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| Zinnias in the neighborhood |
How many more picnics will I go to?*
From ToDo Institute: Pretty amazing. (Related ideas in a blog post from five years ago: "On 'A Certain Number of Times'")
Warm greetings from ToDo.
Here we all are, in the heart of summer. I hope we all have many summers ahead of us, but there's no way to predict. And any of my own realistic predictions are sobering. I'll take that awareness with me when we meet up with friends for a picnic later. How many more picnics will I go to? Probably not hundreds, maybe dozens, maybe one dozen, maybe one. I'll try to be there for the picnic breeze and every bite of food, and every word of the conversation, but I probably won't, given all of the endless chattering in my mind. I will try, though, because being present to our simple moments, one by one, is the most satisfying way to live, and the best way to coexist with a bewildering world.
With love and appreciation for your company,
A Training Ground for Human Variety*
From David Brooks: article link
The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.
We know from studies by the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley that reading literature is associated with heightened empathy skills. Deep reading, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is a training ground for understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the real people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives. The resulting knowledge is not factual knowledge but emotional knowledge.
The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Some are just average-looking old people. But even the plainest face “is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.” We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to sense and respect the immense depth of each human soul.
When I come across a Rembrandt in a museum, I try to train myself to see with even half of Rembrandt’s humanity. Once in St. Petersburg, I had the chance to stand face to face with one of his greatest paintings, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He painted this one at the end of his life, when popular taste had left him behind, his finances were in ruins, his wife and four of his five children were in their graves. I have seen other renderings of that parable, but not one in which the rebel son is so broken, fragile, pathetic, almost hairless and cast down. The father envelops the young man with a love that is patient, selfless and forbearing. Close observers note the old man’s hands. One is masculine, and protective. The other is feminine, and tender.
Though this painting is about a parable, it’s not here to teach us some didactic lesson. We are simply witnessing an emotional moment, which is about fracture and redemption, an aging artist painting a scene in which he imagines all his losses are restored. It is a painting about what it is like to finally realize your deepest yearnings — for forgiveness, safety, reconciliation, home. Meanwhile, the son’s older brother is off to the side, his face tensely rippling with a mixture of complex thoughts, which I read as rigid scorn trying to repress semiconscious shoots of fraternal tenderness.
Experiences like this help us understand ourselves in light of others — the way we are like them and the way we are different. As Toni Morrison put it: “Like Frederick Douglass talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life.”
Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”
Zinnia Explosion*
I've been doing some hour-long walks since we got back from the UP. I liked this explosion of zinnias in a yard near Gilbert and Goodman. It's brash, overgrown, unapologetic, profuse. Last year I grew a few in my garden and loved to use them as cut flowers. This year, the seeds were quickly covered by vegetables in the garden. Maybe they'll still bloom since I pulled out the peas and lots of dill. While I'm waiting, I'll add them to my list of things to plant more of next year.
On This Day (07/28):
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