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.

One usually hears Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as “the three great monotheistic religions.” Apparently, however, that noted deity Yahweh would disagree: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20, 2-3).

That second verse is a simple imperative; there really is no way of reading it other than literally. Yahweh acknowledges the existence of other gods besides himself. He subscribes to what Max Müller called henotheism, which means giving pride of place to one god over all others. Yahweh is the god of Israel and he insists that Israel honor him above the gods of other nations and tribes.

I’m a Catholic, and we Catholics have sometimes been accused of closet polytheism, what with our veneration of saints and fondness for relics and statues and holy water. In fact, the church, as it spread, adapted and accommodated itself to pagan customs. Many ancient churches are built on sites that were once pagan shrines. Catholic thought was also much influenced by a Fifth Century Syrian monk who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, and who thought that, in addition to all the visible creatures inhabiting the world, there were also all manner and levels of invisible preternatural beings, the best-known being angels.

The question I would like to address, however, is this: Who came first, God or the gods? It seems altogether likely that it was the latter. But what is interesting about that, it seems to me, is how it suggests that mankind’s initial encounter with and understanding of the world was interpersonal (as it still is among so-called primitive peoples).

We take it for granted now that everything — including ourselves — is mostly the product of impersonal forces. This is a pretty recent outlook, but is now nearly universal. And yet, increasingly, there seem to be all sorts of misgivings about it. Proponents of anthropogenic global warming, for instance, blame the industrial revolution for the problem they think they have identified. They claim to have identified that problem by means of science, the same science that gave us … the industrial revolution, the factories, the SUVs.

This ambivalence is evident in a piece by Luisetta Mudie called “Climate Change and the Poetic Imagination.” In it, if I understand her correctly, Mudie seems to accept the science of AGW and suggests that we must start imagining things differently if we are to cope with it effectively. “Science,” she writes, “cannot get very far with climate change divorced from its partner, the Mature (not classroom) Imagination.”

The problem with this is that we simply cannot will ourselves to do that. In fact, that is the problem with the way we moderns go about things: We come up with an idea that we think will solve a given problem, then go about trying to put said idea into practice. This is a far cry from the interpersonal engagement with the world we once enjoyed.

It is worth noting that language was born out of just that interpersonal engagement. As that engagement was supplanted by an increasingly abstract view of things, our words grew more and more detached from things even as we ourselves did. We became subjects stranded in a world of objects, in Housman’s phrase, “lonely and afraid in a world [we] never made.”

We do not need a new way of thinking or speaking or imagining. We need to rediscover an old way of being in order to restore to our thinking, speaking, and imagining something of their original freshness. That is something neither reason nor science can help us with. Maybe we need to get reacquainted with those other gods that the first commandment reminds us of.

I have been paging through Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, which happens to be the first book I reviewed professionally. I don’t know how many people remember Hammarskjöld. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and by far its most effective. Indeed, I would argue that, for all practical purposes, the UN died the day Hammarskjöld was killed in an air crash in what is now Zaire.

Markings was published posthumously. It is a kind of journal. Hammarskjöld himself described it — I am relying on memory — as a white paper concerning his negotiations with himself and God. If Socrates was right, and the unexamined life is not worth living, Hammarskjöld’s life would have to be counted among the more worthwhile, since he made sure to examine it carefully, with nary a hint of self-congratulation.

The entry that caught my attention before I began this column is characteristic:

Only in man has the evolution of the creation reached the point where reality encounters itself in judgment and choice. Outside of man, the creation is neither good nor evil.

Only when you descend into yourself and encounter the Other, do you then experience goodness as the ultimate reality — united and living — in Him and through you.

The phrase “evolution of the creation” may seem striking, what with all the yammering these days pitting the notion of the one against the notion of the other. But evolution hasn’t always been thought of as purposeless. The philosophically literate will recall that Henri Bergson’s masterwork was called Creative Evolution. The English translation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenology of Man — which posited that a God-guided evolution was tending toward what Teilhard called the Omega Point — appeared only a couple of years before Hammarskjöld’s death. Among those influenced by Teilhard was Marshall McLuhan.

You will notice in the passage above that Hammarskjöld identifies the “ultimate reality” as goodness and that he understands this to be “living.” Hammarskjöld, I gather, was at least nominally a Lutheran, but in Markings he quotes the Sufi poet Rumi: “The lovers of God have no religion but God alone.” Hammarskjöld was certainly seriously religious, but in a way that was devoid of sanctimony.

In fact, I don’t think anyone was aware of Hammarskjöld’s religious preoccupations until after his death — although, not long after he became Secretary-General, he did say in a radio interview with Edward R. Murrow that “the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it.”

I suppose there are plenty of politicians and bureaucrats who are conventionally religious (and in saying this I mean no disrespect), but I somehow suspect there are few indeed who see politics and administration as a mystical way.

It was Hammarskjöld’s view that “in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.” And there, of course, is the rub. Holiness is not something that preoccupies us much these days. And it certainly doesn’t seem a preoccupation of those engaged in statecraft or diplomacy. People may go on retreats, become “born again,” seek true enlightenment, but you don’t hear many people talk about trying to be holy.

The word, of course, has to do with wholeness, but it is wholeness defined in terms of a relation with God, a relation characterized by recognition of complete dependence upon and submission to the divine will. Or, as Hammarskjöld put it:

… all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond time where Thou art. How, then, can I hold back anything from Thee.

It is a viewpoint utterly alien to the spirit of our age.

“Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Sunday Morning.” Put that together with Keats’s dictum that ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and it all adds up to a pretty grim poetic assessment of life.

Stevens’s point, of course, is that a satisfying cadence is an aesthetic necessity:

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging …

“To philosophize is to learn how to die,” said the redoubtable Montaigne, and I’m sure he was right. But to philosophize is also to think, and death, when you come to think about it, is pretty hard to think about. That’s because death in the abstract is altogether different from what it actually amounts to: the complete and permanent cessation of one’s life signs.

Getting, as they say, up-close and personal, death in general is one thing, but my death is something else again. As Karl Jaspers put it, “Death is something inconceivable, in fact really unthinkable. What we conceive and think about it are only negations and subsidiary aspects” (which makes it, oddly, a little bit like God). Of course, whether we choose to think about it or not, it’s going to come our way one of these days.

My own introduction to the reality of death came in rather a peculiar way. The house I grew up in was for many years where the street dead-ended. One morning — it must have been a Saturday, because everyone was home — I noticed a car parked under one of the maples in front of our house. I went out and noticed further that there was someone in the car, and that he was looking poorly: His face was puffy and purple. There was also a vacuum cleaner hose in the window by the driver’s seat. That window was rolled up as far as it could go and all the other windows were rolled up as well. The hose ran from the window to the back of the car.

I was, by the way, still in grade school, about 11 years old. Anyway, I called to my older brother and he looked a little more closely, then came in and called the cops. Some guy had committed suicide.

Please don’t think this was some grievous trauma that haunted me forever thereafter. The only thing I remember feeling was curiosity. It inspired no nightmares. Even when, years later, I held the hand of someone I loved who was dying, I found myself strangely impassive. Perhaps that incident in front of our house so many years before rendered me impervious to the shock of death. It is more likely, though, that detachment in such cases is simply a defense mechanism.

As I near the Biblical age, the question of my own inevitable demise grows less and less academic. Oddly, I don’t feel any more frightened of it now than I ever have. I am simply aware that it’s nearer now than it ever was before. I think I fear decrepitude more than death. I also wish I could say I had arrived at some insight I could pass along to ease any anxieties others might have on this score. But I haven’t.

So I shall give the last word to Montaigne: “He who would teach men to die would teach them how to live.” A life well lived may not be prophylactic against death — nothing is — but I suspect it makes the going easier. I sure hope so. 

I recently posted on my blog a quote from William Lyon Phelps:

The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.

Bill Peschel sent along in response a quote from Dorothy Parker:

Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzsche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake and Poe. One wonders, with hungry curiosity, what were some of the other definitions that Professor Phelps chucked aside in order to give preference to this one.

I suggested in turn that Phelps may well have thought that, apart from Socrates, the people mentioned did not have the sort of interesting thoughts he had in mind. I also added that Blake seems to have been a genuinely happy man.

Whereupon my friend Susan Balée weighed in that Blake was “a nutter.” This may well have been the case, but if Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography is to be trusted — and I know of no reason why it shouldn’t be — Blake was also happy. Susan then suggested he was manic without being depressive. Can’t say myself. There’s at least the possibility that he was genuinely visionary.

The term common to this whole roundabout of course is happiness, which is one of those things, like pornography, that is recognizable enough, but not so easy to define. The rich, famous miserable person is common enough for us all to know that, whatever happiness may be, ample cash flow and notoriety don’t necessarily contribute to it.

I actually think Phelps (1865- 1943), a scholar and critic well-known in his day, but now largely forgotten, was on to something. I should also mention in passing that Dorothy Parker would not herself appear to have been much of an authority on the subject.

Anyway, in my understanding of what Phelps said, it seems the focus isn’t on great artists, authors and composers, but on those who read, listen to, and look at the works they created. Goethe said something to the effect that every day one should look at a good painting, read a good poem, and listen to a fine piece of music. I think that’s pretty much what Phelps was getting at, too.

After all, he specifically refers to “those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation.” I suppose some would dismiss this view as hopelessly middle-brow or vulgarly utilitarian. Others might see it as elitist. I see it as humanism pure and simple.

The humanities are so called because they are thought to help us be more fully human by enabling us to make the most of ourselves as thinking, feeling, and sensing individuals. The really vulgar utilitarian approach comes about when we become preoccupied over whether a thought is right or wrong in some narrow sense.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — that is all

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

Was Keats right or wrong? I would say he was neither, but that what he says at the end of his ode is worth thinking about in an open-ended way, to see where the train of thought it inspires leads. It is called contemplation and is thought by some to contribute to happiness.

“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?

In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about.

Eddington further notes that if one reduced a six-foot-tall man to pure matter by eliminating the spaces between the particles of which he is said to be composed, said man would be a speck barely visible with a powerful magnifying glass. I recently heard that the entire human race currently alive, all six-and-a-half billion of us, if similarly reduced, would amount to something the size of a sugar cube.

The so-called material universe is, in fact, a vast network of electrical impulses. Perhaps we should think of it as a transmission system and focus our attention more on what is being transmitted rather than on the means by which it is transmitted. After all, taking apart your answering machine won’t tell you anything about the message someone left on it.

Message and transmission really do have little in common. No analysis of the telephone signal will tell you anything about what the caller is saying to you. Any more than a study of paper and ink will give you any insight into David Copperfield or an examination of the Globe Theater will help you understand Hamlet. Likewise, the frequency of a sound-stimulus and the electrical response the stimulus evokes in the auditory cortex are entirely dissimilar.

We like to think that early man was more in touch with nature than we are now. Maybe that’s why the earliest attempts to get to the bottom of things took the form of stories and poems. Maybe life is best understood in terms of symbol and drama. The similarity between the theory of the Big Bang and certain ancient creation myths may be more than just coincidence (which may also be why some scientists find the Big Bang to be, in the words of the late John Maddox, one-time editor of the science journal Nature, “philosophically unacceptable”).

I am not, by the way, advancing any either-or proposition. I like my science and technology as much as anyone. But I am suggesting there may be limits to an approach to reality that is purely abstract, strictly deterministic, and merely quantitative. However much such an approach may tell us about the composition of things, it seems quite incapable of telling us anything about their point. And if one regards such an approach as the only authentic avenue to truth, then one is likely to conclude that things in the end have no point. To insist that everything has a cause is, in effect, to deny that anything has a motive. The world we live in, so far as I can tell, is packed with motivation. And it is motivation that drives stories.

Every morning, the first post on my blog is titled “Thought for the day.” It is simply a quote I find interesting from a writer (usually, it’s a writer) born on that date. Recently, the one I chose was by Italo Svevo, author of The Confessions of Zeno: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”

This struck me as a magical turn of phrase. It reminded me of some lines in Jacques Brel’s song “Ne me quitte pas” (”Don’t leave me”), lines that can roughly be translated as “I will bring you pearls / made of rain / from a land / where rain never falls” (”Moi, je t’offrirai / des perles de pluie / venues de pays / où il ne pleut pas”).

Memory as a gift from God enabling us to envision roses amid snow, an arid land shedding raindrops of pearls — this is the language of enchantment, words used not to designate or define, but to conjure marvels, to reveal the world as wondrous.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that many of our problems derive from a misunderstanding and misuse of language. It isn’t that we tend to define our terms too loosely but rather that our definitions tend to be too confining. I have long thought that the reason Socrates spent so much time talking about the meaning of words was not in order to arrive at a precise definition of one or another but rather to demonstrate that the more carefully one observes, and the more one thinks about what one observes, the more elusive things become. That is because words, when you get to the bottom of them, expand rather than contract. As Emerson said, “Language is fossil poetry.”

Words were sounds before they were ciphers. They were listened to long before they ever could be read. That a sound made with lips and tongue and voice could become associated with something encountered in the world — a tree, the sky, another person — surely is a kind of miracle. “In the beginning was the word” certainly applies to the world we inhabit.

I wonder if we do not do our children a disservice by teaching them to read too soon. A toddler in his crib saying a word he has learned over and over again, in a kind of incantation, so intrigued is he by its sound, may be nearer to the essence of language than any professor of linguistics.

I am reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s wonderful book The Poetics of Reverie, the first chapter of which is titled “Reveries on Reverie (The Word Dreamer).” This column I am writing has itself been a kind of reverie. I have deliberately avoided framing a conventional argument, with the usual definitions, premises and propositions, in order to suggest that by letting the mind wander, going with what one is re-minded of, one can arrive at something that seems truer than any syllogism.

It occurs to me just now that the word spirit means breath, and that in turn reminds me again that words were spoken and heard long before they were ever written and read. Suddenly I am prompted to juxtapose in my imagination the beginning that is the word and God’s breathing into man the breath of life. I can draw no conclusion from this. It is more satisfying simply to ponder it, as one might ponder the possibility of roses in December or drops of pearls showering the desert. The phrases and the images float in my mind and leave me with a sense of knowing that I can neither define nor utter.

The word may well be present in the beginning, but in the end there may only be a fullness of silence. Perhaps the ultimate proof of God’s existence is that the more nearly we apprehend him the less able we are to say anything.

Live long enough and you will start to grow old. As someone who has crossed that threshold I can say that, so far, it isn’t exactly turning out as expected. Not that I expected much, mind you, just what I took to be the usual. I figured I’d put on a bit of weight, get a little paunchy, and have some more aches to put up with. That’s all come to pass, but what I didn’t expect is how, at some point, it all seems to come together into some sort of critical mass, and it’s no longer something that’s happening, but something that has happened. It’s a bit like when you notice that all the leaves are off the trees and realize it’s not really autumn anymore.

There’s another surprise, too, one that Doris Lessing has noted: “The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.”

This is largely true. I would guess that my personality coalesced when I was between 15 and 19. The person I became then is the one I’ve been carrying around ever since. He knows more now than he did then and has changed some views and adopted some others, but fundamentally, he’s pretty much the same fellow.

Growing older is no problem as long as it’s slow and gradual. But over time a gradual this here and a gradual that there add up. One day, you catch a glimpse of yourself in a storefront window and don’t immediately recognize the reflection as your own, and when you do, you experience something akin to the aforementioned winter-has-arrived moment.

Think about it. Having a limp when you’re young is one thing. People are likely to assume it’s an injury, sustained — possibly — in an act of derring-do. Having a limp when you’re older could well be a sign that you’re decrepit, signaling that you’re vulnerable, an easy hit.

Remember those nomadic tribes that, when they pulled up stakes, left their sick and elderly behind to die of exposure? That custom used to be referred to with a measure of disapproval. Now it’s probably regarded as one more stern, but colorful folk custom.

I hear tell of people nowadays who, I gather, think those tribes might have been on to something. After all, seniors who die make a contribution, often sizeable, to government revenues (thanks to the estate tax) and they help cut costs (by no longer needing either Medicare or Social Security). They even cut down on carbon emissions. What’s not to like about that? And what’s there to lose — other than those tedious holiday dinners with the folks? In other words, giving seniors as much help as possible in shuffling off their mortal coils can bring about a great social benefit. There are no retirement homes in nature.

But I digress, as the patron saint of this column, Michel de Montaigne, was wont to do. In fact, someone has suggested that his essays are nothing but digression. But to ponder that would entail digressing even more.

So back to getting old. There is a sense in which what Lessing says is not quite correct. We ourselves, and not just our bodies, can grow old, in the sense that we can start thinking of ourselves as old, making age and its infirmities the essential note of our being. I recently noticed that I was beginning to move a little differently, a little more cautiously. I had long ago slowed down my walking pace to a saunter, but now it seemed to be settling ever so slightly into a shuffle. I also noticed that I was more deferential to my aches than I ever had been before.

This bothered me because it violated one of my rules of living: Posture affects disposition. Walk like a sad sack and you’ll feel like one. Put a little spirit in your step and your mood is bound to perk up. I got this idea years ago from a book by J.-M Dèchanet, a Benedictine monk, called Christian Yoga. Dèchanet wrote that, when he got up on a cold winter morning before daybreak to say Mass, he was not filled with pious fervor. But if he made sure to bow and genuflect with reverence, he found he began to feel reverent.

So I have lately made a point of reminding myself to straighten up and fly right. Years ago, I fractured my right knee cap, which means there’s more than a twinge when I walk upstairs. But I’ve gone back to what I used to do about that: I ignore it and bound up the stairs, twinge or no. Know what? The knee feels better.

I also take a few seconds to make sure I’m standing straight and looking presentable before I walk out the door. Lo and behold, I find myself weaving my way among the slackers on the sidewalk I’m still on the road to being an old coot, but I’m strolling along with a bounce in my step, if not a song in my heart. And while the vehicle may be vintage, it’s the usual self going along for the ride.

St. Nicholas has become indelibly associated with Christmas, but his actual feast day is celebrated a few weeks earlier, on Dec 6, a date that is also notable for something extraordinary that happened in the history of philosophy. The year was 1274. A Dominican monk known to history as Thomas Aquinas said Mass that morning, as priests do every morning. What happened next, as recounted in the records of the process that led to Thomas’s canonization, is nicely summarized by Josef Pieper in his book The Silence of St. Thomas:

… as Thomas turned back to his work after Holy Mass, he was strangely altered. He remained steadily silent; he did not write; he dictated nothing. He laid aside the Summa Theologica on which he had been working. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence … he stopped writing. Reginald, his friend, asks him, troubled: “Father, how can you want to stop such a great work?” Thomas answers only, “I can write no more.” Reginald of Piperno seriously believed that his master and friend might have become mentally ill though his overwhelming burden of work. After a long while, he asks and urges once again. Thomas gives the answer: “Reginald, I can write no more. All that I have written hitherto seems to me nothing but straw.”

Later still, at the prompting of Aquinas’s younger sister, Reginald puts the question to him again. “For a long time, Thomas remains silent,” Pieper writes. “Then he repeats: ‘All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw … compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.’ ”

On the most recent feast of St. Nicholas, Mark Vernon, a former Anglican priest and the author of an excellent book called After Atheism, wrote a blog post about this called “A day to remember the silence.” Vernon rejects the notion that Aquinas was in any way repudiating his work. Instead, he suggests, Aquinas “had reached as profound an appreciation of the divine mystery as was possible. His new silence was not a rejection but the culmination of his life’s work.”

I agree. But I also think that what Aquinas discovered is that, whatever else God may be, he is not the terminus ad quem of any reasoning process. One cannot prove there is a God. If one could, there would be no need to make an act of faith.

A few years ago, Stephen D. Unwin, a theoretical physicist turned risk analyst, wrote a book called The Probability of God, in which he used Bayes’ Theorem to calculate the likelihood of there being a supreme being.

In general, the odds are only so-so. That changes if a person has had what he regards as a religious experience. This underscores that, while religious faith may not be arrived at by reason alone, it is by no means unreasonable. Experience, after all, trumps all theories. This is because it constitutes direct knowledge and, as Aquinas puts it, “knowledge is a certain effect of truth.”

Like Augustine, Aquinas also believed that while we see things because they exist, they exist because God sees them. More precisely, as Pieper explains, he believed that “the notion that things have an essence cannot be separated” from another notion: “that this essential character is the fruit of a form-giving thought that plans, devises, and creates.”

Lest you think this a hopelessly outmoded point of view, Pieper goes on to point out that Jean-Paul Sartre, in declaring that “existentialism is nothing more than an attempt to draw all the conclusions from a consistently atheistic position,” actually starts from the same “major premise” as Aquinas, namely, that “things have an essential nature only in so far as they are fashioned by thought.” Unlike Aquinas, however, Sartre believed there was no creative intelligence that could have thought up man and nature. So, for him, nothing in nature has a nature. As he bluntly puts it: “There is no such thing as human nature because there exists no God to think it creatively.”

This certainly shows how opposite conclusions can be arrived at starting from the same premise. The difference can probably be traced to different experiences or a lack of experience. Sartre perhaps never had what he took to be a religious experience (though the disgust that overwhelms Roquentin when he observes the roots of the chestnut tree in Nausea does seem a kind of negative epiphany).  

In contrast to Sartre, the conclusion Aquinas arrived at was not that things have no nature, but that they are ultimately unfathomable — precisely because they are created, or, as Pieper phrases it, “their knowability cannot be wholly exhausted by any finite intellect.”

On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1274 Aquinas seems to have experienced some serious confirmation of that.

In my last column, I remarked in passing that while great music is always original, originality alone doesn’t account for its greatness. The same is true of all art, of course, not just music

As for why this so, something C.S. Lewis had to say on the subject, which I came upon just the other day, is especially insightful:

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.

Bach would have understood this. So would a painter like Fra Angelico. Or the builders of the cathedrals. These were artists whose originality did not derive from challenging tradition, but rather from mastering it so completely that they had no place else to go but forward.

The fact is each of us is altogether original. As the song would have it, there will never be another you — just as there never has been. Bear in mind that anyone can learn the Palmer Method of penmanship, but everybody’s handwriting still remains unique.

One sometimes hears it said that two people looking at a tree do not see the same tree. But that isn’t quite correct. Both see the same tree, but each has a different experience of it. Looking at the tree is only one factor in that experience.

We are not passive receptors and processors of sense data. When we look at something — really look at it, not merely glance at it — we encounter it. We bring to it the whole of our being, which includes — is practically equivalent to — that continuously changing process known as experience. By becoming a part of that experience, that tree becomes a part of ourselves. As Aquinas would have it, knower and known become one.

That is why, if one describes what one has experienced as accurately and as precisely as one can, the reader will know what your feelings are about what you have experienced without your having to go on about them. Inexperienced reviewers often make the mistake of paying too much attention to how they feel about what they are reviewing, and not enough to what they are reviewing.

It isn’t that reviewers ought not to communicate how they feel about what they are writing about. That is, after all, one of the purposes of a review. But they will better get across how they feel if they concentrate on the details of the work under consideration, not the details of their reaction to it. The attempt to accurately and precisely describe the details of the work will necessarily guide them in the choice and placement of their words. Their feelings, in other words, will come through without their having to belabor them.

Something else will come through as well: Their originality. That focus on accurate and precise description will also compel them to fully engage once more with the work under review and the uniqueness of that encounter is bound to be evident.

The business of an artist is the practice of his art, not the display of his personality or originality. Those can take care of themselves. The more of himself that the artist puts into his work, the more of himself will be manifest in that work. What Eliot says of poetry is true of all art:

There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Or, as the painter Georges Seurat put it: “Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.”

Recently, my wife and I attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that featured, as the concluding work, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s fifth symphony, which is perhaps best-known — even notorious — for its first movement duel between snare drum and orchestra (a note in the score instructs the drummer to improvise “as if at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra”).

At its premiere in 1922, the symphony was pretty well-received by both critics and the public. But a couple of years later, when performed in Stockholm, about a quarter of the audience is said to have fled the hall. Those who remained in their seats were none too pleased, either. My wife, more than 80 years later, felt their pain.

I, on the other hand, have loved the work since practically the first time I heard it, which was when I was in high school. That’s kind of odd, now that I think about it, because my musical tastes at the time were far from sophisticated. But something about Nielsen’s music grabbed me. I do remember thinking it was the first classical music I had heard and enjoyed that sounded like it belonged to the century I was living in. Sometime during the year I spent between high school and college, I came upon Robert Simpson’s Carl Nielsen: Symphonist and, though I could scarcely grasp the technical stuff, it reinforced my admiration for Nielsen and his music.

Every great composer’s music is clearly and distinctly different from every other’s. That’s one of the things that makes the music great. (It is not the only thing, however, and is not enough in itself to account for such greatness.) Nevertheless, there is something genuinely idiosyncratic about Nielsen’s (the same is true of Leoš Janácek’s). A clue to what distinguishes Nielsen’s music can be found, I think, in something David Fanning says in his article on Nielsen in the latest edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first some background.

Carl August Nielsen (1865-1931) was born on the island of Funen, the third largest of Denmark’s many islands. His father was a house painter and Carl August was the seventh of 12 children. The future composer’s earliest musical experience was playing the fiddle at local dances. So his musical sensibility was grounded in folk music and rustic dance.

Nielsen, in other words, was a hick. He didn’t go to university. His education was catch-as-catch-can. But he was smart and curious, especially about things like art and philosophy — though, as Fanning points out in the aforementioned article, he retained “a highly personal, common man’s point of view on those subjects.” I think it is precisely this that accounts for the unusually individual character of his music.

My own background is sort of the urban counterpart of Nielsen’s. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, both factory workers. I can’t remember ever seeing my grandmother read a book, and my mother read only mysteries. I may have ended up making my living reading books, but I like to think that, like Nielsen, I have retained something of that common man’s point of view.

I have certainly noticed that many people from the working class, if they make it to college, often feel obliged to jettison the notions and attitudes they grew up with, especially the political and religious ones. It is the intellectual equivalent of social climbing.  Of course, things aren’t true just because your mom and dad thought they were. But neither are they false just because mom and dad accepted them. Nor are they necessarily true just because Professor So-and-So says they are.

I think of that “common man’s point of view” as a kind of down-to-earth skepticism, an instinctive sense that something ain’t necessarily so just because mom, dad, Father Murphy, or Experts X, Y and Z say it is. Assent to nothing unless you are actually sure what it is you are assenting to. That means you have to come to an understanding of it on your own terms and be able to summarize it accurately in your own words. If you can’t do that, you should remain agnostic on the subject.

And don’t continue to do something a certain way just because that’s the way it’s always been done. Try another way. It may just work. That’s the lesson of Nielsen’s music: It’s traditional all right, but in quite an untraditional way.

In short, as Basho, the great haiku master, advised: If you need another syllable, add another syllable.

Thanks to the Internet — and, in particular, to blogging — the capacity for dialogue has, along with much else, increased exponentially. Now, the aim of this column is to take something someone has said and see where thinking about it leads. But there is no reason why the quoted matter I choose to discuss need be a remark that is famous or one uttered by someone famous.

Recently, I linked on my blog to a piece by Mark Vernon called “How to be agnostic,” in which he quoted something written by Daniel J. Boorstin: “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.”

My friend Maxine Clarke, an editor at the science journal Nature – and who is one of the smartest people I know – posted a comment in which she observed that “ignorance has done immense damage in the historical past, when you look at all the wars, genocides, pogroms etc, which certainly weren’t done out of ‘pretensions to knowledge’ but out of superstition and, er, ignorance.”

In a follow-up comment, I replied to Maxine that, while ignorance has certainly done its share of harm, so had what I called “unwarranted certainty,” pointing out how the medical community of his day incorrectly thought Ignaz Semmelweis had it all wrong about puerperal fever.

To which Maxine wryly responded: “So it all boils down to how you define ‘ignorance’ I suppose.”

I have been thinking about that ever since.

Among other things, I was reminded of something I had written in a review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, namely, that Taleb’s ideas “suggest that the only valid history is one that would enable us to understand a period in terms of the uncertainty and unpredictability facing those alive at the time. In other words, it would involve reconstructing, as it were, their ignorance.”

The consensus among informed observers when World War I started in August 1914 was that the conflict would be over by Christmas of that same year. Closer to home, according to the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org, Obama Administration officials argued earlier this year that, if the economic stimulus package were not enacted, the rate of unemployment would reach 9 percent by early next year, whereas, if enacted, unemployment would peak at 8 percent this year. Unemployment is currently at 10.2 percent. In other words, it is higher than what was predicted would be the case if the stimulus were not enacted.

In both cases, the assessment of reality was based on what those making the assessment knew — or thought they knew. Last year’s economic meltdown, the housing bubble, and the dot.com bubble of the late ’90s were all in part caused by people in positions of authority thinking they knew more or better than it turns out they did.

That is why Maxine’s quip has been so much on my mind. To define means to demarcate, to set limits, establish boundaries.

Ignorance, however, is practically boundless. The sum of human knowledge is a small and fragile oasis right smack in the middle of a vast Sahara of ignorance. Usually, we do not even fully know the little that we do know — hence the law of unintended consequences. The wars Maxine refers to may have owed much to ignorance, but they also owed much to the knowledge and ingenuity of people like Alfred Nobel and Richard Gordon Gatling. Whatever else may be said of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, accusations of ignorance or stupidity would not be among them. And it took some sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to come up with sarin.

Anyway, thanks to Maxine, I kept thinking about what would be a more precise and practical definition of ignorance. And this led me to realize that it is the limits and  boundaries of our knowledge — to say nothing of its destructive potential — that we should focus our attention on. We should, in particular, be extremely cautious when it comes to translating what we think we know now into predictions of how things are going to be.

Robinson Jeffers, writing between the wars, puts it well in his poem “Science”:

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

What St. Augustine says of time could just as well be said of love, that we know what it is until we try saying what it is. Nevertheless, a lot has certainly been said about love. Poets, prophets and philosophers have all weighed in on the subject. Songwriters have made a cliché of it.

Recently I resumed reading Irving Singer’s excellent book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher, which I mentioned in an earlier column. I took it up again at the chapter titled “Idealization: Santayana vs. Freud.”

“For Santayana,” Singer tells us, “love is a creative search for an unattainable ideal object.” Singer then points out that “Freud also characterized love as ‘idealization.’” The difference is that “Freud equates idealization with ‘overestimation’ or ‘overvaluation’ of a sexual object.”

Observing that Freud and Santayana both pose an identical question — “What is it that the lover really desires in another person?” — Singer goes on to suggest that “there is something wrong with the question … It seems to ask about love but is really limited to desire. Yet loving is not the same as desiring. We desire things or persons for what they can give us, for satisfactions we hope they will provide. In loving anyone, however, we take an interest in that person and not just as a vehicle to something else.”

This seems to me to be exactly right. Love, genuine love, is intensely focused upon particulars — this person, as distinct from all others. Montaigne’s explanation of why he and his friend Étienne de la Boétie were so attached to each other says it all: “Because it was he, because it was I.” I love my wife because she is who she is exactly the way she is. Why she loves me is her business — and a mystery to me, which is probably as it should be.

There is, I think, a decisive factor in all this: What makes a particular person who that person is in particular is precisely what that person does not have in common with any other. When we encounter a person — in contrast to merely meeting someone — what is revealed to us is that person’s uniqueness. It is a mystery to which one can only be initiated by the actual presence of the person. The involvement in that mystery enhances one’s own being, which accounts for the sense of deprivation one can feel when that person is absent.

I remember quite vividly when I first saw my wife. She was standing on the porch of a cabin at a summer camp where my foster son worked. She waved at us and we waved back, and for some reason … or no, not for any reason; I just knew — intuitively, in the Aristotelian sense, an immediate awareness — that in that wave something destined was beckoning (which is the only way I can put it that comes at all near to how I felt at the time).

Piers Paul Read’s 2002 novel Alice in Exile, which I also recently read, provides some wonderful insights into the ambiguities of love. Pavel Rettenberg, the Russian aristocrat who rescues the heroine, Alice Fry, from scandal and disgrace, is a womanizer who has been routinely unfaithful to his wife, Tatyana. Having discovered that “after a certain period of time, making love to a mistress becomes as banal as making love to a wife,” Rettenberg concludes that “the thrill … was not in eating the beast, it was in the chase and the kill.”

Rettenberg at first sees Alice as just another conquest, but their involvement turns out to be the genuine article, mutual love. And this experience of love, together with the hard lessons that come of loss — loss of his mother, his sons, his estates, his country — has a transfiguring effect upon his personality. The change from sophisticated seducer to compassionate human becomes manifest as he tends his dying wife:

She was unconscious; her breathing was a painful rasping; her skin was hot. ‘She will die,’ Rettenberg thought to himself, ‘but she will not die soon enough to save us.’ He looked at the pillow and thought of how little strength it would take to smother her. … After all the slaughter they had witnessed, would it matter if he was to bring her death forward by a day or two and thereby save his own life and no doubt the lives of Nina, Alice and her son?

Rettenberg looked at the pillow but his hands did not move towards it. Unaccountably he felt quite unable to obey his own common sense. Perhaps it was just because he had seen so much slaughter; because Sasha had died; because Fedor had killed and then had died; that he could not contemplate taking an innocent human life. The woman who had been entrusted to him, and whom he had so mistreated, would be cared by him until the end.

The mystery of personhood finds its correspondence in the mystery of love. As Dostoevsky put it: “To love someone means to see him as God intended him.”

My bedtime reading last night consisted of a few pages of John Cowper Powys’s The Art of Growing Old. Since I am only two years shy of the Biblical age, I figure it’s high time to get some pointers on how to deal with my impending dotage.

Powys, described by J.B. Priestley as “that eccentric novelist of genius,” has never been a popular writer, but has always attracted distinguished admirers, as Margaret Drabble pointed out a couple of years ago in a piece titled “The English Degenerate.” The Art of Growing Old is one of the “manuals of self-help” that Drabble refers to. Others include The Art of Happiness and In Defense of Sensuality.

I will leave Drabble to fill you in on Powys and his work. What I want to draw to your attention is one of the paragraphs I read last night:

Where then is the escape? Where is the Truth? Where is the Reality? Where is Rest and Reassurance? In one direction only; in that inviolable Present which is not our age, nor our father’s nor our children’s, but is the ever-recurring Moment where all Pasts and all Futures and all Presents form and transform and meet and mix and resolve and dissolve; till sinking down with Time itself, their creator and sustainer and destroyer and restorer, into the solitary soul of every one of us, they become that sub-species of eternity which perhaps is the only eternity we shall ever know.

I decided, before turning out the light last night, that this would be the subject of my next column, which is to say this one you are reading. Just before I fell asleep, and just after I woke up, I had in mind to write about what, initially, I took from it, which was that the only time that is real is the time we are experiencing, namely, the present.

But now that I have copied out the paragraph and read it more carefully, I realize that isn’t exactly what Powys is saying at all. If I read him aright – or, rather, re-read him aright — he is suggesting that each moment is a singular manifestation of the whole of time. It is interesting that he calls this “ever-recurring Moment” a “sub-species of eternity.” Eternity tends to be thought of as time without end, being alive minus the inevitable termination otherwise known as death. But eternity is actually the absence of time, along with, presumably, the change that accompanies it. In “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens makes plain exactly how difficult this is to comprehend:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Powys wonders if the only experience we can have of this is the experience we are having right now. I find no difficulty with the thought that this moment of my being contains somehow the whole of my past and that my future is but the continuing expansion of that same past (incorporating, of course, this present moment). But that this moment is somehow connected to the whole of time I can only assent to intellectually, the way I can assent to the idea that I am somehow connected to the whole universe. I can think it, but I don’t really feel it.

On the other hand, something else Powys says a few paragraphs later makes a great deal of sense to me. Referring to “the ages in history that suit our temperament,” Powys goes on to say that “it is within our power to move from the one to the other, appropriating, by what might be called imaginative empathy, those earlier ages that suit our nature.” Surely I am not the only person to feel a strange affinity with certain historical periods. In my case, those would be the China of the Tang period, the so-called 12th-century renaissance in Europe, and 19th-century France.

I am well aware of the shortcomings of each of those periods, but there is something about them that strikes a chord within my sensibility. It is hard to know what to make of this, but Powys’s notion of a sub-species of eternity might go some way to explaining it. Henry Miller, one of Powys’s admirers, says somewhere that happiness consists mostly in finding a more or less pleasant way of passing the time. This seems a sound observation. Only there may be a good deal more time to pass than we imagine.

“Everything comes in time to those who can wait.” I thought this was a French proverb, but I have seen it attributed to Rabelais. Maybe it’s just a proverb Rabelais quoted. Like Cervantes, Rabelais knew his proverbs.

Whatever its origin, its purport is clear enough. It’s a pitch for patience, which is a virtue I doubt any of us is born with. If the behavior of babies is any evidence, our wish to have what we want when we want it comes naturally to us.

Politicians in particular are given to exploiting this lamentable weakness. One might even say that such is what they do, period. As H.L. Mencken inimitably observed of the breed:

They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn.

In Americans the tendency is acute. As I have suggested before, the reason why there are no second acts in American lives (as Scott Fitzgerald memorably put it) is because Americans want to cram the whole of their lives into Act I. We not only want what we want when we want it; we want all of it immediately.

This desire for instant gratification is, of course, out of sync with reality. The seeds you plant in your garden in springtime are going to sprout in their own good time. No point in watching the plant too closely, either. It will blossom when it blossoms.

Patience happens to be the only virtue I have managed to make any progress toward in my life. I am much better now at taking my time and letting things happen as they will than when I was young. This has much to do with having worked for a newspaper for nearly three decades. Like the prospect of hanging, the prospect of a deadline wonderfully focuses the mind. Being anxious is a waste of energy.

Nevertheless, I still have to remind myself from time to time to take pleasure in what I am doing as I am doing it and not shift my attention to simply getting it done or, worse, to whatever else I may have to do. Actually, now that I think about it, I realize that patience really is largely about time management.

I realize also that, since I retired, I have proved less adept at time management than when I was working. Not having to go to work every day gives one the illusion that one has all sorts of free time — except there are all these things one feels obliged to do, which in turn compete with all the things one would like to do, or had hoped to do when one had the time, which should be right about now.

That is why I recently pulled back a bit from a lot of things I had been doing, especially blogging, which had begun to take up more time than I thought it warranted and was keeping me from doing some other things I very much wanted to do. I needed, I felt, some perspective in order to get a better idea of what I wanted my priorities to be.

To a certain extent what this meant was goofing off a bit. Last week, my wife and I spent a day just strolling about Old City, stopping into art galleries, spending some time at The Book Trader, and having dinner at a nice little Turkish restaurant called Konak. I have been reading books just because I wanted to, and ignoring others I ought to be reading for one reason or another. I feel certain that if I don’t try too hard things will fall into place on their own.

The fact is, whether you know how to wait or not, if you hang around long enough in life, you will grow old, by which time you will have learned some things about yourself you probably never suspected. One of those is how often you have to start over.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” George Orwell declares at the start of his review of Salvador Dali’s autobiography, called The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,” Orwell continues, “since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

I’m not sure about that first sentence. There’s disgrace, and there’s disgrace. Making a fool out of yourself and committing a grievous crime may both be disgraceful in their differing ways, but while most of us can manage the first on a fairly regular basis, few ever lower themselves to the second. There is a puritanical streak in Orwell that gives his moral outlook a hard and somewhat inflexible cast.

I also don’t see the connection between the “disgraceful” of the first sentence and the “defeats” of the second. Defeats are not necessarily disgraceful. They can be more ennobling than victory, as Leonidas and his Spartans demonstrated at Thermopylae.

Most aren’t, of course. Most are losses of chump change — though enough of those can over time add up to a major embarrassment. And, once again, Orwell’s puritanism leads him to exaggerate the negative. Few lives end up amounting only to a series of defeats. The defeats may outnumber the victories, and almost always do, but victories do happen, and they may in quality easily offset the defeats, and in any case do lend some perspective to the sorry messes our lives tend to be.

A few weeks ago, a piece about Rilke in the Times Literary Supplement showed how great a part Rilke’s prodigious self-pity played in shaping both his personality and his art. Of course, you can get away with self-pity in poetry, which can bring out the brooding and Byronic in all of us. When Rilke writes a poem out of self-pity, it isn’t his self-pity that stirs in our imaginations, but our own, at its most glamorous.

That same self-pity encountered in prose, or in life, is something we would rather not be reminded of. However much we may indulge it in private, to go public with our self-pity is tantamount to committing indecent exposure.

Like many things in life, one’s self is best approached obliquely. It is, of course, one of the mysteries of existence that one not only can but must maintain a certain distance between oneself and one’s self. Irony, whether sly or wry, can do the trick. It isn’t a matter of objectifying oneself, but rather of characterizing oneself — seeing oneself as a certain kind of character.

Since it is better to laugh at yourself than feel sorry for yourself, I try to look at myself from a comic angle.

The young Goethe, driven to contemplate suicide after a failed romance, would sit in front of a mirror with a knife at his throat until the absurdity of the situation could no longer be ignored and he started laughing. Nothing will wise you up better than noticing the ludicrous aspects of your amorous mishaps and longueurs. Once you’ve got that far, the lighter side of your other false steps, miscues and blunders becomes obvious as well.

The fact is, Orwell was wrong: Viewed from the inside, one’s life doesn’t seem to be a series of defeats at all. It looks more like a series of pratfalls.