The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch the blue horizon, to touch its infinite loneliness and infinite happiness. I have watched many horizons in the lifetime since, and always they shimmer with the same strange duality, the same absolute awareness of mortality and of aliveness — the crest and trough of the same wave lapping at the essence of being.
Conjuring up a long sea voyage halfway around the world, Camus writes:
We are setting sail at daybreak. The moment we leave the harbor a short, gusty wind vigorously brushes the sea, which curls backward in small, foamless waves. A little later, the wind freshens and strews the sea with swiftly vanishing camellias. Thus, throughout the morning, we hear our sails slapping above a cheerful pond. The waters are heavy, scaly, covered with cool froth. From time to time the waves lap against the bow; a bitter, unctuous foam, the gods’ saliva, flows along the wood and loses itself in the water, where it scatters into shapes that die and are reborn, the hide of some white and blue cow, an exhausted beast that floats for a long time in our wake.
Finding himself “alone with the horizon,” he touches into the infinite loneliness from which everything we know of love is born:
The waves come from the invisible East, patiently, one by one; they reach us, and then, patiently, set off again for the unknown West, one by one. A long voyage, with no beginning and no end … Rivers and streams pass by, the sea passes and remains. This is how one ought to love, faithful and fleeting. I wed the sea.
When the engine dies in the middle of the Atlantic, the sky opens into the sea:
The curious austral moon, looking slightly pared, keeps us company for several nights and then slides rapidly from the sky into the sea, which swallows it. The Southern Cross, the infrequent stars, the porous air remain. At the same instant, the wind ceases. The sky rolls and pitches above our immobile masts… There are days like this when all is accomplished; we must let ourselves flow with them.
Eventually, South America emerges on the horizon like a postcard from paradise as they curl around the coast and into the Pacific:
Our sails are like iron under the imperious wind. The coast drifts at full speed before our eyes, forests of royal coconut trees whose feet are bathed by emerald lagoons, a quiet bay, full of red sails, moonlit beaches… At night, the ice from Tierra del Fuego comes and beats for hours against our hull, the ship hardly loses speed and tacks about. In the morning, the single wave of the Pacific, whose cold foam boils green and white for thousands of kilometers along the Chilean coast, slowly lifts us up and threatens to wreck us. The helm avoids it, overtakes the Kerguelen Islands. In the sweetish evening the first Malayan boats come out to meet us.
And then, one morning, the voyage comes to an end and the metaphor cracks open:
We drop anchor in a bay filled with a strange silence, beaconed with fixed sails. A few sea birds are quarrelling in the sky over scraps of reeds. We swim ashore to an empty beach; all day plunging into the water and drying off on the sand. When evening comes, under a sky that turns green and fades into the distance, the sea, already calm, grows more peaceful still. Short waves shower vaporous foam on the lukewarm shore. The sea birds have disappeared. All that is left is space, open to a motionless voyage.
Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die. Great sea, ever in motion, ever virgin, my religion along with night! It washes and satiates us in its sterile billows, frees us and holds us upright. Each breaker brings its promise, always the same. What does each say? If I were to die surrounded by cold mountains, ignored by the world, an outcast, at the end of my strength, at the final moment the sea would flood my cell, would lift me above myself and help me die without hatred.
The sea then becomes a shimmering reminder of the hardest, simplest truth — that we spend our lives learning to die, which is the same thing as learning to live:
At midnight… the sky itself has weighed anchor, with all its stars, like the ships covered with lights which at this very hour throughout the world illuminate dark harbors. Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know… I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.
Camus never reached the horizon of fifty. Not long after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, he died in a car crash traveling back to Paris from a winter holiday, an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket.
The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.
And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.
It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein —
that sudden rush of the world.
The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable.
—
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave certainty, only to discover over and over that it is a mirage, that the love of life is rooted in the courage of uncertainty — because certainty doesn’t allow for surprise, but everything we know of life is the product of the wildest bet that prevailed against the odds of otherwise so we may exist; because certainty thrives on clear category and neat classification, but the most meaningful experiences we have inhabit the liminal spaces between the common categories of what we can name.
NASA engineer Lisa Rosenberg offers a lovely ode to the life-force of uncertainty in the title poem from her altogether ravishing collection Weeds and Stars (public library) — the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe:
WEEDS AND STARS by Lisa Rosenberg
Weeds and stars and everything between,
from ocean dwellers to accretion disks —
resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented —
recall the transience of clouds.
The ocean dwellers and accretion disks,
the finest river stones and faintest moons
recall the transience of clouds,
of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.
The faintest moon, the finest river stone,
the lucid silences at play in dreams
find harmony at work in gorgeous noise.
Let night and day be open quandaries
in play with silences and lucid dreams.
Forget the cries for certainty, the heft
of night and day and open quandaries,
the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.
The case for certainty forgets the weft
of wholes, of fragments and resiliency,
imperfect music of imperfect spheres,
the weediest of stars, the in-betweens.
In our yearning for certainty, we have tried to reduce the cosmos to clockwork, to side with probability over surprise, and yet again and again it is the break in the pattern, the chaos in the order, that creates the conditions for possibility. The most brutal benediction of life is that every experience is unrepeatable, every organism irreplicable, every existence a singular phenomenon that has never before occurred and will never again occur in the entire history and future of the universe — something Rosenberg channels in another poem from the book, reverencing the most poetic of numbers:
PRAISE ON PI DAY by Lisa Rosenberg
To praise the nonrepeating, I will praise
the universe: each smooth circumference,
each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.
The universe, each smooth circumference
of our daily mess, won’t fit in simple bins
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not
our daily mess, unfit for simple bins,
but each repeated lesson learned anew
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not
that we forget, but that our learning shifts
with each repeated lesson learned anew.
The aster blooms. The supernova cools.
We might forget that all our learning shifts
into the pupil of the coming day.
The aster blooms. The supernova cools
its jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
into the pupil of a coming day
where praise is nonrepeating, and we praise.
Devising a sort of incompleteness theorem of the heart’s truth, Nussbaum writes:
We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)
With an eye to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its central theme of how our intellect blinds us to the wisdom of the heart, Nussbaum contemplates the nature of those experiences “in which the self-protective tissue of rationalization is in a moment cut through, as if by a surgeon’s knife”: Proust’s protagonist, Marcel, has rationally convinced himself that he no longer loves his beloved, Albertine, but is jolted into confronting the falsity of that rationalization upon receiving news of her death; in the shock of his intense sorrow, he instantly gains the knowledge, far deeper and more sinewy than the intellect’s, that he did, in fact, love Albertine.
Proust tells us that the sort of knowledge of the heart we need in this case cannot be given us by the sciences of psychology, or, indeed, by any sort of scientific use of intellect. Knowledge of the heart must come from the heart — from and in its pains and longings, its emotional responses.
Such a conception of love’s knowledge, to be sure, stands radically against the long intellectual tradition of rationalism stretching from Plato to Locke like an enormous string of reason that plays only one note, deaf to the symphonic complexity of the emotional universe. The Proustian view calls for a restoration of lost nuance. Pointing to “the pseudotruths of the intellect,” Nussbaum revisits Marcel’s predicament, wherein the intellect has imposed an illusory sense of order and structure upon the entropy of the emotions:
The shock of loss and the attendant welling up of pain show him that his theories were forms of self-deceptive rationalization — not only false about his condition but also manifestations and accomplices of a reflex to deny and close off one’s vulnerabilities that Proust finds to be very deep in all of human life. The primary and most ubiquitous form of this reflex is seen in the operations of habit, which makes the pain of our vulnerability tolerable to us by concealing need, concealing particularity (hence vulnerability to loss), concealing all the pain-inflicting features of the world — simply making us used to them, dead to their assaults. When we are used to them we do not feel them or long for them in the same way; we are no longer so painfully afflicted by our failure to control and possess them. Marcel has been able to conclude that he is not in love with Albertine, in part because he is used to her. His calm, methodical intellectual scrutiny is powerless to dislodge this “dream deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart.” Indeed, it fails altogether to discern the all-important distinction between the face of habit and the true face of the heart.
Nussbaum considers how our over-reliance on the intellect for clarity about love produces instead a kind of myopia:
Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.
[…]
To remove such powerful obstacles to truth, we require the instrument that is “the subtlest, most powerful, most appropriate for grasping the truth.” This instrument is given to us in suffering.
Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
Central to this method of truth-seeking is what Nussbaum calls catalepsis — “a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” To be cataleptic — from the Greek katalēptikē, derived from the verb katalambanein, meaning “to apprehend,” “to firmly grasp” — is to have a firm grasp of reality. But, of course, the implied antinomy is that because reality is inherently slippery, either the firmness of such catalepsis or its conception of reality is false.
Noting the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno’s view that we gain knowledge of the heart’s truth through powerful impressions that come directly from reality, Nussbaum returns to Proust’s Marcel:
The impression [that he loves Albertine] comes upon Marcel unbidden, unannounced, uncontrolled… Surprise, vivid particularity, and extreme qualitative intensity are all characteristics that are systematically concealed by the workings of habit, the primary form of self-deception and self-concealment. What has these features must have escaped the workings of self-deception, must have come from reality itself.
We notice, finally, that the very painfulness of these impressions is essential to their cataleptic character. Our primary aim is to comfort ourselves, to assuage pain, to cover our wounds. Then what has the character of pain must have escaped these mechanisms of comfort and concealment; must, then, have come from the true unconcealed nature of our condition.
Detail from Musikalische Unterhaltung by Hans Makart, 1874.
And yet there exists another, more dimensional possibility. Nussbaum writes:
For the Stoic the cataleptic impression is not simply a route to knowing; it is knowing. It doesn’t point beyond itself to knowledge; it goes to constitute knowledge. (Science is a system made up of katalēpseis.) If we follow the analogy strictly, then, we find that knowledge of our love is not the fruit of the impression of suffering, a fruit that might in principle have been had apart form the suffering. The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing. In responding to a loss with anguish, we are grasping our love. The love is not some separate fact about us that is signaled by the impression; the impression reveals the love by constituting it. Love is not a structure in the heart waiting to be discovered; it is embodied in, made up out of, experiences of suffering.
[…]
Marcel is brought, then, by and in the cataleptic impression, to an acknowledgment of his love. There are elements of both discovery and creation here, at both the particular and general levels… Before the suffering he was indeed self-deceived — both because he was denying a general structural feature of his humanity and because he was denying the particular readiness of his soul to feel hopeless love for Albertine. He was on a verge of a precipice and thought he was safely immured in his own rationality. But his case shows us as well how the successful denial of love is the (temporary) extinction and death of love, how self-deception can aim at and nearly achieve self-change.
We now see exactly how and why Marcel’s account of self-knowledge is no simple rival to the intellectual account. It tells us that the intellectual account was wrong: wrong about the content of the truth about Marcel, wrong about the methods appropriate for gaining this knowledge, wrong as well about what sort of experience in and of the person knowing is. And it tells us that to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving — a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.
Noting the contrast between the mutuality of love and the asymmetry of infatuation — after all, Marcel’s confrontation of his feelings for Albertine doesn’t require her participation at all and can be conducted as a wholly solitary activity — Nussbaum adds:
What Marcel feels is a gap or lack in himself, an open wound, a blow to the heart, a hell inside himself. Is all of this really love of Albertine?
[…]
The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.
Proust’s protagonist arrives at this conclusion himself:
I understood that my love was less a love for her than a love in me… It is the misfortune of beings to be for us nothing else but useful showcases for the contents of our own minds.
And yet this conclusion, Nussbaum argues, is but a form of self-protection — in denying one’s porousness to the other and instead painting love as a curious relationship with oneself, it bolsters the illusion of self-sufficiency as a hedge against the suffering which love entails. Such a conception is ultimately a form of self-delusion masking the true nature of love and what Nussbaum calls its “dangerous openness.” Reflecting on Proust’s ultimate revelation, she writes:
Love … is a permanent structural feature of our soul.
[…]
The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a mechanism that is regular and deep in our lives. But this means that in love itself we do not yet have full knowledge of love — for we do not grasp its limits and boundaries. Sea creatures cannot be said to know the sea in the way that a creature does who can survey and dwell in both sea and land, noticing how they bound and limit one another.
It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, bellowing in the bosom of every brokenhearted lover, reverberating through the body of every civilization’s love songs and sonnets, radiating from cave drawings and dive bar graffiti. It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters. It feels like nothing less than a violation of the universe—how love alone can defy the first law of thermodynamics, how this most immense energy of being can simply dissipate into the oceanic austerity of time.
We build the sandcastles of our loves and fancy them fortresses of granite, then watch bewildered as the waves of our inconstancy lap them away, along with the footprints of the builder. Each love we love and unlove alters the way we walk through life, alters the trajectory of our traversal along the shoreline of the self. The only constant is that we go on walking, that we remain pilgrims of possibility. We would not walk if we had already arrived. We would not write if we had already arrived. Out of our incompleteness and our disorientation, out of our longing and our wanderlust, arises the motive force of every love and every revolution, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every creative act is an act of traversal.
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