Here I sit, sharing the peace with little Pita (her head on my lap) and big Nell (nestled into the opposite corner of the couch), pondering again the precious privilege of breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving. "Be happy for this moment," advises Omar Khayyam in this week's postcard to California. "This moment is your life."
This life. It's our only bird in hand, which we're too quick to ignore in deference to whatever lurks uncertainly in the bush. “We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we know to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the alteration our experience comes as one continuous fact. “Yes,” we say at the moment of full brightness, this is what I meant. No, we feel at the moment of the dawning, this is not yet the meaning, there is more to come.”
This life. It's our only bird in hand, which we're too quick to ignore in deference to whatever lurks uncertainly in the bush. “We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we know to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the alteration our experience comes as one continuous fact. “Yes,” we say at the moment of full brightness, this is what I meant. No, we feel at the moment of the dawning, this is not yet the meaning, there is more to come.”
William James wrote that, in The Knowing of Things Together, and I just reread it in the sidebar. Thanks to Jacques Barzun's dedication, noted yesterday, I'm planning to reread lots of things that remind me not to squander the moments of experience that compose this life, and the transitions and alterations that shoot out of the darkness and transform them.
I just reread this Barzun sentence: "For experience is an instinct of life, as Oscar Wilde said, and what matters is the way life is 'taken' by the experiencer."
That's right: the instinct to attend closely to our moments and extract from them all the life they offer is the source of our vitality. You could say it's our power. Our superpower.
Barzun then says: "To know William James we go to his early letters and find there not only the quality of his power to experience, but also the germs of almost all his original ideas."
And so I shall go back and reread his early letters, to reaffirm the germ of the idea of experience as philosophy's indispensable source. Too many philosophers, I think, have lately neglected it.
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