"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." - The Road, last paragraphNo novel has haunted me for good and bad the way Cormac McCarthy's The Road has. I can't forget it, though at times I think I should in order to shake my fear that our world will darken to the one McCarthy imagines—a gray post-apocalyptic world of cutthroats.
What saves the book is that it ends in beauty, ends in reverence. "Hummed of mystery" is the essence of reverence, since reverence comes from awe for what we humans cannot fully comprehend. Awe for the incomprehensible mystery that is older than man, a grand Incomprehensibility that compels us to love.
If I cut straight to the heart of what I've learned so far from writing about reverence and rhetorology it's that I've learned I love sloppily. I've learned I don't love people I should love.
Well, that won't amount to much, will it?
It's a broken word—love—since in English we're unable to divorce it from romance, but it's the word we Christians use for the great commandments: love God, love each other. That is, strongly like.
Studying reverence has led me to believe that a person who is awed by the grandeur of Mystery (a grandeur that surfaces in things as commonplace as the intricate designs on the side of a fish) cannot help but love. You can't be filled with feelings of awe and scrawl vitriol on the wall of a YouTube discussion board.
Experiencing good art is one way to garner feelings of awe, since good art reminds us to appreciate aspects of life we've grown overly accustomed to.
Communicating with others is another way. Communication reminds us that other humans are more mysterious and grand than we may have thought.
The trouble is that most people today are merely out to convince (coming from the Latin vincere: "to conquer") rather than to commune. This is why concepts like rhetorology and Rogerian argument are so powerful: they motivate reverence, which in turn motivates love.
Maxine Hairston, professor emerita of English at University of Texas at Austin, describes the process this way:
“In the several years since I first became interested in Rogerian argument it has had a growing influence on me. Not only do I teach it to help my students become better rhetoricians, but I have found that increasingly I am using Rogerian strategies myself when I really care about communicating with people. I have learned how to phrase questions neutrally in order to elicit genuine answers, and I have trained myself to become a better listener by adopting Rogers’ advice to withhold my response until people have had a chance to express their views.”I've seen this too. I've created enemies before, by layering internal gossip about people I thought were detestable but hadn't really yet spoken to directly. Then when I finally confronted them, even if we argued and remained at odds with each other about a given topic ("enemies?") I found that I liked them more than I had prior to communicating. I could see, at least a grandeur I hadn't previously considered.
4 comments:
Great post, Jon. You need to make sure you put your thesis on the Web when it's finished, I want to read it.
Also, I know you won't take this as a compliment, but there's something almost Heideggarian about some of these ideas. This sentence in particular--"Awe for the incomprehensible mystery that is older than man, a grand Incomprehensibility that compels us to love" hints at it the most, though Heidegger doesn't talk about love much.
That's because Heidegger is a boring old German. (I feel authorized to say this, if for no other reason than the fact that I slogged through a semester of him and my last name is very German... how's that for great logic, Dallin?) :)
Actually, what I was going to say has to do with the last part of the post: I find myself doing this all the time. What I should do is like people immediately, or at least assume I will like them, and then be either pleased or disappointed later. As it is, I often think much less of people in the beginning, and then grow to love or appreciate them a lot more later. Which in some ways is really too bad.
I think someone needs to mention here that the ending of "The Road" is not necessarily beautiful (though the language itself certainly is), positive or reverent. Some have interpreted to be a particularly bleak and cruel ending.
Honestly, I think if that's how they interpreted it, they haven't fully explored McCarthy's work in it's entirety, OR their focus is on the lesser things (in my opinion, of course).
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