“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”
But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations.
Anaïs Nin
Nin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.
With an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:
When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”
In his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:
All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.
D.H. Lawrence
This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:
If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.
In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:
I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.
In August of 1952, having just finished the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien took a vacation in Worcestershire, where he stayed with his friend George Sayer, an English Master at the local college. To entertain his guest one evening, Sayer pulled out an early portable tape recorder. Although the technology had been around for some time, it was only just becoming commercially available and Tolkien hadn’t seen one before. Intrigued by how it worked, he joked that he “ought to cast out any devil that might be in it” by recording himself reading the Lord’s Prayer in his beloved ancient Gothic language. The result delighted him, and he went on to read from his own work.
In this rare archival recording from that serendipitous summer evening, sixty-year-old Tolkien reads from The Hobbit, doing a magnificent impression of Gollum in the ancient accent he so loved — please enjoy:
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.
Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.
Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”
She writes:
It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.
Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.
It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:
Our lives aren’t unfurling plots or stories; they are intricate paths already mapped out in four dimensions… Every cell within your body — your neurons, muscle cells, the blood cells pulsing through your arteries, capillaries and veins — has its own intricate, interconnecting life path carved out through the block. And not just every cell, but every atom. Each of us is made up of trillions of strands in space-time, all with their own complex trajectory. Your whole life might look like a sort of tree carved into the block, with disparate strands coming together at one end, representing your conception and birth; gradually thickening into a trunk; and then at the other end splaying out into finer and finer branches before disintegrating completely at the point of your death and decomposition… There is no room for movement, flow or happening. Reality doesn’t become. It just is.
If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.
Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”
Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”
It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:
There isn’t a simple progression from one brain state to the next as time passes, with each moment most similar to its nearest neighbour. Our “brain patterns are not simply counting off the seconds,” says [study author Dan] Lloyd. Hidden within the sequences was an organised temporal structure, with regular patterns in the way that subjects’ brains moved back and forth between a small number of states. In fact, the structure he found is very like that of music. Lloyd identified short, repeating motifs, or themes: sequences of states, between 4 and 11 seconds long, that look similar to each other. Often these themes recurred at constant time intervals: he called that “rhythm.” These rhythms appeared at a range of different timescales, and sometimes these frequencies were related to each other, so that they nested within one another perfectly. Lloyd called this structure “harmony” because it is analogous to the harmonic vibrations that give musical instruments, from violins to saxophones, their rich, resonant sound.
What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.
An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:
It seems our perception of Now is a combination of two crucial factors: the ability to bind a hierarchy of different timescales together within each moment; and the inexorable progression from one moment to the next. This highly ordered temporal composition underpins our flowing stream of consciousness. Passing time is not just a characteristic we perceive: it is the underlying frame or structure through which we experience reality.
And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.
Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:
The perceptions and sensations themselves — the call and response, the meeting or thwarting of predictions — these are reality. These are what existence is made of… Our perceptions or experiences — the melancholy of raindrops on a window, the exhilaration of diving into an icy pool — are real in themselves. There is no separate, enduring landscape beyond that they’re based on, no solid reference point against which our sensations can be judged.
[…]
Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.
With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:
Do we exist as frozen snapshots or mathematical braids? Are we logic-bound computers or dynamic hurricanes? Are we living in a mental realm of shadows, separated from true reality by impenetrable, iron-like walls? Or are our perceptions real, while the familiar things of our world — even time and space themselves — are mere statistical structures, predictions that help us to manage our flow of sensations and stay alive?… Perhaps with all these possibilities there’s no way even to approach what lies beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond this point in time… All any of us can ever really know is that this moment exists. Maybe that’s enough. What we’re sensing and feeling, right here, right now, is real and undeniable, precisely because we are experiencing it.
Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.
What we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any “true,” definitive way of things outside that process… Our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate, enduring “selves” sitting behind… [We] exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted. And, on the other side of the coin, there’s no pre-existing “us” either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.
This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:
What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.
[…]
Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.
Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .
Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.
Devising a sort of incompleteness theorem of the heart’s truth, Nussbaum writes:
We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)
With an eye to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its central theme of how our intellect blinds us to the wisdom of the heart, Nussbaum contemplates the nature of those experiences “in which the self-protective tissue of rationalization is in a moment cut through, as if by a surgeon’s knife”: Proust’s protagonist, Marcel, has rationally convinced himself that he no longer loves his beloved, Albertine, but is jolted into confronting the falsity of that rationalization upon receiving news of her death; in the shock of his intense sorrow, he instantly gains the knowledge, far deeper and more sinewy than the intellect’s, that he did, in fact, love Albertine.
Proust tells us that the sort of knowledge of the heart we need in this case cannot be given us by the sciences of psychology, or, indeed, by any sort of scientific use of intellect. Knowledge of the heart must come from the heart — from and in its pains and longings, its emotional responses.
Such a conception of love’s knowledge, to be sure, stands radically against the long intellectual tradition of rationalism stretching from Plato to Locke like an enormous string of reason that plays only one note, deaf to the symphonic complexity of the emotional universe. The Proustian view calls for a restoration of lost nuance. Pointing to “the pseudotruths of the intellect,” Nussbaum revisits Marcel’s predicament, wherein the intellect has imposed an illusory sense of order and structure upon the entropy of the emotions:
The shock of loss and the attendant welling up of pain show him that his theories were forms of self-deceptive rationalization — not only false about his condition but also manifestations and accomplices of a reflex to deny and close off one’s vulnerabilities that Proust finds to be very deep in all of human life. The primary and most ubiquitous form of this reflex is seen in the operations of habit, which makes the pain of our vulnerability tolerable to us by concealing need, concealing particularity (hence vulnerability to loss), concealing all the pain-inflicting features of the world — simply making us used to them, dead to their assaults. When we are used to them we do not feel them or long for them in the same way; we are no longer so painfully afflicted by our failure to control and possess them. Marcel has been able to conclude that he is not in love with Albertine, in part because he is used to her. His calm, methodical intellectual scrutiny is powerless to dislodge this “dream deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart.” Indeed, it fails altogether to discern the all-important distinction between the face of habit and the true face of the heart.
Nussbaum considers how our over-reliance on the intellect for clarity about love produces instead a kind of myopia:
Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.
[…]
To remove such powerful obstacles to truth, we require the instrument that is “the subtlest, most powerful, most appropriate for grasping the truth.” This instrument is given to us in suffering.
Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
Central to this method of truth-seeking is what Nussbaum calls catalepsis — “a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” To be cataleptic — from the Greek katalēptikē, derived from the verb katalambanein, meaning “to apprehend,” “to firmly grasp” — is to have a firm grasp of reality. But, of course, the implied antinomy is that because reality is inherently slippery, either the firmness of such catalepsis or its conception of reality is false.
Noting the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno’s view that we gain knowledge of the heart’s truth through powerful impressions that come directly from reality, Nussbaum returns to Proust’s Marcel:
The impression [that he loves Albertine] comes upon Marcel unbidden, unannounced, uncontrolled… Surprise, vivid particularity, and extreme qualitative intensity are all characteristics that are systematically concealed by the workings of habit, the primary form of self-deception and self-concealment. What has these features must have escaped the workings of self-deception, must have come from reality itself.
We notice, finally, that the very painfulness of these impressions is essential to their cataleptic character. Our primary aim is to comfort ourselves, to assuage pain, to cover our wounds. Then what has the character of pain must have escaped these mechanisms of comfort and concealment; must, then, have come from the true unconcealed nature of our condition.
Detail from Musikalische Unterhaltung by Hans Makart, 1874.
And yet there exists another, more dimensional possibility. Nussbaum writes:
For the Stoic the cataleptic impression is not simply a route to knowing; it is knowing. It doesn’t point beyond itself to knowledge; it goes to constitute knowledge. (Science is a system made up of katalēpseis.) If we follow the analogy strictly, then, we find that knowledge of our love is not the fruit of the impression of suffering, a fruit that might in principle have been had apart form the suffering. The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing. In responding to a loss with anguish, we are grasping our love. The love is not some separate fact about us that is signaled by the impression; the impression reveals the love by constituting it. Love is not a structure in the heart waiting to be discovered; it is embodied in, made up out of, experiences of suffering.
[…]
Marcel is brought, then, by and in the cataleptic impression, to an acknowledgment of his love. There are elements of both discovery and creation here, at both the particular and general levels… Before the suffering he was indeed self-deceived — both because he was denying a general structural feature of his humanity and because he was denying the particular readiness of his soul to feel hopeless love for Albertine. He was on a verge of a precipice and thought he was safely immured in his own rationality. But his case shows us as well how the successful denial of love is the (temporary) extinction and death of love, how self-deception can aim at and nearly achieve self-change.
We now see exactly how and why Marcel’s account of self-knowledge is no simple rival to the intellectual account. It tells us that the intellectual account was wrong: wrong about the content of the truth about Marcel, wrong about the methods appropriate for gaining this knowledge, wrong as well about what sort of experience in and of the person knowing is. And it tells us that to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving — a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.
Noting the contrast between the mutuality of love and the asymmetry of infatuation — after all, Marcel’s confrontation of his feelings for Albertine doesn’t require her participation at all and can be conducted as a wholly solitary activity — Nussbaum adds:
What Marcel feels is a gap or lack in himself, an open wound, a blow to the heart, a hell inside himself. Is all of this really love of Albertine?
[…]
The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.
Proust’s protagonist arrives at this conclusion himself:
I understood that my love was less a love for her than a love in me… It is the misfortune of beings to be for us nothing else but useful showcases for the contents of our own minds.
And yet this conclusion, Nussbaum argues, is but a form of self-protection — in denying one’s porousness to the other and instead painting love as a curious relationship with oneself, it bolsters the illusion of self-sufficiency as a hedge against the suffering which love entails. Such a conception is ultimately a form of self-delusion masking the true nature of love and what Nussbaum calls its “dangerous openness.” Reflecting on Proust’s ultimate revelation, she writes:
Love … is a permanent structural feature of our soul.
[…]
The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a mechanism that is regular and deep in our lives. But this means that in love itself we do not yet have full knowledge of love — for we do not grasp its limits and boundaries. Sea creatures cannot be said to know the sea in the way that a creature does who can survey and dwell in both sea and land, noticing how they bound and limit one another.
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