Light On Dark Water

Seeing--Like, Actually

Seeing is more than indifferently reflecting (as a mirror reflects all that passes within range). It is a vital process that directly affects our lives. To see, perceive, means to receive into oneself, to submit to the influence of things, to place oneself within their grasp. Necessarily, the will mounts guard over the vision. One protection against precarious things is to look at them sharply, so as to discover their weaknesses; another is to look away, so as to remain unaffected by them. On the whole, we see what we choose to see; the selectiveness of the individual eye is a protective measure of life itself. This being true already on the natural plane, how much truer it is on the spiritual, with its cognizance of others, of the positions we take to the truths and demands thrust upon us. To see another human being as he really is means to lay ourselves open to his influence. Thus when fear or dislike moves us to avoid him, this reaction is already evident in our gaze; the eye caricaturizes him, stifling the good, heightening the bad. We discern his intentions, make swift comparisons, and leap to conclusions. All this proceeds involuntarily, if not unconsciously (in which case our powers of distortion, uncurbed by reason, do their worst). Seeing is a protective service to the will to live. The deeper our fear or distaste of a person, the more tightly we close our eyes to him, until finally we are incapable of perception or the profound German word for it, Wahrnehmen: reception-of-truth. Then we have become blind to that particular person. This mysterious process lies behind every enmity. Discussion, preaching, explanations are utterly useless. The eye simply ceases to register what is plain to be seen. Before there can be any change, a fundamental shift must take place in the general attitude. The mind must turn to justice, the heart expand; then only can the eye really begin to discern. Little by little the sheen of the object on which it rests strengthens its visual power, and slowly it recovers the health of truth. 

--Romano Guardini, The Lord

I said I was not going to discuss current events and controversies during Lent. But this passage is uncannily applicable to those. 

This picture has nothing to do with this post. But suppose you associate red with someone or some group you hate and/or fear.

 

I Guess I Need to Read War and Peace Again

Because I didn't get out of it anything close to what Gary Saul Morson does in this New Criterion piece, "The Greatest of All Novels." 

Tolstoy had an amazing capacity to understand “particular moments” in all their unrepeatable complexity. Where theorists, and even other great novelists, saw a smooth curve, he detected the infinitesimal deviations from it. This ability explains his unsurpassed realism in describing the human mind. Isaac Babel expressed what so many have felt when he remarked that if nature could write directly, without a human intermediary, it would write like Tolstoy; in a similar spirit, Matthew Arnold declared that “we are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.” Tolstoy himself stressed his ability to see the infinitesimally small movements of consciousness that others overlooked.

I don't dispute that by any means. But it's not what I noticed in the reading or remembered after. I think I was so occupied with keeping track of the people and their movements that the subtler aspects of the book more or less passed me by. Another reading really would be in order, though I'd like to re-read Anna Karenina first--I only read it once, forty-plus years ago. 

I don't like the "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky" false choice, but I have to admit that Dostoevsky is more appealing and interesting to me. Perhaps that would change on greater acquaintance with Tolstoy.

Greene: Lord, Let Me Know Mine End

Because my wife and I are chronically and apparently incorrigibly late almost everywhere we go, we did not go to our usual Ordinariate Mass yesterday morning. It's on the west side of Mobile, and we live twenty miles to the east. It takes us most of an hour to get there. The Mass is at 9:30, and at approximately 9:25 we had just reached downtown, with ten to fifteen minutes yet to go. So we decided to just stop where we were and wait until 10:30 for the Mass at the cathedral. And I'm glad we did, because I heard this music for the first time.

I like the music, but I really like the text, which is from Psalm 39:

Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live. Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity. For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee.

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling; hold not thy peace at my tears. For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen.

If you're at all familiar with the Coverdale translation of the Psalms, you may have guessed (if you didn't already know) that this is one of his. Reportedly he is less accurate but he is very often a better poet than the King James translators, who have, for instance, that last sentence as:

O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.

Not nearly as poignant, to my ear.

I thought I was fairly literate about classical music, but can't remember ever having heard Maurice Greene's name before. He was an English contemporary of Bach and Handel and according to Wikipedia this piece is "his acknowledged masterpiece." He's probably well-known to church musicians in the Anglican tradition and to those particularly interested in choral music.

The Intellect Cannot Cope

The intellect cannot cope with such paradoxes, though it somehow senses the reality beyond all reality, the truth beyond all truth. Precisely here lies the danger. The mind must never allow itself to be misled into seeming 'comprehension,' into facile sensations or phrases with nothing solid behind them. The whole problem is a mystery, the sacred mystery of the relationship of the triune God to his incarnate Son. We can never penetrate it, and knowledge of this incapacity must dominate our every thought and statement concerning Jesus' life.

--Romano Guardini, The Lord

I think this basic idea is itself almost a commonplace now, so much so that it can become another means of evasion, of "seeming 'comprehension'".  So that stern "must dominate" is still needed, and always will be.