Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

1972

1972 1 January The chorus in Haydn's Creation was like the chorus of singers in white robes, carrying palm leaves, in Durer's woodcut illustrating the seventh chapter of Revelation. The blades of the palms rise in visual unison around the heads of the devoted choristers—an abstract upsurge of harmony. When the dentist says: "Tell me when it hurts!" I feel like Wittgenstein as I answer in my mind: "I can tell you this only if I know whether you are asking because you need my sensation as a signal that your drill is approaching the live nerve or because you do not wish to make me suffer more than inevitable. Depending on what you mean, I shall be your fellow explorer or a victim prepared to call for mercy. Accordingly, I shall either watch out keenly for even the slightest sensation or try to ignore as much of it as I can." 5 January There is no surer way for a writer to reveal his lack of education than by festooning his pages with the standard 153 quotations from the great sources. When I read that the world is too much with us, or that the unexamined life is not worth living, or that Euclid looked on beauty bare, I conclude that the writer was brought up on freshman survey courses and never made it beyond them; and I shut his book. 18 February Cubist shapes resemble the film technique of montage developed at roughly the same time. In Cubist painting, the surface of an object such as the human body is pieced together from small units, which penetrate each other as though every one of the angular shingles were unaware of its neighbors. They have no borders but bleed into emptiness . Only their overall configuration fits a unified volume . Similarly, the units of classical film montage create a continuous sequence through the discontinuity of the individual joints. Each shot is endless in time and space, a mere sample clipped from an ongoing event. They join by mutual interruption, so that the whole is a tissue of small contradictions. This makes for the symbolism of this uniquely modern way of conceiving of wholes. 27 February Someone told a friend that a man would visit the university to lecture on visual thinking. "Visual thinking?" responded the friend. "There can be no such thing!" But she pondered the matter and amended, "It is true, though, that when I wake up in the morning, I cannot think as long as I don't wear my glasses." Motion picture theaters, just like airplanes, ought to provide oxygen masks dropping automatically on the seated customer in case of emergency. When a film clogs the vital outlets of experience, the masks would restore the spi154 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT raculum vitae by which the first man was transformed from a lump of clay into the carrier of a living soul. 5 March When our daughter Margaret was a child, she bought for me with her pennies a birthday plant from the dime store. Grown into a large bush, it flowers every few years. For a day or two, drops of nectar glisten on the small blossoms like the pearls of earrings and fill the living room with the lascivious perfume of oriental harems. How did this mute emanation of exotic vice come from the hands of the child, and how can it draw inspiration from its sober confinement on the third floor? 19 March Concerning national character. A London publisher prepared a British edition of an American writer's book on American and British usage of the English language. When the author received the galley proofs from England , he discovered that the printer had adapted the text throughout to British spelling. This led to sentences such as: "Where the Englishman writes colour, the American prefers to write colour." 13 April An art historian gave a talk at a lectern, from which he directed the slides by remote control. So accustomed was he to working with a projectionist that he kept saying, "Next slide, please!" and then executed his own command by pressing the button. Looked at from afar, the moon is a ball of matter surrounded on all sides by empty space. But when the astronauts approached it, there must have been a perceptual 155 1972 change, gradual or sudden, to the way we asinhabitants experience our earth—a solid base...