, in his poem “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” says that “A world of made / is not a world of born,” he puts his finger on what is wrong with systems of thought, namely, that they are fundamentally mechanical and lifeless. They are attempts to accommodate the world and life to a mental construct, whereas the aim should be to expand the mind to embrace as much of the world and life as it can on the world’s and life’s own vital terms.  

Anyway, the world isn’t there to be figured out, systematically or otherwise. It is there to be encountered — looked at, listened to, felt, tasted, inhaled. J. Krishnamurti, who defined meditation as “choiceless awareness,” also made it plain it was not something that could be taught, though you could notice it when it happened. As I recall, he gives as an example waking up in the middle of the night and finding oneself so alert that the silence and darkness are well-nigh palpable.

In the morning, after I put on the coffee, I usually spend the moments while the macchinetta heats staring blankly out the window at our patio garden. I focus on nothing, but am aware of the birds and the branches, the light and the sky. There is nothing mystical about this, but it does sort of rev up my consciousness and brighten my mood. Especially refreshing is the wordlessness and the absence of concepts that accompanies it.

Speaking of concepts, another problem with systematic thinking is the abstractness of it. The word abstract means to “draw away.” To abstract a document is to summarize it, focusing on highlights and ignoring the rest. (I once made my living writing abstracts.)

Obviously, a view of the world grounded in abstractions is a view that leaves out most of the world’s details. And it is interesting how such a view, organized into a theoretical system, can soon be used as a standard by which to judge reality. We see this again and again in all those stories in which a given behavior is explained in terms of how such a behavior would have given our remote ancestors a survival advantage.

The problem with this is that the principal reason for explaining the behavior in terms of survival is the mere fact of survival. In other words, because our ancestors did such-and-such and so-and-so and survived, doing such-and-such and so-and-so must have been the reason for their survival. Maybe. But the mere fact of their survival doesn’t prove it.  Moreover, survival is not the be-all and end-all of living. We want to survive in order to live fully human lives, and a fully human life is hardly one preoccupied exclusively with survival.

It is also not one that would give pride of place to the ideas about the world and life rather than to the world itself and the creatures living therein. No system of ideas can ever come near to encompassing the wonder of reality. To view the world through the lens of theory is to deprive oneself of the greater part of what life has to offer.

Much pleasure and enlightenment can be had from desultory reading. I mean the sort when you don’t read a particular book from cover to cover, but just pick up first this one, then that, reading a little here and a little there. The different passages that catch your attention often fit surprisingly well together, like the bits and scraps that go to make up a collage.

It is something I like to do after I’ve finished a book for review and don’t feel like reading anything else just yet. The other day, for instance, having finished Robert Harris’s excellent Conspirata, I picked up two very different books to page through idly: José Ortega y Gasset’s Man and Crisis and J.-K. Huysmans’s En Route.

The chapter I happened upon in the first is titled “In Transition from Christianity to Rationalism,” and I was immediately taken by the opening sentence: “We do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us — the fact of not knowing what is happening to us.” I proceeded to skim the chapter, but nothing in it excited me as much as that opening gambit, which I like because it encapsulates my instinctive understanding of being — specifically, its fundamental uncertainty and absence of necessity.

Leibniz said that the most basic philosophical question is “Why is there something and not nothing?” Well, the fact is, there needn’t be anything. Lev Shestov, who suggested — in Athens and Jerusalem, I think — that God could be defined as “infinite caprice,” framed his entire philosophy in opposition to the despair born of necessity.

Determinism, I suppose, is the philosophy of necessity par excellence. Julian Barnes, in Nothing To Be Frightened Of, summarizes it in distinctly personal terms: “[F]ar 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.”

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of subscribing to determinism. A determined determinist would, I guess, ascribe that to the chain of causation whose end-point I happen to be. But then I could write off his opinion as the result of the same in his case.

I have to say that I can never quite believe that any determinist lives his life as one. I am sure they feel that they think their thoughts and not that they merely have thoughts.

For me, the mystery and uncertainty born of the feeling that being is not necessary is the ground of my faith. And this brings me to the other book I was browsing through the other day. J.-K. Huysmans is probably best known for his novel À rebours, which was the model for the yellow-backed French novel that so influenced Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The novel I picked up, En Route, is the second in a series featuring his alter ego Durtal. The first, La Bas, recounted his hero’s (and Huysmans’s own) involvement with Satanism. The series as a whole is the story of Durtal-Huysmans’s journey of faith. (Huysmans’s said once that “the Devil, by his hooked claw, drew me to God.”)

I had started reading En Route a while back, but had got distracted by other business and never finished it. I expect to finish it over the weekend. In the passage that leaped out at me the other day, Durtal is pondering the nature of God:

… we do not know Him — we are ignorant of him. He is, and, in fact, He can only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. … He is above and forever incomprehensible.

This notion of the divine nicely mirrors the sense of uncertainty I have living in this unnecessary world. Of course, to call the world unnecessary is at least to suggest that it is gratuitous. I would say it is precisely that. And why not? The word gratuitous shares an etymology with another word: grace.

There is a poem by that fine, but neglected poet George Barker called “Allegory of the Adolescent and the Adult.” It has long been a favorite of mine. “It was when weather was Arabian,” it begins. “I walked / Like Saint Christopher Columbus through a sea’s welter / Of gaudy ways looking for a wonder.”

But the wonder proves elusive. Our young speaker tells us that “hollyhock here and rock and rose there were,” but “I wound among them knowing they were no wonder.” A bird with a worm and a fox in a wood fail to meet muster as well, for “I was / Wanting a worse wonder, a rarer one.”

So he goes on, “expecting miraculous catastrophe,” though a bit anxious as well: “How shall I know my marvel when it comes?” He continues his way until …

… after long striding and striving I was where 
I had so long longed to be, in the world’s wind, 
At the hill’s top, with no more ground to wander 
Excepting downward, and I had found no wonder. 
Found only the sorrow that I had missed my marvel. 

Then he remembers: “It was / When on the hilltop I stood in world’s wind.” He realizes:

The world is my wonder, where the wind
Wanders like wind, and where the rock is
Rock. And man and woman flesh on a dream. 

Barker was only about 22 when he wrote that poem, and I don’t think I was much older when I first encountered it. I immediately bonded with it. It encapsulated an intuition I had — obviously one that Barker had as well — that in the pursuit of one’s dreams one might just miss the marvels life had to offer.

One Sunday in May, when I was 15, I took a long hike. In late afternoon on the way back, I paused above a ridge and looked over the stream far below to where the sun was burnishing the trees on the other side. I had the feeling, which has never left me — that scene is as bright in my memory as if I had lived it yesterday — that I was looking into time, not space — the time allotted me to live.

Now that I have used up a good part of that allotment I find myself returning to Barker’s poem from time to time. One of the interesting things about life is that, while some things may turn out more or less as you expected they might, most don’t, and those that don’t prove to be more important than the others. Another interesting thing about life is how many of the things you thought were important turn out to be not so important after all.

I think it was Leibniz who said that the fundamental philosophical question is this: “Why is there something and not nothing?” But for you and me and everybody else, there is an even more fundamental question than that: Why am I?

Leibniz’s question, like most philosophical questions, has to do with grand matters, the universe, all of being. But what does any of that mean to any of us as individuals? Not a hell of a lot, I submit. What you and I are most concerned with is — you and I in the here and now.

I took a break from writing this column to go out for a walk and clear my head. And you know what grabbed my attention? This very sidewalk beneath my feet, that tree I was passing, the sky above, unlike any before or again. In other words, the here and now with me in its midst — the only world any of us really cares about, the one each of us actually inhabits: our very own, private one.

I began with a fine, neglected poet, and I shall end with one: John Hall Wheelock, who, in a lovely piece called “Dear Men and Women,” puts it thus:

I have learned it from them at last, who am now grown old
A happy man, that the nature of things is tragic
And meaningful beyond words, that to have lived
Even if once only, once and no more,
Will have been — oh, how truly — worth it.

The world is my wonder. It’s yours, too.