The Wayfarer
This is an era of travel. If you want to be cultured, broadminded, thoroughly educated, you travel. And escaping across the continent or overseas has never been easier or more popular. Day or night, the roads that crisscross the country are lined with lights. People are always going somewhere.
Recently, my husband and I took a road trip from Maryland to Tennessee, and as the miles and hours ran on, I wondered what places—exotic, comfortable, or dingy—all those drivers around us looked toward over their steering wheels. I believe that many of us, whether we’re on a business trip or a vacation, don’t enjoy the journey part of traveling, although we look forward to the destination. Traveling can be uncomfortable; it means to be on the way to somewhere, to be in limbo. We are in a hurry to get that on-the-way part done and to make ourselves feel as much at home as we can while we’re en route.
On most American highways, you can’t drive through empty countryside. Every mile or so along the open road, you pass ugly blue, red, yellow, and green signs pointing out the gas stations, chain restaurants, and hotels that dot the roadside over and over, for the convenience of the multitudes who pass. As we sped along the endlessly unrolling road through Virginia and Tennessee, I felt disappointed; I couldn’t help thinking that the uniqueness of every new place we passed was diminished by this speed and these identical stores planted in concrete.
We are so eager to shorten the space and time between destinations that we seem to have sacrificed place—and our ability to be aware of the place we are in. C.S. Lewis, a great walker of the English countryside, writes in Surprised by Joy about the pleasure of experiencing the “quiddity,” the essence or flavor, of a place. If you stay somewhere–in a certain city, a house, a field, or a patch of woods–long enough with your senses sharp to its details, you will take in this flavor. Those memories you have of the feel of your grandmother’s house, or a church, or a concert hall from childhood; the vivid colors of places, recalled by a smell or story that strikes you by surprise; these are your vital connection to a place.
It has been a common theme among certain modern writers that physical place, the place you are in, matters, in the same way that time, the now moment, matters. It is easy to walk wearily around familiar places, blind to their details, not suspecting that, as Tony Hiss writes, “Everything around you has a question inside it” (“Wonderlust”). Many of these modern writers, like Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, and T.S. Eliot, warn that people who do not know how to be somewhere, to live where they are and embrace the present place and moment, are more than likely nowhere, essentially more dead than alive.
But drawn by globalizing forces, we are trying to be at home everywhere and are in danger of losing awareness of anywhere. I think we have done this because we dislike the vulnerable feeling of homelessness; and to recognize a place for what it is means admitting one’s alienation, one’s position as a stranger there, perhaps both physically and spiritually. But I believe that the person who is confident enough in the destination that lies behind or ahead can find pleasure in the journey.
You can learn to like those reminders of what it is to be a pilgrim, a wayfarer gathering impressions, with home always as the point of reference. Part of the pleasure in traveling is experiencing the flavors of each place and savoring their difference from the flavor of the place you call home. It may even help you better distinguish from a distance the quiddity of home, which a pilgrim will treasure that much more when he or she arrives.
Is it wrong to travel and to accommodate travelers with 70 mile-per-hour speed limits and identical McDonalds and Comfort Inns scattered from Maine to Florida, helping us to ignore where we are? I only know that if any such thing as a home exists on earth, it isn’t found by smoothing away distinctions of place and abolishing the discomforts of travel. To be at home everywhere is to be at home nowhere.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid traveling. It means you should travel with awareness of place. Travel the rough country roads instead of the interstates; and travel with the reminder that to travel is not to be home.
Impressions
Who can say how we each gather impressions, catching hold of fragments we have read, seen, half-heard, or dreamed, to form our own vision of the world? There is a part of us that draws conclusions from a suggestion echoed in the mind, a story, a mood felt beneath the level of words. Hardly knowing it, we adjust our picture of reality by these impressions. If each of us, like a collage artist, has pasted together our mismatched pieces, how can we be sure of what the world is like? Who hasn’t felt the nagging fear that reality might turn out to be something different than he expected?
This is what is lovely in children; most don’t yet suspect a sham in their world. Theirs is, however, a fantastical world, pieced together by impressionable minds with few defenses and no larger vision against which to compare their ideas. We like to call this credulous quality in children “innocence,” but I would rather call it joy. Joy is the opposite of cynicism. And both joy and cynicism are framed pictures of reality, stances from which one may view the world.
For many of us this joy, like innocence, vanishes into memory somewhere along the path to adulthood, replaced by fear, bitterness, familiarity, and the conviction that life is hard. As we eat the fruit of knowledge and experience, we learn to mistrust others and our senses, to question and overturn. We see more of the horrors and futilities of the world.
Sometimes the happy dream of childhood is torn by a close death or betrayal. One of the first shocks that troubled my world was an intellectual one: Calvin’s doctrine of Predestination, taught in heavy doses in my junior high Sunday school class. To me the problem—how God could be good and life have meaning while everything is determined–was horrifying, and I struggled with the doctrine for years. It awakened my fear that the worst might be true, that the world might not hold together as I had thought. I felt that deception was reaching to the root of what I had thought was my own decision-making and essential self.
Over time, however, I found plenty of wise people who saw these same difficulties in the doctrine, and they suggested that something can be true and yet impossible to understand through rational explaining. Eventually, I made peace with Calvin, shelving his ideas in the shadowed realm of mystery, where maybe even angels dare not walk far. But I have felt the same dizzy feeling again and again, after an accident or tragic waste, or after reading satirists, materialist psychologists, reductionists, and postmodern philosophers: it is the feeling that I am peering through a rip in the happy fabric of my life, into an unexpected gulf.
Life is a battle between joy and cynicism. Often joy (that sense that all might be well, that we have found happiness) comes within reach. At some point in our intellectual maturing, this battle becomes a choice. It seems to me that this choice must be informed by both intellect and faith. It requires the strength to dismiss fear and to assent to a view of the world as a place where the beauty we find is meaningful, and where things hold together in a purpose we can’t see.
To yield even a little to cynicism is to admit room for meaninglessness, to resign oneself to the rips that could undo the whole fabric. We have a choice to believe the worst or catch hold of faith in the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Dante), in the essential meaningfulness of the creation, and in its ultimate redemption to loveliness.
Recently, while I was reading Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas—part satire, part fable—I tasted that joy-killing fear. Rasselas tells the story of a young Abyssinian prince who is discontented with the lovely valley where he dwells in pampered imprisonment. He escapes with his sister and a poet to see the world, to seek happiness, and to decide what to do with his life. Rasselas has already found disappointment in pleasure and ease, but in his travels he discovers that all occupations and stations of life fail to bring happiness, and that all people, whether they admit it or not, are miserable, and their attempts at happiness are futile. At the end, the adventurers decide that the best a person can do is seek virtue and wisdom and renounce the world’s joys; for it is only after death, when the vanities of the temporal world are gone, that the soul may be in any way happy.
The cynicism beneath satire like Johnson’s has always bothered me. I am still learning how to find the humor in it. But before I quit Rasselas, I thought about my reaction. I didn’t need to fear this novel that threatened to show happiness as a fake and to alter my picture of the world. I didn’t have to let gloomy old Sam Johnson drain life of its meaning. My battles with poorly taught Calvinism and with grim psychology textbooks had gained me a conviction that the joyful view of the world is more than just wishful thinking. I hold enough defined beliefs to react to the impressions I encounter and to match my own understanding of the world against this one.
I am of course assuming that things can be affirmed and denied about the world. One thing that I believe can be affirmed is that there is meaning and symbol in the material world: meanings we have only glimpsed and guessed at that go very deep. Those “trailing clouds of glory” Wordsworth remembers from childhood weren’t just in his imagination. Johnson may be right that happiness cannot be seized barehanded from worldly treasures, but I affirm, in spite of that great man’s intellect, that there are good things and happiness to be found in the world, when all is viewed with reference to the higher and more lovely Creator.
It is good to grow up out of the childhood fantastical world; but the unself-conscious wonder, simplicity, eagerness, and trust that children lose foreshadows the joy we must regain as adults. Our education of children must be to bring them back around to a place where they can make decisions to accept or deny things–where they can make peace with intellectual issues and find a clear way to see the world. Parents often live in fear that their children are going to get strange and damaging notions from what they read, watch, and hear. They dread their loss of innocence, their fall into cynicism and the fading of that simple wondering joy. But the battles that ensue from the warring impressions and worldviews they meet are their only hope of finding solid ground.
If I were to formulate all this as an education philosophy, I would borrow George MacDonald’s words:
Everything in the world is more or less misunderstood at first: we have to learn what it is, and come at length to see that it must be so, that it could not be otherwise. Then we know it; and we never know a thing really until we know it thus.
–Hope of the Gospel
Afternoon in Autumn
I walk out into an October afternoon, and the air is sweet and clear, full of the jingle of crickets. The breeze shifts the shadows and sunlight on the leaves, and the trees in their green and gold glory reach into the genial blue of the sky. This is autumn in Maryland; it isn’t a fireworks show of colors, but the world is still lovely with abundance at the year’s end.
Its sweetness stirs all my senses, and immediately a yearning pierces me, wafting from the secrecy of the tree-shadows, or else from the heights where the trees meet the blue–I can’t tell which. It is a promise, like a half-recovered memory, of the possibility of . . . what? But I have learned that if I am to take a walk, I must acknowledge this yearning and then ignore it. Otherwise it will poison my vision of the afternoon.
Where do these false promises come from? Is there a spirit in this autumn day that offers them? Or is it that my soul hears whispers it cannot interpret, and chooses to attach meaning to them?
By now I have learned what it is that my soul hears in the promise of the breeze. “This is it,” the whisper says. “This is beauty, this is your heart’s joy, what you have been looking for. Follow; the answer is here.” And if I listen and follow, all the splendor grows sour and the world turns its back, because (oh so painfully) it isn’t it, and it will not speak to me. Wordsworth and the other Romantics heard such a promise, and they believed it; I wonder why they did not fall out of love with nature sooner. If I listened too long, if I was always grasping hard at the beauty that moved me, as though I could make it stay and invite me into its secrets, that is what would happen to me.
Our best pleasures must be painful. Anyone who has made an idol of food or wealth or love or any kind of beauty knows this pain. By their nature pleasures do not satisfy; they do the opposite. They remind us that we desire something, and that they are not “It.” I believe that if many of us were honest, we would admit that our pleasures and happy moments sometimes carry more pain than our troubled times.
How is one to solve this paradox? St. Augustine, also plagued by the siren-call and sorrow of pleasure, offers an answer in his Confessions. We must say to every lovely thing: “You are not Him, but He made you.” This thing that attracts your passion is not God, but it comes from him, it points to Him. Maybe those whispers you hear (and misconstrue) have all the time been whispering of Him.
I believe that accepting that painful yearning, which we cannot and must not seek to interpret, is part of our enjoyment of beauty or of any good thing. We cannot force our impressions to stay; we cannot create our own meaning or make an experience last. We must kiss the sweet moments and let them go. That is because they are merely signposts for wayfarers (as C.S. Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy) and not the thing itself. They remind us that we are on the path to the soul’s joy, and that the destination is ahead.
Meditation on a Mollusk
Do you ever notice, in a moment of self-examining vision, that you are very like a mollusk? Like those soft-bodied sea creatures, you spend your energies building yourself a snug, clean shell. You have crafted it with infinite care, for this shell is you, your self-made definition of yourself.
Only in those rare moments do you realize that the shell is not you, but a hiding place. You wrap yourself in it to keep the world out. You are split, and you have taken pains to keep the vulnerable part, the part even you aren’t sure of, behind that smooth barrier.
Maybe you would call this shell-crafting business hypocrisy, or insecurity, or independence, or individualistic creativity. But really it is the behavior of those who carry shame, who do not know forgiveness. People who don’t know who they are will work most resourcefully to construct their fortresses, where, like the fallen Adam and Eve, they can crawl in and hide.
Here is a beautiful passage from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, spoken by a man who has decided to confess a great sin in his past that he has been concealing. On days when I feel especially inclined to creep in behind my painted shell, I like to remember his warning about the fate of individualists:
“For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself. He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity. But there must needs come a term to this horrible isolation, and everyone will all at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves one from another. Such will be the spirit of the time, and they will be astonished that they sat in darkness for so long, and did not see the light. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens . . . But until then we must keep hold of the banner, and every once in a while, if only individually, a man must suddenly set an example, and draw the soul from its isolation for an act of brotherly communion, though it be with the rank of holy fool” (Trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky).
This man, a few pages earlier, also declares Dostoevsky’s wonderful line, the theme of the whole novel:
A Forgotten Gift?
I recently found some stories I wrote late in high school, and they reminded me of an old ambition that colored my whole childhood. Since second grade when I wrote my first book about a cantankerous cat and dog, my plan was to become an author of fiction. And I worked on it. Between the ages of eight and eighteen, I wrote dozens of stories, poems, and plays, most of them ridiculous, but a few of them charming, if I am allowed to praise the writer I once was. Then I went to college and drowned in the oceans of Milton, Faulkner, and a hundred other giants of the literary canon. What was my puny imagination compared with that of Alexander Pope? Now I merely hoped that I might make a good literary critic, trading arguments in my puny voice with other critics, our heads stuffed with quotations and theories. Somewhere along the way, my eager dream had died. Besides the stories and poems that were milked from me in my sophomore creative writing class, I have not finished a piece of fiction since the 12th grade.
But I believe that flame needs to be reawakened, in me and in anyone who has let skills or artistic dreams slip away. Many of us mistakenly view human creativity as the prerogative only of the most talented and revered artists. The more extensively we have been educated in the classics of literature, music, and art, the more firmly we seem to hold this idea that the ordinary man or woman cannot create much of anything worthwhile.
But all of us are driven to imagine beauty. What child does not invent stories and adventures in play and act them out, in a kind of double of creation? Children love to color, build, tell stories, fashion sand castles. As we grow older and move into real life, many of us stifle these desires to create. But wouldn’t we all, if offered an open pathway, jump at the chance to be a published author, to hear someone sing a song we have written, or to act successfully in a show—not only for the fame, but for the pleasure of having created something? But there are obstacles in the path. Creation is unbelievably hard, and few have the skills or motivation to paint a portrait or even compose a simple poem. Most of us don’t try those things. We devote ourselves to our day jobs and leave artistic activity to the professional artists.
In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers gives voice to an often forgotten Christian idea, that “The characteristic common to God and man is apparently . . . the desire and the ability to make things.” According to Sayers, if you are human, you are a potential artist. Each has not only the desire, but also the ability. Ability of course must be cultivated; but no creature made in the image of God is without it. Why leave all the work, and the fun, to the Mozarts and Miltons of the world? Maybe few of us will craft masterpieces as captivating as Beethoven’s Fifth. But we can still humbly exercise our artistic skills and creative imaginations as a way of better knowing God, ourselves, the world, and the world’s wonders, and as a way of connecting with those in our community.
I think there is further reason to create, though, and you can find it in the fervor that drives those Beethovens and Miltons in their work. Stories and myths often speak of a death that precedes birth, or birth that feels like death. Artistic creation always involves pain; pain often inspires it. Confusion, anger, grief, depression, alienation, longing, or sensitivity to the loveliness and promise of the world that tantalizes but does not satisfy—these all drive the artist to the birthing.
In a fallen world, we create to ease the pain of being human. However full of Christian hope, no one is whole. Everyone grapples with (or else strives to ignore) the brokenness of the world, our feelings of homelessness, and the way time catches us by surprise. We are troubled by what C.S. Lewis calls
. . . the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both (from “The Weight of Glory”).
This desire to tell, to understand, and to expunge drives the artist. Do the great, troubled artists–Emily Dickinson and Francis Thompson and Gustav Mahler–feel this pain more acutely than ordinary mankind? Maybe they do, or maybe others have found their own answers. And maybe some of us have just settled for easy ways of distracting ourselves so that we need not think or feel more than is comfortable.
Even though it is difficult creating offers great pleasure. I believe the joy and power of the creative work lie in the act of naming things to an audience. Like an excited child learning and bestowing names, like Adam in the garden naming the animals, when we name an object or idea, we discover it. A writer who can name or rename something by metaphor in prose or poetry has the power to offer the reader an apprehension of an experience or object as we have never before known it. As Walker Percy puts it, artistic exchange always involves “one man encountering another man, speaking a word, and through it and between them discovering the world and himself.” For artists of all kinds, the purpose is the same: to discover, represent, and express something for themselves and another person. In expressing, the artist gains power—not to create reality, but to understand it and help another to see it.
What, then, does this mean for our busy, every-day lives, especially for those of us who never learned artistic skills? Contrary to general belief, adults are not too old to cultivate artistry. If you have skills in music, writing, or art, develop them. If you don’t, start learning to play an instrument or sing; make time to write (and read); learn pottery, woodworking, sewing, and cooking, and practice these things. Study and enjoy all kinds of art. Find music or drawing lessons for your children and expose them to lovely things in nature and art. Find a way to exercise your creative imagination. Since you are by nature a creator, attempting creativity can never be a waste of time.
But I am afraid, and you are afraid. What if we fail in our artistic efforts? How often will we really succeed in expressing and communicating? Will the amateur fiction writer or the violinist who begins playing at age thirty ever move themselves or an audience with their art? I believe they may. If we as amateur artists do not learn and experience something of the glory, the pleasure, and the pain of what it means to be a creator in some area of life, than we have not tried hard enough. Artistic desire and artistic capability, at some level, is God’s gift to each of his children. We have only to awaken it.
An Open Letter to the University Professor of Humanities
Dear Ms. or Mr. Professor,
I am writing this letter because, during my time at the University, I came to understand something of your labors. You are a tired, bitter pilgrim. You have created the gorgon that will turn us all to stone, and you strive bravely to look everywhere but in the direction of its eyes.
You have discovered the limitations of language. You understand how words defer meaning, how it is impossible for the symbol, the word, to escape its own system and directly represent the world outside itself. We have learned that words carry meaning not because they can replicate “the other” which they name, but because of their relation to other words. Thus, no set of words will have a contained or certain meaning. It is the same with beauty; we glimpse, we long, but we cannot lay our finger on what it is we see and desire. In your youth, those stars shivering in the void might have pierced your heart and you would have kept the memory of them, but now you are bitter that beauty eludes your grasp.
And so rather than endure the ache, you have denied the beauty of the world, and you have denied the world’s existence as the Greek philosophers thought it existed—as something solid outside our heads with which our hands and our words may connect.
Like Narcissus staring into the pool, you refuse to admit the presence of anything—pondweed, water snakes–existing inaccessible below the surface; you see only your own image. The world exists only insofar as we construct it through the symbols our community has invested with meaning. Reality, you tell your students, has no objective qualities and is just raw material for a rhetorician, a historian, or an artist. Now you are no longer Narcissus; you are the magician standing before the pool, by your powers of language and vision moving the waters, blending light and shadow to create new forms, shifting the center to the edges and embracing the margins into the center.
We write, create, and speak, as Andrea Lunsford says, with a view of “knowledge as always contextually bound, as always socially constructed.” We create truth through symbols used in community. Situation is the name for something we rope off and shape by tongue and emotion. These are the things you daily tell your students.
You are giving your students ashes, the dust of gems. What you are really saying is that there is nothing to see. You have changed the word “reality” so that it means “nonreality” or chaos; the unknowable outer darkness. This is because nonreality frightens you less than a reality that looms as an unshapeable mountain over your head.
But I know that you still find joy, Ms. or Mr. Professor, in your work: you love the thrill of figuring out how to dance around Medusa without getting caught by her gaze. With your symbols and your discourse communities, you have built magnificent castles and playgrounds all around her and earned laurels for it in obscure journals, although you have earned little money. It is not the money that matters; it is the thrill of skirting the abyss and the pleasure of building those imaginary castles, the work of your hands.
But there is an ache in your heart, because something about them is imaginary.
You wonder sometimes, and I have heard you ask one another, how Aristotle could write so brilliantly about manipulating language and emotion and yet naively assume that something—truth, ethics, some kind of stable reality—exists behind language. I do not know why, but maybe it is because he saw what you do not see—that your theory and your dance are suicidal. You skirt the abyss of nihilism, although you have not all fallen in and still believe you have things to teach. You believe this because you still love language and creation.
Mr. or Ms. Professor, there is a model that would allow you still to love and get your hands messy in language, and yet draw you away from the abyss. You would have to try out some new assumptions, which may have no more, but certainly have no less, proof than yours. It is possible still to see the symbol as a thing signifying a reality behind the symbols. As you say, words draw traces of meaning from other words in the language, and from all the situations in which they have been used by speakers of the language. These connections and associations, along with the veil between the word and reality, are what make writing so difficult; but they also give words their power of expression. They make poetry possible.
If you begin by assuming that an order outside our senses does exist, and that it is knowable, then symbols become the means of pursuing that reality. I believe with Aristotle that language, symbol, and art can be used to misinterpret, as well as to interpret; to misconstrue, as well as to translate; to evoke resonant images, or trite and harmful ones; to evaluate more falsely, or more truly.
Maybe, Mr. or Ms. Professor, you are happy constructing your castles and earning your laurels. Or maybe you have had your heart worn flat by the disappointments of language, beauty, and pleasure fleeing away from you, as a stone is worn flat by slow dripping water.
As for me, I am not disturbed that sometimes beauty and knowledge come only in glimpses and traces, or that it is hard to know the truth. I wonder if the reason we need symbols is that the reality is too great, or too infinite for us to grasp with our bare hands; language and symbol are our humble means of knowing (or, depending on how you look at it, our noble means). But how after all do we know what is good interpretation or bad interpretation, what is true or not true? That is not a question for now; but I do think it a wonderful mystery that the closest we have ever come to laying eyes upon “the other” is in the story of the Gospel, when God comes in a man’s body, and he is introduced to us as the Word.
Grace in the Ordinary
Starting a blog has made me think about ordinariness, because a blog offers space for an ordinary person like me to write. Maybe that’s why many of us distrust the idea of blogging; who wants to read about ordinary things? This is not going to be an argument for why you should read my blog. But I do want to convince you that, contrary to popular belief and practice, if you want mystery and adventure, if you want to find something with secrets beneath its exterior, you will find it in the things we have cloaked with the word “ordinary.”
The problem is that we have taken “ordinary” to mean “boring,” “normal,” “everyday.” But really, it refers to the familiar things that lie so close to us that we have stopped seeing them. Ordinary is what we call something or someone we no longer notice. We speak of an ordinary meal because we eat it all the time, or an ordinary day because it follows routine, or an ordinary person because she doesn’t have striking intelligence or personality. Our families and the places where we live and work also become ordinary; they begin to seem dull. And often we respond to this dullness by seeking thrill and escape.
I spent my childhood in a little Pennsylvania town, with parents who were fairly strict; but my world was nonetheless wide and full of wonders. Most children I have met also seem to experience life this way. They find hours of delight capering among the splintered forts and colorful pipes of a playground or playing in an attic. As a child, I discovered caves of astonishing depth in closets; a bike ride past the edge of town to find blackberries with my dad was the greatest adventure I could think of. I used to sit on our front porch in the evenings, watching the cloud formations and considering what it would be like to live up in the sky–or, if my mood was less sublime, imagining how those clouds would taste if they were mashed potatoes.
My first year of high school, it suddenly happened that the universe shrank. My town, which was the whole world and faerie-land besides for a little girl, suddenly didn’t have enough elbow room. I could still catch some charm in the old haunts–I still roamed the broken sidewalks and admired the broadness of the sky above the storefronts; but I began to feel scorn for my town and its cramped alleys, and the simple people who had never lived anywhere else. Like my friends, I began to feel the wanderlust.
I suspect that this belief in the ordinary is a trap into which we fall deeper as we grow older. Since I’m not very old, I can’t say, but I imagine that as time passes one needs more frequent reminders, from children or other messengers of faerie, to clear away the dust of everydayness and remember that ordinary is never what it seems.
As for ordinary people, I believe the drabness you see in them and pass over is always a mask. It is a cloth thrown over a light bulb. Some of us are fine hypocrites and know how to use ordinariness to cover sin and scandal, or a passion, or our shyness. And ordinary things–they are only ordinary because they have become invisible. To really see them, you need a new manner of looking. As a child, I used to amuse myself by lying on my back in the living room and pretending the ceiling was really the floor. How I would have liked to live in that upside-down house, with it’s empty rooms and chandeliers sticking up at people’s feet! We need upside-down eyes that will let us look at the world as if we had never seen it before. I don’t mean that we need to pretend closets are caves or that the backyard is faerie-land; but how many of us look twice at the canvass of the sky to observe the shades God paints on it? How many of us admire an airplane or rejoice at the green of the fields after rain? How many of us remember how to see our homes or our husbands or wives as we saw them first? With Keats, I would like to believe that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
There are really two ways to respond to the ordinary. We can try to escape it by traveling, seeking new experiences, or hunting for drama, like the gourmand who must add more spice to a dish each time he eats it in order to taste anything. Or we can learn from sacramentalists (like Walker Percy) to see the sacredness of the commonplace. Sometimes God speaks to us quietly, through the objects and people closest to us. Christ came to us in the ordinary body of a man, living the life of a commoner, and leaving a reminder of his glory in the humble form of the bread and wine. Like Elijah in the wilderness, we will miss the whisper if we don’t open our ears and eyes.
G.K. Chesterton tells a fable about two boys who are each offered a wish. One boy wishes to grow huge so that he can travel the world and see strange and faraway sights. To a giant who can cross the Himalayas in a few strides, however, the world isn’t so vast or interesting anymore. His end is disillusionment and death at the blade of an indignant farmer’s ax. Meanwhile, the second boy asks to become tiny, and he sets out to explore his garden. As far as anyone knows, he has not yet reached the end of that adventure. The moral of the tale, I believe, is that there are wonders yet to be seen in the world, and we must learn to become small enough to notice them.
