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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Long Loneliness and Being in the World4/13/2007 00:15:35At night, I have been working on a book about questions. Periodically, I will post here some scraps of what I am coming up with in the hope of generating some reaction. This is how the first chapter is beginning to shap up. Questions are not normally a thing that people think or talk about. Questions come up commonly enough in the course of life, with no special trying. It may even be that we (as a human community) have more questions than we can handle and what we really need is good answers. But to think that way is not exactly to think about questions. It is thinking about something else, while questions are a technique with the specific purpose of getting at that; of getting, of information, or even of declaring. To think about questions in themselves, such as they are, is to suggest that the purpose is the question, even if only temporarily. To not look past the question to the answer and dwell for a moment in the question, because it has some certain fascination and some certain sense of importance. Then questioning becomes a special sort of task, or even a sport. A thing to probe and become obsessed by, to hone like an athlete, as if this were the meaning of life. When or if one returns to the normal ways of thinking, of looking past the question to other pressing things, perhaps this period of attention to questions will turn out to be of some benefit, in ways least expected. Or it may be forgotten entirely. For the moment, though, the subject is questions, and so questions must be brought into focus. One sensation (there are others, but this is mine) that can bring about an interest in questions as a thing to reflect on and get better at is the long lonliness. I have no choice but to begin there. What I mean by the long lonliness, a term which I take from the great writer and activist Dorothy Day, is no very specific thing. Perhaps it is exactly what it sounds like to whoever hears it, however it strikes one's heart. For me it is one way of describing a thing that is constantly lurking in life, or life itself. Not that life is always lonely or should be felt that way. But at the times when, indeed, one is lonely and looks back on life, the fact of loneliness stands out as a basic condition, having come in on one's own and fixing to leave that way as well. The long lonliness may not be the why of every question a person asks. But it is the heart of questions. Like all utterances, questions come from a variety of sources. Sometimes out of feeling, or habit, or politeness. Still, they all fit a logic which can be traced. This logic is perhaps derivative from more elemental causes, but its universality suggests its reality when we decide to talk about it and put it out into the open. The long lonliness is the logic. The long lonliness is a description of life which points out that a person is a solitary vessel who comes in all alone and departs all alone, yet despairs a little in loneliness. Questions are important for the long loneliness because they offer the possibility of inhabiting it and expressing one's need for something beyond oneself. Asking is the beginning of stepping out of mere loneliness and of asserting that it is not a complete account of what living is like. What is another description of this idea? It is the desire a person has for the world. In these terms, questions are a way of being in the world. "We amphibians," to take the phrase from Nietzsche out of context, is us in the sojourn between water and land, death and life, self and community, not quite sure to which one belongs. Being in the world and the long loneliness are two coexistent descriptions of existence, and they both suggest a special place for asking. Being in the world is true in a similar sense as the long loneliness; though not always felt, when felt, in can be said to have always been true. It states that a person is part of a world and the two are not really separate. The world is not imaginable without the person to experience it and the person is not imaginable without the world to experience. Even birth and death, those key moments of loneliness, are also the moments that affirm with the best certainty a world that cradles us, which we are never without. Birth especially, and death often too, is necessarily shared with somebody else who is said to experience the same thing, albeit differently. And so we can ask questions of one another, about that and all the shared experiences, as well as about what we've missed. If the long loneliness is what makes one want to ask questions, and even to need them enough to thing about questions in and of themselves, being in the world is the fact that makes questions possible. Because of the world, loneliness can ask the questions it wants to ask, or rather it can find things to ask questions about for the simple sake of asking questions. Being in the world may not be the why of every question a person asks. But it is the heart of questions. |
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