Torn out Truths

"The growing sense of the ineffable that reaches and curves toward the light of an ultimate reality can never be transplanted into the shallowness of mere reflection. Torn out of its medium, it is usually metamorphosed like a rose pressed between the pages of a book. When reduced to terms and definitions, it is little more than a desiccated remnant of a once living reality." 

―Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion"

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Dear Kate,

I read heavy stuffs in the morning, with my lightest head, a discipline of joy, and my dog reads my palm.  For the same reason and in similar manner I suppose, to lap up symbols and signposts, mine in words and hers more exuberant and less exclusive, to make sense of life and possibly live a good one.

I asked a week ago: "So far into this pandemic, what have you learned about yourself?  What have you learned about human nature?"  I wish you did have a chance to reflect on the questions.  I wish we won't turn out speaking Macbeth: "I am in blood / Stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

I can start.  The Enlightenment celebration of reason and our being rational enough to unleash reason's power to understand and improve our life condition should now be properly relegated to the Fantasy shelf, somewhere under the shadow of Self-help books, which is now, if you haven't yet noticed, the foremost section in our bookstores, even libraries.  Our belief in continual progress ever advanced by our knowledge and use of "scientific" "facts" is anything but scientific or factual.

How can it both be true, that my closet neighbors are killing each other to resist vaccination, while my forgotten neighbors are dying to receive it?   Please read me carefully: this is not a polemic for or against any stance on the matter (if any "stance" is so conveniently available for us to categorically dismiss anyone).  My observation is how "facts" are elusive--pure facts, the ultimate reality, and human beings, selfish and shortsighted as we are, would always play fast and loose with half-truths.  Most of us have not flown to outer space and make our own observation: so, truthfully speaking, we can insist the world is flat.

Two nights ago before bed I was reading the passage above from Heschel, and suddenly I remembered earlier in the day while walking my dog I picked up two fallen leaves, was ready to press them between the pages of a big book and squeeze half-truths out of them.  They were stuck in between summer and autumn: green and succulent still, but with yellow spots rapidly expanding and now stopped, a reality frozen by their falling off the life-giving Reality.

I did exactly that, went downstairs and took them out of the pocket of my vest, put them between the heavy pages of weighty words, ready them for my use.

Yours, Alex