It is a frosty night with stars abundant. We just came in from friends' house down the road, where we sat and visited and ate nuts and kit kats and watched the kids cavort and scamper. Their little one is nearly a year old, and his preferred mode of transport is crab-walking. They have a Boston Terrier whose preferred instrument of communication is the tongue. Jessica shows no concern when the object of this dog's affection is little J, so neither do I. Dogs have been licking babies for all millennia.
Before we came inside, we stood in the darkness and beheld the crystalline wonder overhead. It never fails to awe, does it. And it never fails to provoke a Why.
This Christmas a friend of mine gave me a volume of C.S. Lewis' essays, through which I've working this new year. It seems that Lewis would advise one not to spend too much time searching the firmament for an answer to that Why. And unless it were for scientific purposes, he would discourage one from pondering them too much at all, especially if the intent were to derive a spiritual feeling. In "The Screwtape Letters", the elder demon advises his nephew Wormwood to:
"keep (the human's) mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."
This passage makes me recall hours spent in college - to choose one era - absorbed in idleness disguised as elevated thought. To what end a 28-minute library-tower reverie on the Saturday shadows below? To put off the writing of a paper, that's all. And, by the way, those weren't reveries. And shadows were just the first observation. If we could get a mental audio file, they'd go about like this: "...is that my roommate?....He wants to be a dentist...Look at those girls......hot breath on the window....I'm going to make a baby foot with my hand...."
And don't get me started on dorm-room music appreciation. Meddle is indeed a great album*, but is 2am to 3am on a Thursday the best time again for it? It makes one wonder about certain sects and their prohibitions against music, and is this what they were targeting? And how did they know?
My own beloved wife, whom I on occasion call The Robot, permits herself idle time. I'm talking about a high-quality, top-grade vegetable-state. In the later evening, after she has done more in a day than I manage in most months, Jessica unwinds with an ice-cream, a blanket, and the Discovery channel, and lets a show about midgets/bizarre gardening accidents/septuplets wash over her for an hour. I'll look at her in the glow of the tube, and I see a ten year-old, her eyes wide with wonder, her mouth curling up at the edges. She is rebooting, the hard-drive reorganizing. (I could make my own Discovery Channel show about her. It'd be a reality-challenge show called "A Million Dollars if You Stay in your Pajamas all Weekend." It would show her training with me for weeks beforehand, we'd eat carry-out every night, in one episode she'd break down and make stew when I wasn't watching.) Understand: she's not the sort of productive person who reports her accomplishments. It's not a decision for her, not a struggle, and requires no broadcasting. You won't know unless you ask her. Some of my teaching buddies and I joke about the impossibility of author Harry Wong's claim that a teacher should every day be able to "get home by 5:00pm, play tennis, and have a cocktail before dinner." No way, we said. Except that Jessica used to do just that, from her very first year of teaching. Sometimes through a massive effort/massive neglect I pulled it off, but not every day like she did. And even though Wong's thirty-something-in-1970s-California visual seemed incongrous with our group of friends, we actually did sometimes play doubles. And, of course, we often drank margaritas. Even now, 10 years later, my wife can always go on a date on short notice (provided Auntie Julie's available to sit).
Kipling exhorts us to "think, but not make thoughts your aim." From my limited reading of C.S. Lewis so far, I reckon he would endorse that. He would not discourage contemplation of life's mystery and beauty, but would say let those wonders not obscure more immediate aspirations. When Jessica gazes from a library-tower window, as it were, you can be certain she has finished the paper.
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* I said Meddle, because that's the album we in the dorm used to listen to most, but if you're going to include a Floyd song here, it may as well be thematically related. So from Dark Side of the Moon:
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