Solitude

“When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.”
– William Wordsworth

Toothache

“I always take Scotch whisky at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.”
– Mark Twain

Housecleaning

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.”
– Thomas Merton

Mistakes

“I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly.”
– Peter Cook

Pirandello

“I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.”
– Luigi Pirandello

An Incessant Shower of Innumerable Atoms

I recently came across a passage in an essay by Virginia Woolf that resonated with me in a surprising way, and I thought I would share a few thoughts on it.

The passage comes from her 1925 essay “Modern Fiction,” in which she discusses several then-current authors and the subject matter with which they chose to deal in their works. While she doesn’t take for granted the idea that fiction of recent times is automatically better, a manifestation of “progress,” than older works, she does believe that a new approach was emerging. In the case of authors she criticizes, like H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, she feels that they are “materialists,” concerned with the outer rather than inner life, “making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.”

That observation leads to the beautiful passage that got my attention:

“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there…”

Later on, she states it in a different way: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

If a writer were to choose to focus on that “incessant shower” of impressions, Woolf says, “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.” Writing of the intentions of one author, James Joyce, who seemed to have embraced this idea, Woolf writes, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

Now, Woolf is obviously critiquing fiction, saying that traditional forms fail to convey fully the processes of the human mind, and that one of the projects of modern writing is to experiment with alternative strategies that might evoke those processes more accurately. At the same time, I think we can see in her marvelous words the truth of what we experience on a moment-to-moment basis.

If you were to examine your thought processes closely during a five minute period at, let’s say, a movie or symphony concert, or while you’re driving somewhere, what kinds of thoughts would travel through your mind? I mean to include not just extended trains of thought, but even fleeting impressions.

I hope I turned off the heat at home.
It was really difficult to find a parking spot this afternoon.
I wish I’d slept more last night.
Lots of stupid drivers out today.
Will I have time to complete my project at work on Monday?
I hope her knee is healing OK.
I wish that person would stop coughing!
Oh, the clarinetist clammed that note.
I’m hungry.
This is kind of a boring movie.
Look at the way the sunlight glistens off of those mountains!
Why can’t they make these seats more comfortable?
Etc. etc.

Yet, if someone were to ask you later that day what you were doing during that time, you’d likely reply, “I was at a symphony concert,” or “I was driving home from work.” That might very well also be what you’d put in your journal at the end of the day, too. Our thoughts are all over the place at any moment, as anyone who has tried to meditate can verify. Innumerable thoughts and impressions pass through our minds. Many come to consciousness, a few are memorable, and very, very few make their ways into the narrative we are constantly creating for our own lives.

If we were to come upon a person on the street carrying on an ongoing conversation with her- or himself, we would probably think that there was some psychological or mental health issue there. Yet we all do this all the time – we’re just a little more decorous about it and keep the conversation to ourselves within our brains. But that little voice, that incessant chattering voice registering all those fleeting thoughts, is always with us.

Our impressions of the world around us, too, get focused, put into some kind of form, by this chattering voice. We actually take in much more information than our conscious minds can handle. Aldous Huxley took this idea to its extreme in The Doors of Perception: “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” Or, as Michael A. Singer puts it in The Untethered Soul, “Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.”

So as not to be overwhelmed and paralyzed, our minds automatically, mostly without conscious input, reduce the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” to just a few. To a large extent, this happens simply to give us at least a small sense of control over a world that is raging around us, entirely out of our control. We’ve got to bring order to it, somehow. How else can we function? How else can we find happiness? How else can we find ourselves? How else can we create ourselves?

Dare

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”
– Seneca

A Separate Life

“Some there are that torment themselves afresh with the memory of what is past; others, again, afflict themselves with the apprehension of evils to come; and very ridiculously both – for the one does not now concern us, and the other not yet … One should count each day as a separate life.”
– Seneca

Begin, Commit

“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.”
– William Hutchison Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Permanent Childhood

“In my soul there was never a place for envy or for hatred, but only for the joy that you can collect anywhere and anytime. I consider that what makes us truly live is the feeling of permanent childhood in life.”
– Constantin Brancusi