A post for a stark, cold, and beautiful Sunday evening....
Very few people really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.
--Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his friendsSara and Gerald Murphy, on the death of their son, aged 15, from spinal meningitis
In his letter, Hemingway gives us what he would have called the gen regarding the dead.
Whatever our religious beliefs, those dead we have loved truly and well—and sometimes not so well—can never die because we human beings are capable of imagination, and so resurrect in our minds those who have gone to their graves. Our dead appear to us in dreams; awake, we summon them to life through prayer, meditation, and thought; photographs and various objects they treasured—a bracelet, a book—can bring them back to us in a rush that takes away our breath. As a poet once wrote, “The dead die only when we living let them die,” and anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one understands precisely Hemingway’s words of comfort. The dead we have loved live in our memories and in our shared reminiscences with others, even when memory falters and reminiscences fade.
Very few people really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.
--Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his friendsSara and Gerald Murphy, on the death of their son, aged 15, from spinal meningitis
In his letter, Hemingway gives us what he would have called the gen regarding the dead.
Whatever our religious beliefs, those dead we have loved truly and well—and sometimes not so well—can never die because we human beings are capable of imagination, and so resurrect in our minds those who have gone to their graves. Our dead appear to us in dreams; awake, we summon them to life through prayer, meditation, and thought; photographs and various objects they treasured—a bracelet, a book—can bring them back to us in a rush that takes away our breath. As a poet once wrote, “The dead die only when we living let them die,” and anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one understands precisely Hemingway’s words of comfort. The dead we have loved live in our memories and in our shared reminiscences with others, even when memory falters and reminiscences fade.
But the first part of the Hemingway quotation should give us pause. Is it true that “very few people really are alive?”
Throughout my life I have heard others make this same claim, and have read writers who believed it, and at times I may have concurred myself in this judgment. We look at people en masse, walking the sidewalks of Manhattan, for instance, and conclude by their blank expressions that many of them are dead inside. Conversely, we sit in a Burger King and watch a solitary man pushing a mop, and determine by his bent posture and lowly job that he must be one of the walking dead.
But if we stop to think about these judgments, we stumble over our own arrogance. Are we really capable of deciding who is truly alive? Who are we to decide such a thing? What qualifications do we possess for determining who is “really alive?”
Regarding our fellow human beings, we are for the most part mere spectators, observers on the outside looking into a darkened wood, judging another human soul half-hidden in shadows and mist. For all we know, that man pushing the mop may possess a rich interior life, reading philosophy in the evenings or raising three children whose love for him is unbearably beautiful, a man whose soul is a package of surprises, and each of those hundred thousand people on the pavements of Manhattan are sentient creatures, bearers of thought and emotion as varied and unique as the color of their skin or the cut of their hair. (Hemingway’s own remark was directed at a fifteen-year-old boy, and from what I have observed in my classroom these last two decades, all fifteen-year-olds are fully and really alive).
Of course, part of the difficulty, as is so often the case, lies in the definition of our terms. What exactly does it mean to be fully and really alive?
Here another writer, Thornton Wilder, offers some help. In his play Our Town, Emily Webb, whom we first meet as a schoolgirl and then as a bride on her wedding day, dies in childbirth, but is given permission by the Stage Manager to revisit a day in her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday and returns to that day with great excitement and hope, but quickly realizes how blind she and other human beings are to the sublime beauty of life. “We don’t have time to look at one another,” she says, and breaks down sobbing. She then asks the Stage Manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? —every, every minute?”
“No,” the Stage Manager replies, but then modifies his remark: “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
Wilder is onto something important here. We are all alive, but we are most truly alive when we are aware of the miracle of the world in which we live. Most of us are too caught up in our daily routines—very busy routines, I might add—to lift our heads and see the beauty and the mystery of this thing we call life. We are like soldiers in a trench, confined in a place of bare earthen walls and muddy floors, unable to hear the skylark or to bask in the light of the sun and the moon.
Sometimes circumstances force us to “realize life while we live it.” In war, for example, soldiers in combat have spoken of feeling most fully alive when they were in danger of death. “Depend upon it, sir,” Johnson told his biographer Boswell, “when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” and soldiers facing death, indeed anyone facing the big sleep, surely find themselves alerted to the vividness of life. When Dostoevsky awaited a firing squad for crimes against the state—his sentence was commuted to imprisonment at the last moment—he wrote later how the experience offered him an epiphany of life and its wonders.
People who fall violently in love, whether at the age of sixteen or the age of seventy-five, also experience this sensation. Their surging emotions can transform the familiar into something strange and beautiful. Their love can alter their vision of everyone and everything, changing, for example, the dull face of a convenience store cashier into that of an angel or an unimpressive garden into a vision of paradise. To fall in love this way has a magic all its own, and the spell can, at least for a time, radically change the lover’s vision of the mundane.
A religious conversion can also give us a pair of new eyes. Those who have experienced such a conversion often record the experience as akin to the violent emotions of love. Saint Paul in his blindness, Saint Augustine in the garden, the Quaker George Fox and the Anglican John Wesley: these and a thousand others have left us accounts of how a sudden encounter with God rocked their hearts and souls, and changed forever the way they perceived reality.
Wilder writes that none of us can ever “realize life…every, every minute.” Here again he is on target. The world is too miraculous, too vast, too overwhelming, too filled with impressions, for us to do more than briefly touch such deep perception at its core. To apprehend life this way, to immerse ourselves every moment of every day in the mystery we are living, is simply beyond our power. A few hours into the experience, and we would collapse from exhaustion.
Yet we can, if we choose, create visionary moments. We don’t need to be in danger of death or in the throes of love to enter into this mystery, this holy apprehension of our existence. A little time, a little effort, and a little silence, and we can capture the magic.
Try this experiment. When you are with someone you love, preferably someone as familiar to you as an old pair of shoes, study the face of that person when she is least aware of you. Perhaps she is sleeping, perhaps she is reading a book, perhaps she is performing a chore—cooking in the kitchen, dusting the shelves, quieting a child. You have watched her do these things a hundred times, a thousand times, but now truly look at her. Study that face, try to see it as if you are seeing it for the first time—the shape and color of the eyes, the slant of the cheek, all the beauty and the blemishes—and you will apprehend this awesome mystery of life.
Another approach: when you are sitting on your porch or in your living room with your coffee, the first cup of the morning, and all around you lies the great stillness of dawn, let yourself think of all those sleeping in your house and in the houses around you. Remind yourself of the mystery you are living, whirling through the universe on a tiny planet, and how beautiful the sliver of moon looks this particularly morning, and how good the coffee tastes, and how fresh and clean the day feels as it arrives over the horizon. Do this, and you may find yourself falling into a moment in which you become aware, however briefly, that life, as Winston Churchill once remarked of Russia, is “a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma.”
We are not all saints or poets, but we are human beings, and like the saints and poets, we too can touch the transcendent and experience, even for a moment, this dazzling realm of enchantment in which we breathe and move and live.
Throughout my life I have heard others make this same claim, and have read writers who believed it, and at times I may have concurred myself in this judgment. We look at people en masse, walking the sidewalks of Manhattan, for instance, and conclude by their blank expressions that many of them are dead inside. Conversely, we sit in a Burger King and watch a solitary man pushing a mop, and determine by his bent posture and lowly job that he must be one of the walking dead.
But if we stop to think about these judgments, we stumble over our own arrogance. Are we really capable of deciding who is truly alive? Who are we to decide such a thing? What qualifications do we possess for determining who is “really alive?”
Regarding our fellow human beings, we are for the most part mere spectators, observers on the outside looking into a darkened wood, judging another human soul half-hidden in shadows and mist. For all we know, that man pushing the mop may possess a rich interior life, reading philosophy in the evenings or raising three children whose love for him is unbearably beautiful, a man whose soul is a package of surprises, and each of those hundred thousand people on the pavements of Manhattan are sentient creatures, bearers of thought and emotion as varied and unique as the color of their skin or the cut of their hair. (Hemingway’s own remark was directed at a fifteen-year-old boy, and from what I have observed in my classroom these last two decades, all fifteen-year-olds are fully and really alive).
Of course, part of the difficulty, as is so often the case, lies in the definition of our terms. What exactly does it mean to be fully and really alive?
Here another writer, Thornton Wilder, offers some help. In his play Our Town, Emily Webb, whom we first meet as a schoolgirl and then as a bride on her wedding day, dies in childbirth, but is given permission by the Stage Manager to revisit a day in her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday and returns to that day with great excitement and hope, but quickly realizes how blind she and other human beings are to the sublime beauty of life. “We don’t have time to look at one another,” she says, and breaks down sobbing. She then asks the Stage Manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? —every, every minute?”
“No,” the Stage Manager replies, but then modifies his remark: “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
Wilder is onto something important here. We are all alive, but we are most truly alive when we are aware of the miracle of the world in which we live. Most of us are too caught up in our daily routines—very busy routines, I might add—to lift our heads and see the beauty and the mystery of this thing we call life. We are like soldiers in a trench, confined in a place of bare earthen walls and muddy floors, unable to hear the skylark or to bask in the light of the sun and the moon.
Sometimes circumstances force us to “realize life while we live it.” In war, for example, soldiers in combat have spoken of feeling most fully alive when they were in danger of death. “Depend upon it, sir,” Johnson told his biographer Boswell, “when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” and soldiers facing death, indeed anyone facing the big sleep, surely find themselves alerted to the vividness of life. When Dostoevsky awaited a firing squad for crimes against the state—his sentence was commuted to imprisonment at the last moment—he wrote later how the experience offered him an epiphany of life and its wonders.
People who fall violently in love, whether at the age of sixteen or the age of seventy-five, also experience this sensation. Their surging emotions can transform the familiar into something strange and beautiful. Their love can alter their vision of everyone and everything, changing, for example, the dull face of a convenience store cashier into that of an angel or an unimpressive garden into a vision of paradise. To fall in love this way has a magic all its own, and the spell can, at least for a time, radically change the lover’s vision of the mundane.
A religious conversion can also give us a pair of new eyes. Those who have experienced such a conversion often record the experience as akin to the violent emotions of love. Saint Paul in his blindness, Saint Augustine in the garden, the Quaker George Fox and the Anglican John Wesley: these and a thousand others have left us accounts of how a sudden encounter with God rocked their hearts and souls, and changed forever the way they perceived reality.
Wilder writes that none of us can ever “realize life…every, every minute.” Here again he is on target. The world is too miraculous, too vast, too overwhelming, too filled with impressions, for us to do more than briefly touch such deep perception at its core. To apprehend life this way, to immerse ourselves every moment of every day in the mystery we are living, is simply beyond our power. A few hours into the experience, and we would collapse from exhaustion.
Yet we can, if we choose, create visionary moments. We don’t need to be in danger of death or in the throes of love to enter into this mystery, this holy apprehension of our existence. A little time, a little effort, and a little silence, and we can capture the magic.
Try this experiment. When you are with someone you love, preferably someone as familiar to you as an old pair of shoes, study the face of that person when she is least aware of you. Perhaps she is sleeping, perhaps she is reading a book, perhaps she is performing a chore—cooking in the kitchen, dusting the shelves, quieting a child. You have watched her do these things a hundred times, a thousand times, but now truly look at her. Study that face, try to see it as if you are seeing it for the first time—the shape and color of the eyes, the slant of the cheek, all the beauty and the blemishes—and you will apprehend this awesome mystery of life.
Another approach: when you are sitting on your porch or in your living room with your coffee, the first cup of the morning, and all around you lies the great stillness of dawn, let yourself think of all those sleeping in your house and in the houses around you. Remind yourself of the mystery you are living, whirling through the universe on a tiny planet, and how beautiful the sliver of moon looks this particularly morning, and how good the coffee tastes, and how fresh and clean the day feels as it arrives over the horizon. Do this, and you may find yourself falling into a moment in which you become aware, however briefly, that life, as Winston Churchill once remarked of Russia, is “a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma.”
We are not all saints or poets, but we are human beings, and like the saints and poets, we too can touch the transcendent and experience, even for a moment, this dazzling realm of enchantment in which we breathe and move and live.