Wallace Stevens, one of America’s most distinguished poet, once wrote in one of his early journals something which I thought was both perceptive and chastening.
“How utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes and barrens and wilds. It still dwarfs and terrifies and crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter.
Man is an affair of cities. His gardens and orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.”
We speak of people who fail to see the proverbial “elephant in the room” as being hugely distracted or tunnel-minded that they become bogged down by trivialities, missing the much bigger things that the world has to offer, be it natural or man-made. Do we lose anything consequential by missing these wonders – the roar of a waterfall, the songs of thrushes at sunrise, the music of Bach and Chopin, the art of Michelangelo and Kandinsky?
Plenty, I would think. Whenever I think about the extravagant beauty of the Earth, whenever I ponder over the creative impulse of man that makes a poem sing, I am bowled over by the enormous privilege to be alive, to be part of this mystery called life.
“This is the truth of the pervading intricacy of the world’s detail: the creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in form.”
~ Annie Dillard, American writer
This meticulous detail extends to us – every atom of every individual on the planet arranged to make us sit at the top of the evolution chain, uniquely endowed with the cognitive ability to build civilizations, tell stories, make art. All of this is too much goodness to be wasted by indifference and nonchalance. Can I stay still, asked Dillard and she answered thus:
It is the fixed that horrifies us. The fixed is the world without fire – dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark.”
The renowned cellist Pablo Casals understood the point Dillard was making. Writing at the age of 93, he said that for the past eighty years,
“I have started each day in the same manner … I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach … It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning … It is a rediscovery of the world in which I have the joy of being apart. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being human.”
The sublime need not always be grand. As the poet William Blake famously taught, mind and spirit can be uplifted by a mere grain of sand.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And hold Heaven in a wild flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in a hour…
~ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, II, 111-4.
Blake lived in a different era, but already felt the need to slow down in order the experience the sublime. Our challenge is to reclaim the time spent looking at our screens. We need to live more viscerally, taking time to know grasses and sedges – and care. We need to think beyond STEM and think of the humanities – of art, music and literature – not as luxuries but as essential cultivators of curiosity and tastes. Then slowly but surely, the world will offer itself to our imagination, and the least of our journeys in life will be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions.