Blindness

Foggy morning. Visibility is limited. But that's always so, until we notice and correct for our condition so that we may begin to appreciate "the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves." What stops us? Abstraction. Artifice. Education of the wrong sort.

"We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys."

William James said "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," which we're looking at in Happiness, was one of his own most important and personally gratifying essays. It calls out our self-inflicted and obtuse "ancestral blindness" in failing to grasp or even acknowledge the interior lives of others.

It celebrates the often-inexpressible delight of being human and having a human interior. It pleads for mutual respect and toleration, in recognizing that each of us possesses a singular station and perspective. It says my pursuit of happiness must empathize with yours, or else it becomes as egoistic and dumb as it is blind.

It anticipates Carl Sagan's cosmic wonder at our uniqueness. “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

It shares Richard Dawkins's deep biologically-informed gratitude for life. "The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia." We're so lucky to have the opportunity to open our eyes on this sumptuous planet, so tragically short-sighted not to.

It celebrates the self, every self, all selves,

celebratory of the self as a locus of intrinsically valuable experiences... he appreciates the marvelous diversity of ways in which human beings find the world interesting and important, ways that "make life worth living." The fact that one person's very reason for being leaves another cold and uninterested is at the heart of what he considers the enduring mystery of happiness and is part of the larger mystery of life. William James's "Springs of Delight"

It recognizes and revels in "the intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception," as documented by a writer (W.H. Hudson) who discovered in the wilds of Patagonia a liberating solitude and harmony with nature beyond adequate description.

The antidote to too much refined abstraction, too much distance between direct experience and mediated reflection, is to give too thinking a rest. Take a moral holiday, as James elsewhere puts the point, open to the mysterious sensorial life that's all around us, and discover "supreme felicity." 

The pleasures of sensorial life aren't always so deeply mysterious. Tolstoy's hero in War and Peace learns "that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence." Keep it simple.

Some (though not the author of "Sentiment of Rationality") might call a deliberate daily intermission of thought, of "thinking of nothing and doing nothing," irrational. James, like Hudson, like Wordsworth, like Whitman ("rapt with satisfied attention... to the mere spectacle of the world's presence) might rather call it coming home. Safe at home.

Blindness concludes with a stern "Hands off" warning: "neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands."

Failure to respect a multiplicity of interpretive insights is an instance of the deplorable but natural "blindness" by which we so frequently misconstrue one another. James did advance a striking vision; but one great fact about him, and the most arresting thing about it, is that his vision (like Emerson's "thousand-eyed present") defies every conceivable attempt to reduce it to a single point of view, including his own. It is "self-reliant" only to a point. I read it as an ultimately optimistic vision. We're blind, but we can (if we will) see that we are, and therein lies our hope.

"Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world..." This passage resonates more for me today than it might, having just said a sorrowful farewell to our constant canine companion of the past dozen years. How often old Angel sat at my feet, doubtless rehearsing (in her way) something like James's fox-terrier's lament: "To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking [her] to walk and throwing sticks for [her] to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?" Sorry, old girl. You tolerated so much, asked for so little, provided so much joy.

Joy's the word, as Stevenson said, "the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy" we miss if we objectify and neutralize things by reducing them to their surface externality. Our springs of delight lie beneath the surface, our inner lives are out of sight but not out of nature. There is a "limitless significance in natural things," when we view them through the prism of personality and imagination. There is the promise of "all the happiness destined for man."

"Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be." If recurrent zest, tingle, and excitement don't make you happy, what will?

We're each tasked to "find out where the joy resides" and honor it. In the case of departed friends, it resides in pleasant precious memory. Pixar's Coco gets it right: remember.
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Today is the birthday of novelist, biographer, and essayist Nancy Mitford (1904) (books by this author), born in London. She was unapologetically aristocratic, but that didn't stop her from satirizing her own class... She wrote to a friend, "If one can't be happy, one must be amused, don't you agree?" ...The Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting from Nashville on this date in 1925... It's the birthday of poet and artist William Blake (books by this author), born in London (1757). He was four years old when he had a vision that God was at his window. A few years later, he went for a walk and saw a tree filled with angels... WA ["What do you mean 'William Blake'?"]

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.”

― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

On this day in 1932, Groucho Marx performs on radio for the first time... He said

• “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
• “I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.” 
“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”
• “If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong.” 
• “I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.” 

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11.3.15. 6 am/6:13, 59/75
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