On Our Myopia

On what assurance, what promise, do I affirm this pain? On the arrival of what future can I accept my present suffering? Is there any higher whole right now in which to dissolve this agonizing single part? Is the part, fallen from the whole, the form and content of my suffering as well?

Theme Post: The Ocean

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Moby Dick:

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea- mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.

Emerson, "Experience":

Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.

And in "Fate":

I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.

Charles S. Peirce on the meaning of life, the universe, and our ideals:

Thus, whether you accept the opinion or not, you must see that it is a perfectly intelligible opinion that ideas are not all mere creations of this or that mind, but on the contrary have a power of finding or creating their vehicles, and having found them, of conferring upon them the ability to transform the face of the earth. If you ask what mode of being is supposed to belong to an idea that is in no mind, the reply will come that undoubtedly the idea must be embodied (or ensouled; it is all one) in order to attain complete being, and that if, at any moment, it should happen that an idea,--say that of physical decency,--was quite unconcieved by any living being, then its mode of being (supposing that it was not altogether dead) would consist precisely in this, namely, that it was about to receive embodiment (or ensoulment) and to work in the world. This would be a mere potential being, a being in futuro; but it would not be the utter nothingness which would befall matter (or spirit) if it were to be deprived of the governance of ideas, and thus were to have no regularity in its action, so that throughout no fraction of a second could it steadily act in any general way. For matter would thus not only not actually exist; but it would not have even a potential existence; since potentiality is an affair of ideas. It would be just downright Nothing.

It so happens that I myself believe in the eternal life of the ideas Truth and Right. I need not, however, insist upon that for my present purpose, and have only spoken of them in order to make my meaning clear. What I do insist upon is not now the infinite vitality of those particular ideas, but that every idea has in some measure, in the same sense that those are supposed to have it in unlimited measure, the power to work out physical and psychical results. They have life, generative life.

Doubt



I feel like there's about 20 different threads here I could pick up on, but there's one in particular that seems often overlooked in most of the reviews I've read. Doubt, as the first scene of the movie makes clear, indicates our common humanity, as distinct from Divine certainty. And there we encounter an uncomfortable paradox that seems to define the movie: the farther we are from Grace, the closer we are to our fellow humans. Is it any wonder that the questionable ethics of the Priest go hand in hand with being the movie's most sympathetic character?

But the movie is about Meryl Streep's nun, more than anything else. And it's made clear that her certainty of the Priest's sin takes her "a step away from God"--and so it's a certainty that is in stark contrast to the religious certainty of the simple and naive Amy Adams character. What are we to make of this? Is Streep's nun sacrificing her own salvation for certainty? The movie doesn't tell us who's right and who's wrong, who's bad and who's good--not because it wants to be pretentious, but because the concern of the movie falls directly into that abyss, and if we had that information it would let us off the hermeneutic hook, as the audience.

Ultimately, I'm inclined to think the tragedy of this movie is not really an epistemological one, nor the dehumanizing and abstract theological codes that demand certainty of fallible human beings. The tragedy is that in the face of the dizzying metaphysical uncertainty that Streep's nun faces she can only respond by trusting her own intuition. Paradoxically, in the terms of the movie, distancing herself from her fellow human beings in both her certainty and her doubt. And thus she is denied even the comforting human community available to us in God's absence. The despair in that final scene is infinte.