James Geary, metaphorically speaking (TEDtalks)

Lewis and Tolkien on Chronological Snobbery

...if we are to use the words childish or infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping.

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If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of youth, we might begin with this—with youth's chronological snobbery. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism


Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery," as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.


--J.R.R. Tolkien, from "On Fairy-Stories"

On “Chronological Snobbery”

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Recently, in preparation for guests, I spent some time cleaning the house more thoroughly than I normally would. (I am no particular lover of tidiness).  As I sorted through my stacks and piles of neglected objects, I recalled how much more present things seemed to me when I was a child. I remember a mushroom-shaped pin cushion with a heavy gold-plated stem and luscious green velvet top that seemed amazed at its own worthiness to display my mother's pearly-tipped dress pins. Then there was the salt and pepper shaker set—tiny red glass strawberries balanced on a prickly silver vine-- and the venerable, marvelous blue button box. It was my great-grandmother's button box, though it was a cookie tin in actual fact, and it rattled with so many buttons, so various and interesting that I wanted to tip the tin over my head and let the buttons trickle down the back of my neck or tilt the box onto the floor so that I could flex my toes amongst the treasure. Now, when I lose a button, I buy a new shirt. I am much less sentimental about objects—I don't really care what hangs on the Christmas tree and one tea cup is as good as another—but in achieving this grown-up detachment it is possible that I have stunted the growth of my relationship with the life of the world.

I understand now that boxes are for containing things and do not get lonely on the shelf and that my bathroom mirror has nothing to tell me that comes from inside itself and is not merely reflected from the space between it and the opposite wall. The problem is that my childhood intuitions were not wholly or inherently wrong. It was only when I began to think about them that they became a problem. It is not accurate to say that, when I was a child, I believed that all in the world was alive in the same way that I was. It was only gradually, in a confusion of thought and sensation, that I began to believe anything or have any ideas at all.  It is silly to look back on a feeling and say it is wrong because it does not match your subsequent idea when feelings and ideas are two different ways of knowing.

If our feelings, our intuitions, are misrepresented by our nascent ideas then maybe, instead of simply replacing feelings with a newer set of (more rational) ideas, we would have been better served to allow our feelings to grow-up, to inform and be informed by our ideas, so that we didn't end up trapped in the belief that one is "just a feeling" and the other is "just an idea."  If our early, egocentric beliefs about the world amount to clumsy attempts to explain our previously unreflected-upon intuitions (what Shelley called the "before-unapprehended relations of things"), the problem is not with the original intuition but with the ineffective attempt to explain it, with the very belief that anything can be explained through representation.

At this stage of our development, it is rationality that has not gotten its feet yet.  It is rationality that is the pretender-god, thinking it can grasp the ungraspable, but we laugh away our intuition because our rationality says that intuition is the way babies know the world and, of course, babies can't really know anything because they can't think about anything.  I assure you that there is nothing on the earth or in the heavens that is not possessed of some degree, some kind of life but, in my rush to maturity, I put this knowledge away with as much shame as I attached to my security blanket or first, unbearably awkward crush.

Perhaps the relationship between feeling and rationality should be imagined as more like a continuum than as a series of succeeding stages (something that is more subtly fluid even than Ken Wilber's "transcend and include" model).  A child cannot make a sophisticated aesthetic judgment (a judgment made from an intuitive sense of wholeness or, at least, a sense of how things fit together) because the child's judgment of an object cannot be separated from the immediate, visceral effect the object has on the child (the child feels that he likes or dislikes something based on egocentric, almost animal drives).  A child needs individuation, perspective (in other words, rationality) to see the object for itself, rather than for himself.

When a child has his needs met by food and affection, the world is a seamless perfection of regularity and proportion.  Objects are a functional part of that perfection, not distinct from it, but, when a child begins to distinguish the world from himself, perhaps he begins to expect the same principle of regularity and proportion to exist as conditions for (and within) the existence of objects (including other beings) as well as a condition for (and within) his own existence.  Everything breathes together, so to speak. 

In other words, he senses that everything is alive and, in a provisional sense, distinct from each other but nothing could be either alive or distinct from his internal world unless it was a function of the same rhythmic principle (manas or logos, we adults might call it) upon which his internal world operates.  All of this is felt and not thought, not consciously reflected upon.  It does not exist as a stage of oceanic, egocentric consciousness or as a stage of individuated, non-egocentric consciousness but somewhere along the continuum between them.  Empathy, a sense of kindredness, is only possible when we on some level know ourselves to be the same but different from the object of our empathy.  The less we feel our connection to objects, the fewer objects seem worthy of our empathy.  This is how we lose our feelings for rocks and trees and fail to see that this loss is as pathological as a loss of feeling for each other.

I do not want to remain a child forever. I want to use my rationality to understand the worth of an individual and the vital necessity of keeping my individual head above the crowd of sensations that is the undifferentiated world. I want to be able to appreciate objects for their own nature rather than simply love them because they are umbilically attached to myself but I never want to fully sever the cord. Abandoning the intuition of one stage of consciousness for the rational mistrust of another precludes the possibility that we can shape an intuition into a solid, reliable, grown-up thing—informed by our analytical mind that loves to distinguish but grounded in our empathetic mind that loves to relate. This will change, not only the way we think about rocks and trees, but how we feel privileged to make use of them. Perhaps when we understand that everything has a soul, we will cease to contrive such unworthy vessels to contain them. Then, all of our homes will be filled with objects that speak to us.

To His Books

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
    By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know — what was too much for thee!

--Henry Vaughan

On Losing Yourself (and Finding Yourself) in a Good Book

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In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.  The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself.  The seconday impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.  In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.  Obviously this process can be described either as enlargement or as temporary annihilation of the self.  But that is an old paradox; "he that loseth his life shall save it." 

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Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.  Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism

From a Speech Delivered at a Farewell Party

"To speak of remembrance as you do is merely a clumsy way of expressing oneself.  Whenever we have experienced something great or beautiful or significant, it need not be recalled as if it were recaptured from without.  On the contrary, it must from the very beginning become interwoven with our inner being, become one with it, make us into a new and better person and thus creatively  live on forever within ourselves.  We must not long for the return of anything that has passed: in a sense there is no past; there is only the ever new that is formed from the elements of what we call the past; longing must always be creative..."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Once Forever

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I spent the evening rewatching the film Once with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  It put me in mind of a universal truth and of its equally true opposite.  Nothing lasts.  Everything passes away.  At the moment of perfection, the unraveling has begun.  We cannot continue breathing-in forever, no matter how good it feels to take in the air. Eventually, very soon, we must allow our lungs to release.  Yet when I was younger, and more recently but less regularly, I had the experience of stepping into a moment as into the frame of a photograph, of stepping not only into the scene but into my body, gesture, knowledge and emotions with the assurance of a dancer precisely hitting her mark.  I knew that, after I felt myself moving on, the moment would remain forever as it was.  This knowledge invested even the horrifying moments, and the awkward and confusing ones, with a flawless radiance.  Every breath was inexpressibly satisfying but sad.  Made up of longing and fulfillment and longing again, each was full.  Each was endless.  Nothing passes away.  Ever.

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