An Ineffable Word

"There are three aspects of nature which command man’s attention: power, loveliness, grandeur. Power he exploits, loveliness he enjoys, grandeur fills him with awe. We take it for granted that man’s mind should be sensitive to nature’s loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human.

But why? What does it do for us? The awareness of grandeur does not serve any social or biological purpose; man is very rarely able to portray his appreciation of the sublime to others or to add it to his scientific knowledge. Nor is its perception pleasing to the sense or gratifying to our vanity. Why, then, expose ourselves to the disquieting provocation of something that defies our drive to know, to something which may even fill us with fright, melancholy or resignation? Still we insist that it is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.

Perhaps more significant than the fact of our awareness of the cosmic is our consciousness of having to be aware of it, as if there were an imperative, a compulsion to pay attention to that which lies beyond our grasp."

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Man is Not Alone”

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Dear Alex,

This 3-paragraph starter jumpstarts our attention on the first week of the New Year. I don’t know anything in pretext or context about its author, Abraham Joshua Heschel, but I will resist looking him up first in Google or hunting him down as if my searching for his trail of thoughts may enlighten me. Instead, I will do what I don’t usually do: let the words of a stranger pour over me, bore through my heart and soul, silencing me.

This evening, something sublime, grandly personal and powerfully intimate, happened in me: I ran for 30 min on treadmill, my pulse doubling to a rate over 160 beats/min. I have neither imagined nor planned for it.

For more than 15 years, I have been running inconsistently, starting with 5 min and straining towards 20 min last year. Running for an extended time in itself is not powerful, lovely or grand for me. It is a humbling discipline, a grueling form of art in sweat and defiance against my natural bent towards comfort at resting heart rate. Limbs feel wobbly, veins drumming. Yet the most curious nature of such endurance is sublime. You cannot stop. You keep going beyond the “fright, melancholy or resignation”.

Heschel speaks as a runner towards questioning the sublime - power, loveliness, grandeur. He persists in this breathless pace of asking about the enigma of this “imperative, a compulsion to pay attention” to the incomprehensible, imperceptible, past and present and prospect entwined as one umbilical cord of humanity in cosmos.

We too have asked the same questions: Why bother know more when we cannot know more? What is the point? Our awareness is finite, our vanity and longings boundless. We can only observe and do this much in this dimension real or surreal. I cannot even understand my thoughts, never mind another or the universe. The more I listen and read, the more I wonder in thirst and terror. I begin to see the commonality in quest and questions among voices and words, our “imperative" to search for signposts, icons.

And this is where we meet the sublime - in our despair, solitude, failure. The power, loveliness, grandeur of nature and mind, flesh and womb, spirit and sky, seize our attention, insist our running to seek, tell man he is not alone.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Here we are, talking about what we cannot talk about, speaking an ineffable word.  The world is probably more interested in a Herschel than words from Heschel and would rather be addressed and summoned by a logo than the Logos.

I chose today's quote, one paragraph, then two, and finally forced myself to stop at three.  If I had my way I would quote the whole book, not a long one, but deep, the kind you would never finish reading for it's never done with reading you.

On the bus today I thought about what Girolamo Cardano said, “I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men -- although the sum total of men's learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.”

There's a context to what he said here.  The line that I was pondering on is the last: "The wasting of time is an abomination."

In the name of not wasting time we live to achieve our SMART goals--specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound--and count the specs of our body and soul by the numbers.  And to do that we pretty much need to allow anyone to waste our time.

Yours, Alex