The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Page B
Authors: Peter Watson
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Nozick said, to become a vehicle for beauty as well as truth, coherence itself being a form of beauty.
SECULAR REVELATION: WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW WE HAD WITHIN US
To this we can add an idea of Seamus Heaney’s. Heaney is endlessly quotable: poetry adds to the volume of good in the world; a new rhythm is a new life given to the world; poetry produces a sense of at-homeness and trust in the world; poetry is a natural process, simultaneously proffered by the phenomena of the world and engendered by the frolic of language; it is the transmission of intuited knowledge; poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life, it is an experience of enlargement; poems stand like cathedrals in the wilderness; they offer an infrangible dignity, unconsoled clarity, unfenced existence, they are the outward sign of an inner grace; they are examples of self-conquest; they show that the reality of the world should not be underprized; they offer a sense of sufficiency, and a spurt of abundance from a source within.
It is this last that we focus on here. In one of his essays, Heaney quotes from Czesław Miłosz’s The Estate of Poetry :
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
A thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had within us 10
Isn’t that second line a secular equivalent of a revelation and a profound guide to leading a life? To keep on coming into a fuller life, to not underprize the reality of the world, to explore our unfenced existence, don’t we have to bring forth something that “we didn’t know we had within us”? And how are we to do that? What criteria can we use by which we will know that we have achieved that aim, that our activities—like those of Dworkin’s matchbook-cover collector—are not trivial?
There is almost certainly no one criterion that would fit the bill to everyone’s satisfaction, but there is one poet who has influenced many philosophers and other writers precisely because he made a determined and imaginative stab at it, and whose life certainly had a distinctive narrative.
NAMING THE WORLD
Rainer Maria Rilke thought that what lends sense to life is the act of “saying,” of transforming into language all that is in danger of being lost in our hurry to move ahead. In particular, he felt that the details and glories of nature were under threat and that Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife had prevented us from experiencing this earth—which is all there is—as fully as we might, and that it is the post-Christian recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life,” making sheer wondering inquiry the “central sane activity.”
O happy earth, O Earth on holiday,
Play with your children! Let us try
To catch you . . .
In one sonnet he spoke of a “boundless inner sky”—words that sit happily on a page with Seamus Heaney. What Rilke was trying to do in his poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature—the earth—in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past, notably Christianity, which have hindered a true appreciation of the earth and the sheer joyfulness of existence. Rilke also thought that the earth could be best enjoyed by singing, singing being unique to humans, and with music weaving a line through the present, “lyrics uniting the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds.” For him, saying and singing overlapped.
And that is the point. In his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity , Charles Taylor says that we have lost the power to name things. Taylor is surely as way off the mark here as Weber was earlier. For with the advent of science, our ability to name things has increased exponentially. And this, too, is the point, or a large part of it, because naming, saying, singing the world constitute the very criterion by which, it is being suggested
SECULAR REVELATION: WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW WE HAD WITHIN US
To this we can add an idea of Seamus Heaney’s. Heaney is endlessly quotable: poetry adds to the volume of good in the world; a new rhythm is a new life given to the world; poetry produces a sense of at-homeness and trust in the world; poetry is a natural process, simultaneously proffered by the phenomena of the world and engendered by the frolic of language; it is the transmission of intuited knowledge; poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life, it is an experience of enlargement; poems stand like cathedrals in the wilderness; they offer an infrangible dignity, unconsoled clarity, unfenced existence, they are the outward sign of an inner grace; they are examples of self-conquest; they show that the reality of the world should not be underprized; they offer a sense of sufficiency, and a spurt of abundance from a source within.
It is this last that we focus on here. In one of his essays, Heaney quotes from Czesław Miłosz’s The Estate of Poetry :
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
A thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had within us 10
Isn’t that second line a secular equivalent of a revelation and a profound guide to leading a life? To keep on coming into a fuller life, to not underprize the reality of the world, to explore our unfenced existence, don’t we have to bring forth something that “we didn’t know we had within us”? And how are we to do that? What criteria can we use by which we will know that we have achieved that aim, that our activities—like those of Dworkin’s matchbook-cover collector—are not trivial?
There is almost certainly no one criterion that would fit the bill to everyone’s satisfaction, but there is one poet who has influenced many philosophers and other writers precisely because he made a determined and imaginative stab at it, and whose life certainly had a distinctive narrative.
NAMING THE WORLD
Rainer Maria Rilke thought that what lends sense to life is the act of “saying,” of transforming into language all that is in danger of being lost in our hurry to move ahead. In particular, he felt that the details and glories of nature were under threat and that Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife had prevented us from experiencing this earth—which is all there is—as fully as we might, and that it is the post-Christian recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life,” making sheer wondering inquiry the “central sane activity.”
O happy earth, O Earth on holiday,
Play with your children! Let us try
To catch you . . .
In one sonnet he spoke of a “boundless inner sky”—words that sit happily on a page with Seamus Heaney. What Rilke was trying to do in his poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature—the earth—in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past, notably Christianity, which have hindered a true appreciation of the earth and the sheer joyfulness of existence. Rilke also thought that the earth could be best enjoyed by singing, singing being unique to humans, and with music weaving a line through the present, “lyrics uniting the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds.” For him, saying and singing overlapped.
And that is the point. In his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity , Charles Taylor says that we have lost the power to name things. Taylor is surely as way off the mark here as Weber was earlier. For with the advent of science, our ability to name things has increased exponentially. And this, too, is the point, or a large part of it, because naming, saying, singing the world constitute the very criterion by which, it is being suggested
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