Streams of experience

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains." 

That's Henry the natural man and transcendentalist, whose passion for the perpetual dawn is a great inspiration but whose detection of eternity eludes me. I do love to contemplate deep time and all it may yet deliver, but I really can't see through it to something sure to endure. 

It amused me to open Ed's email yesterday, just after posting "Don't ask me what time is," with a link to a short essay on the subject. James and his hero Bergson both thought hard about the perception of time in our experience, about the role of our distinctively-personal and subjective takes on experience in shaping that perception of kronos and kairos. 

The present may be specious but, in the moment, it's what we've got. We must attend to it, and to the next, and the next. Not ad infinitum, just again and again until all attention's spent. 

In other words, life as we know it is a flowing stream destined either to dry up or eventually merge with a larger sea. How adeptly and attentively we manage to dip our oars as we're carried along, we may presume, affects the quality of the day, a lifetime, maybe an epoch. 

Time lends itself to such metaphors, which convey a sense of the importance of taking experience seriously. That's been the hallmark of philosophers in the classic American tradition, but also of the best and wisest observers of the passing scene generally. 

That must be why, since I returned from the Chicago philosophy meeting, I've been so taken again with Alistair Cooke. I never really paid him much attention as the Masterpiece Theater host, but his Letters from America 1936-2004 back to Britain are wonderful dips into the streams of our experience. 

That's the rich sense of experience as attentive and not-unsympathetic encounter with an extravagant and exotic world in need of explication, elaboration, elucidation, appreciation, celebration, and constructive critique. Philosophers ought to start with that "thick" notion, not the thin deracinated conceptual shadow they too frequently find so dispensable.