All my education I owe to a single question: “What do I think?” No other teacher so probes, ramifies, fructifies, forces us to confront ourselves. It is the human question: no other creature speculates, best we know, pursuing their curiosity beyond the necessary. Humans, as a species, can’t stop wondering. All art and thought result from this pursuit.
By think I mean feel. What’s my reaction to some experience and why? Why do I love this and loathe that? Why do I spend my mind here and not there? Why do some impressions stick in mind like deep splinters while the preponderance vanish? Explaining myself – to myself – teases me ever deeper into the mystery of being. Every question leads to more. The more I know, the less.
Reporting my findings – in words – forces me to formulate them. All humans are curious, at least somewhat. That’s what Aristotle meant when we wrote, “All humans by nature desire to know.” Few of us make curiosity our career. We may wonder about something, then quit the inquiry as a waste of effort. “That’s more than I know,” we shrug and move on.
For me, ignorance is the starting point to a treasure hunt, words my exploratory tool. This inclination is neither laudable nor deplorable, just how I was made. I write to find out, I can’t stop myself. I write to you to discipline my pen. I want to bring you along on my outing because it’s lonely alone. To bind you I write as beguilingly as I can.
Sadly few the mysteries consciousness has time for during its span. Robert Penn Warren addressed this frustration in his poem, “Bearded Oaks.” “So little time we live in time,” it concludes hauntingly,
And we learn all so painfully
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for Eternity.
How best to spend my “little time” is my preoccupation. Why, I ask myself, am I spending it writing these words on this subject to you?
In my suit-and-tie years, work dictated thought. Curiosity was the slave of my objectives. Now I can think about what I please – but, oh, from an infinitude, how to select! I surrender my navigation to an inner pilot I do not control, who often resists my petitions. It’s almost impossible to force myself to do what that pilot, call it my Soul, recoils from. I’m a mule to manage (as Jane will attest).
These missives chart my mind’s course. After ten years’ worth, six hundred words each day, patterns emerge. My inner pilot is enticed by literature, especially in English, history, especially our moment, beauty, morality, the evolution of character, music (the sort we call classical), love, loss, God, how best to be. Each missive, each private word in my journal, each inadvertent poem, begins with the question, “What do I think about ________” (fill in the blank). Tackling that question may set me wandering widely. I follow my words as Saint Francis did his feet.
Today’s attempt began with “What do I think about the Victorian novel?” For four years now, I’ve been rereading them at length. (At length is the only way with Victorian novelists.) Reading, in this instance, means listening. Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot have been keeping me company – on the hills of Rome, the Appalachian Trail, in my car, wherever I’ve found myself physically occupied and without Jane. Turns out, to my surprise, I think a lot about them, more than I’d have thought if the question hadn’t been put. But now we’ve run out of time, so this amble must be preamble.