All of us are a little like Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's masterpiece
Gulliver's Travels-- sailing the sea of time in our fragile
bodies, repeatedly finding ourselves shipwrecked on our voyage
to the Unknown. In this parable of the human condition, Gulliver's
accidental voyages take him to strange worlds inhabited by odd
creatures. Perhaps most bizarre is Laputa, the island world that
floats like a Zeppelin in the sky high above the ground.
The Laputans who inhabit this island have one eye permanently
turned inward as though in literal introspection, while the other
is turned upward as though in permanent contemplation of the stars.
They worship the abstract sciences and have a passion for theoretical
reflection; they are devoted to the study of mathematics, music
theory and astronomy.
The cerebral Laputans are masters of a wide array of esoteric
arts and sciences that gives them the ability to control the land
below and hold subject the ordinary earthly citizens. However,
they have difficulty in social situations. When they go out into
society, they must be accompanied by a servant carrying a stick
to bash the Laputans on the head so that they don't drift off
into flights of absentminded speculation, ignoring the person
in front of them.
The world of Laputa is so strange as to seem wholly unreal.
But to me, the product of an Ivy League education and two decades
as a college philosophy professor, that fantasy world is all too
real. Increasingly over the years I have come to feel that as
an academic I live in Laputa.
I entered the academy to be able to more firmly grip reality
through study. So what am I, a commoner with an allegiance to
the earth and not the stars, doing living in an island in the
sky? When I think back at my journey into the academy, my life
seems no less strange than Gulliver's.
Forty-four years ago, when I was 7, I was drifting, like Gulliver,
on the open sea aboard a cargo ship. My family and I had left
the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and were headed for New York
City. But the steering mechanism of the ship broke down off the
coast of south Florida, and we had to be towed to Miami. We made
the rest of the trip by rail. In retrospect, it is fitting that
I first saw America from the instability of a disabled ship swaying
on the open sea, and that I first caught sight of the phantasmagoria
of the Manhattan skyline from the window of a rattling train.
All this, it turns out, prepared me well for what was to come.
When I was 9, I found myself sitting in a class for the mentally
retarded at Public School 101 in Brooklyn, New York. The people
around me spoke a foreign language and behaved in odd ways. Even
the name I had to use was strange to me. The school forced me
to call myself "John" instead of my birth name, Juan.
I was placed in that class, the principal told my worried mother,
because I scored just a hair above what an orangutan would have
scored on the I.Q. test I was given the year before. The I.Q.
test was in English, of course, and the only English I knew were
a few curse words my friend Fat Tony taught me in the schoolyard.
I eventually escaped that class, but not before learning to always
question authority and to never trust the world with my fate.
While my lifeboat has taken me to other strange worlds, none
has been stranger than the one I entered 25 years ago when I attended
an Ivy League school to study for my doctorate. On my first day
on campus I found the building where the philosophy department
was housed. In the hallway I encountered a man who had just emerged
from the men's room. He was wearing bedroom slippers, fancy suit
pants with cigarette-burn holes in them, and a T-shirt covered
with stains. He had a toothbrush in his right hand. He looked
at me, cracked a smile and said "Hi!"--revealing a mouth of crooked,
smoke-stained teeth.
Minutes later I learned that I had just met the most brilliant
member of the philosophy department -- the very man who would
be teaching me, of all things, logic, the science of correct thinking.
The experience sent me into a tailspin, but I knew that if I could
make it through the class for the mentally retarded at Public
School 101 in Brooklyn, then I could certainly make it through
graduate school at an Ivy League university.
Being Itself
Life is indeed strange and unpredictable. One never knows what
tomorrow will bring nor what one will be able to do with it.
What is truly astonishing, however, is
not the mystery of life, that some things move and
other things don't, that in every life's voyage there are shipwrecks,
that you never know what tomorrow will bring, that I am now teaching
philosophy to college students rather than selling pizza on 86th
street in Brooklyn. No. These mysteries are merely the tip of
the metaphysical iceberg hiding beneath our everyday concerns.
What is truly amazing is the fact that there is anything
at all.
Being itself -- to be! -- is the most uncanny
datum of our experience, and yet it simply stands for everything.
It is this very act of writing, the air we breathe, the space
we move through and this time that we are sharing. It is here,
there, all around us, between us, it is us. It is
now. From the atoms that make up the paper of this magazine, to
the thoughts in your mind, to the most distant galaxy: All this,
the world itself, is, and it is wondrous that
it is. And yet we tend to lose sight of the wonder of it all in
the midst of it all.
It is our capacity to wonder at the mystery of being that makes
us human and separates us from the rest of creation. To wonder
about being is like having the top of your head removed and feeling
with your naked brain the icy cool presence and unfathomableness
of everything.
When you fall into wonder only one sentence
forms on your lips: Why is there anything at all and not,
rather, nothing? I am not seeking a "cause" or a general
explanation of what is, which might or might not be provided by
philosophy, religion or science. I am, rather, acknowledging a
deepening experience of everything around me. Prior to the experience
of wonder, I now realize, I took the full weight of existence
for granted, as most people do most of the time.
You cannot, however, deliberately choose to
wonder. You can only ready yourself for it. Wonder always happens
as though from the outside in. One slides into wonder, is surprised
by wonder, is overtaken by wonder; but one cannot will
to wonder. And all of this happens under the most ordinary of
circumstances. Maybe it has already happened to you. Maybe you
have already fallen into wonder. Or maybe you have been touched
by wonder but turned away.
Maybe you have had the experience, as I have,
of awakening in your familiar bed only to find it inexplicably
alien, and not because of what you drank or took the night before.
A morning when, for reasons unknown, you woke up before the alarm
rang and, somewhere between a dream state and clearly felt reality,
found yourself bathed in astonishment at your mere being. At the
fact that you are at all, let alone here, now, in this
particular place at this particular time in this familiar yet
so strange bed of yours. A moment when everything you cast your
eyes upon-- your shoes on the floor, the plant on the windowsill,
the pile of books on the desk -- fills you with a mixture of awe
and anxiety as you let yourself admit to yourself that
the mystery of life, of being itself, is so overwhelmingly shocking
that it leaves you powerless and speechless.
I could not leave my room for days when this happened to me
when I was a student in Europe. When I did I walked around in
a haze, astonished that the whole world did not feel as I did.
Only the innocent, superficial or deluded will think this experience
weird.
Many of us, however, have had such existential epiphanies, such
moments of realization of what it is and means to be. If you have,
then you know that no amount of description can capture the actually
lived felt-sense of being in awe of being. You also know with
certainty that it changes you forever. You know that you have
rubbed up against the very edge. There is nothing that
could be further or deeper.
No one knows what being is or why it is. Not Plato or Aristotle
or the Buddha or Einstein. There is no knowing the what
or the why of what is. There is only the understanding
of life that is acquired through the asking in the state of wonder.
But that's enough. And it better well be because that's all there
is for us mere mortals.
The experience of wonder brings the world into relief and makes
a person take life seriously. In wonder you realize that this
is it. You have the opportunity to swim through the river of life
rather than just float on it, to own your life rather
than be owned by life. If attended to, the experience
of wonder gives birth to self-examination and to a mindful awareness
of the world. In time you come to know yourself as you have been
and are -- and this gives you the possibility of choosing how
to be. Through the experience of wonder we become true individuals
and true citizens of the universe.
Drifting
Most people, however, live out their lives unaware of the mystery
of existence. Everyday routines of work and entertainment keep
them from seeing the world and themselves in the light of wonder.
They drift quietly through life like the autumn leaves that float
on the surface of a river, barely noticing that they are adrift
even as their place in the river of time empties into the ocean
of death. This is the most common kind of life, literature and
art tell us. It's the life of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych, Arthur Miller's
Willy Lohman, W.H. Auden's Unknown Citizen and Kierkegaard's aesthete.
The average life of the average person seeks to become just that,
average -- to be "just like everyone else."
But why do people drift through life like dead leaves? The answer
is simple: Drifting is easy and has obvious advantages visible
to everyone, while the advantages of letting wonder teach you
to swim through life are known only to those who actually do it.
Yes, drifting can lead to worldly success, but it can cost you
the only thing in life that you can truly call your own -- your
self. And therein lies the tragedy.
What good is it to know the world but not to know yourself
-- to be the scientist who succeeds in mapping the 30,000 genes
of the human genetic code and thereby hold the biological secrets
of all of mankind in the palm of your hand, but not to know the
very person who holds this knowledge in his hand?
What good is it to satisfy the administration of the college
and become promoted to full professor, but in the process fail
to become a full human being?
What good is it to find a high paying job, fit well into the
community, be well-liked and thereby succeed in "living well"
but, for a lack of time or attention, fail to succeed in dying
well?
I am no different from any other middle-age tenured professor.
I enjoy mastering esoteric fields of knowledge, I would love for
the college to award me a chair of philosophy, and I could surely
use and would love to have a Lincoln Navigator to take my four
kids camping. I do not doubt the value of scientific knowledge,
worldly success or material pleasure; I only question the importance
that people give to these values.
We are all adrift in the sea of time. What matters most is to
be aware of what and where we are.
What could be sadder than to have lived but not have noticed that
one did; to have been born into Plato's cave and died there without
ever having realized that it was a cave in which one lived? And
yet, this is the fate of most of humanity, and it always has been.
Alienation
Experiencing wonder is essential for becoming a complete human
being. Unfortunately for you and me, the character of the modern
world does not provide the conditions that are necessary for wonder
to easily grow into wisdom. We live in an abstract, impersonal
world fueled by a mindless hunger for efficiency, progress and
profit. In this world life has become a blur that produces confused
anxiety rather than insightful wonder.
Wonder needs a sense of place to take root. It unfolds
when the familiar is noticed to be unique. For that to happen
people need to become embedded in the place where they live. But
in the last 50 years we have built a society in which a large
number of people live like rootless nomads, traveling across anonymous
landscapes of identical-looking lonely suburbs chasing one promotion
after the next. In a landscape where strip malls, hamburgers and
residential areas are indistinguishable from one another, nothing
calls for our attention. We take being for granted.
Wonder also needs time to come into being. But the
marriage of capitalism and technology is racing us through time
into oblivion. Speed is our god. We go to sleep fast, make love
fast, wake up fast, travel fast, eat fast, work fast, read fast
-- and all this so that we can keep on going fast. Fast
for what? When things go too fast, reality blurs and wonder has
nothing to latch onto.
Wonder finds no support in our age of analysis, calculation
and technical reason. We don't value or teach people how to feel
or attend to their experience. The art of self-examination, which
can lead to self-knowledge and virtuous living, is not even a
part of the secular curriculum of our schools. Instead we value
and teach the abstract arts necessary to operate the machines
and bureaucracies of the economy.
The individual hungering to awaken will, unfortunately, find
little help. Not only is the character of the modern world inhospitable,
but the fire of wonder seems to have gone out in our culture in
the very places that were created to protect it.
Philosophy, Plato and Aristotle said, begins in wonder. Yet
for most contemporary philosophers it seems to begin in puzzlement
or intellectual curiosity. In our age philosophy has become a
discipline mired in theoretical and textual minutiae. It is so
removed from the actual existence of men and women that much of
it does not even recognize existence to be a mystery
that disturbs.
Willard van Orman Quine, perhaps the greatest American philosopher
of the past century, said that the question of the meaning of
life was not worth asking. When our brightest philosophical minds
neglect the one question most human beings want answered, philosophy
has stopped nourishing the soul.
Science, too, disappoints the hungry heart. Science has become
so driven by research grants that one wonders if scientists can
stand back from their instruments long enough to feel the wonder
of the world they are pinning to paper like so many dead butterflies.
In physics, the legacy of positivism is so strong that many physicists
are content to believe the universe began with a Big Bang - but
don't feel the need or think it's legitimate to ask "Why did the
Big Bang bang?" How can such a question not
disturb one's sleep?
I may be a Philistine, but I find mostly disappointment where
you would expect wonder to flourish most radiantly: poetry. Read
the poetry of today and you smell the musty air of the study carrel,
not the fresh air of the forest or the pungent smog of the city.
Cut open the poems of today's poetry professors and ink spills
out, not the blood of life or the pus of pain.
Education, ironically, does not guarantee arriving at the wonder
that can lead to wisdom. Obstacles abound in the life of learning
and study. The most treacherous obstacle is education itself.
Students of the humanities are in danger of falling victim to
the most serious disease that can befall a spiritual pilgrim.
I call this disease of the mind and spirit "Academentia." It is
the scourge of intellectuals of all types but especially of academics,
writers for The New York Review of Books and theoretical
Marxists.
Academentia is the delusion of confusing the order of thought
with the order of being. Victims think reading is knowing and
book knowledge is the same as being. Nothing could be further
from the truth. There is no necessary connection between studying
the humanities and becoming humane. History has proven this better
than logic. Some of the biggest creeps in the history of the world
were well-educated in the liberal arts.
When Academentia reaches its climax, the afflicted become so
consumed by reflection that they stumble into existential contradiction:
the difference between words and things, ideas and actuality,
theory and practice become confused. The teacher of Romantic poetry
may be moved to tears by reading Byron but fail to behold his
own wife sleeping by his side. The sociologist may get so caught
up in gathering and analyzing statistical data about families
that she neglects her own children and husband.
The simple lesson here is that there is more to being good than
knowing the good, more to wisdom than the accumulation of knowledge,
more to virtuous living than refining intellectual capacities.
In order to be you must do, and the doing that
brings about personal transformation occurs in the streets, in
your jobs, in relationships -- and not in the classroom
or the library.
A second danger facing the educated elite is the burden of privilege.
History is filled with victims of privilege who had to spit out
the silver spoon in order to become authentic individuals: Prince
Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha; Don Giovanni di Bernardone,
who became Saint Francis of Assisi; and Count Leo Tolstoy, who
gave away his wealth and became a simple Christian, are but a
few examples.
The lives of these great men serve to remind us of the vain
promises of privilege. Privilege can buy you
many things. As time has shown again and again, it can't buy you
happiness or a meaningful life. These have to be earned the old-fashioned
way: one virtuous act at a time.
Death and the Art of Living
Though obstacles abound, and the ethos of our age impedes the
growth of our spirit, nothing can entirely kill it. We will always
be creatures who have been thrown into being without explanation.
For better or worse, we are so created as to realize this.
So long as human beings die, so long as we go out of being as
mysteriously as we come into it, the occasion for wonder will
remain present. Nothing provokes wonder like death.
When I was 17, my cousin Richie got killed in Vietnam. Richie
was an incredibly charismatic person, exploding with life. He
was cool, good-looking, and he could play the guitar and sing
like John Lennon. I loved him. I wanted to be like him,
maybe even be him.
Richie was drafted at age 18 and was in Vietnam barely a few
months when he stepped on a land mine and got blown to pieces.
His death changed my life forever.
He was given a full military burial that unfolded like the absurdist
plays of Ionesco. At one point, Richie's mom threw herself onto
the casket and tried to open it. The soldiers desperately tried
to preserve decorum as they forcibly subdued her. As I watched
this horrifically surreal scene I felt as though I was being transported
into outer space by some alien force.
Before they lowered Richie's casket into the grave, one of the
soldiers folded the flag that was draped over it very neatly into
thirds and then into triangles while another soldier played taps
on a bugle. With every fold of the flag I felt myself drifting
further and further into outer space until the last fold that
made a triangular pillow. The moment the soldier placed the folded
flag into my screaming aunt's hands, I completely lost my sense
of being there.
The next thing I remember is sitting with my mother in the kitchen
of our Brooklyn apartment. We were drinking coffee when all of
a sudden I regained the sense of my body's presence but simultaneously
felt like I was going to faint. I went into the bathroom and began
to furiously splash water on my face, not so much to wash away
the tears as to vainly try to wash away my overwhelming awareness
of death. When I looked up into the mirror I not only saw Richie's
face staring back at me, but my face, my mother's face, my father's
face, my sister's -- Everyman's face. There and then, suffering
the most unbearable of sorrows that a person can feel, I knew
I had uncovered something big, the biggest thing there is.
Death has been my constant companion since that day, not filling
me with night terrors but, instead, always reminding me of the
brevity of life, the preciousness of every moment
and the absurdity of fate. The lessons that are learned in facing
death cut to the bone and can never be forgotten. Death frees
a person from all of the trivial bull in life and helps the mind
focus on what truly matters. Death is the master teacher of the
art of living.
You cannot will yourself to wonder any more than you can will
yourself to love, but you can prepare yourself for it just as
you can for love. You can choose to move slowly through this fast
life mindful of your experiences. You can strip down to your bare
self and press up against what is.
* * *
Juan de Pascule is a philosophy professor at Kenyon College
in Gambier, Ohio. From 1980 to 1984, he taught in Notre Dame's
program for Liberal Studies.
