Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts

Chapter 3. “The Philosophy of ‘Breaking Through’”

Ricketts drafted and revised this essay throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, often after discussions and correspondence with friends such as John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. The version included here is from a typescript marked “Revised July 1940, Mexico City,” composed of fifteen double-spaced pages, and it reflects a number of suggestions Campbell made in a 1939 letter. Ricketts’s notion of breaking through derived largely from his readings of the Tao Teh Ching, T. D. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, and Jeffers’s Roan Stallion, but as with most of his ideas, he integrated concepts from many sources and disciplines. He worked hard on the essay’s structure and diction, struggling at times to find adequate words for an abstract and personal concept. Indeed, the very nature of mystical transcendence renders it beyond language, and his efforts to reduce it to a sentence often frustrated him, as indicated by his many revisions; in places he fumbles with language, employing terms in imprecise ways that may prove difficult for readers. It is unusual that Ricketts, a marine biologist in the 1930s, drew on the work and thought of Steinbeck (the era’s most significant novelist), Jeffers (a major visionary poet), and Campbell (the foremost specialist on myth in the twentieth century) to develop his theories about transcendence . “The Philosophy of ‘Breaking Through’” remains one of the most thoughtful and detailed documents he produced. • • • • • • • • • chapter 3 “The Philosophy of ‘Breaking Through’” 89 Revised July 1940, Mexico City A personal interpretation of some modern tendencies, approached from an inductive standpoint. Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them. Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner. Acts of the Apostles 4:11 I I remember it first when we children were living in a squalid district in Chicago. One winter night, the combined home and saloon of some Bohemian neighbors caught fire and burned to the ground quickly before much could be saved. I guess we knew them only slightly. Father bought beer there every night (this was referred to as “composition” in our presence; I used to notice how remarkably it smelt like beer), but they traded almost not at all at our grocery. On the whole, an observer would have seen that they were beneath us. I have no doubt but that my parents knew them as people; but a feeling of kinship with these foreigners-saloon-keepers, furthermore—whose children were even allowed to draw beer for customers—wasn’t in any way communicated to us. We probably scorned the Huska kids. I remember the boys were very bow-legged. This was presumably due to the fact that as babies they had been allowed to walk too soon, a preventable situation, and another indication of the family’s inferiority. And of our superiority, since all of us were straight-legged. The father, Steve, was said to be fond of children, and I frequently saw him dandling the baby. It must have seemed quite impossible to me, if I had stopped to consider: how could such people exhibit traits like ours, really human traits! Obviously we were snooty people; we children were, at least: in the slums, but, to our notions, not of them. Any intimate mixings into our surroundings, furthermore , must have been frowned upon by our parents. Anyway, on this occasion, something happened. The fire flared up suddenly. Suddenly we were all out in the street, watching our first close fire. But not only as observers. The Huska kids were probably crying, 90 “The Philosophy of ‘Breaking Through’” scared, not understanding their so-well-known father now strangely numbed at seeing his frugally built security vanishing. All at once I, of our remote family probably the most remote and cold, found myself suggesting, and intensely meaning it, that Father should make sure Stefan Huska and his family had a place to stay. I, of all people, was asking him to bring these dirty (presumably; foreign anyway) bow-legged children , stocky, sturdy, in all ways the opposite of delicate us, to our house. More surprisingly, I seemed to express a notion we all felt flowing through us with a suprapersonal beauty for which we were only vehicles . We must give, something, anything. And what we had to give, the sanctuary and former superiority...