Unfinished Business
Hello, friends! The sun is shining and there is the whole of Sunday ahead of us. What news? Well, this week, I had the displeasure of facing one or two (or three) disappointments in the form of professional rejection. Happily, a career in writing is excellent training for such disappointments, and though there is always a sting, at the wise age of 32, I feel increasingly philosophical about the things, professional or other, that don’t work out the way I wanted them to.
But I can’t pretend that this week I did not feel deflated, certainly demotivated. I walked to the library a couple of times instead of taking the overground because it was sunny and I didn’t much feel like sitting in a dark room putting a whole lot of effort into projects that felt likely to come to nothing. Monday was sluggish, Tuesday was beautiful: I took an extra-long break and had a coffee in the sunshine with my friend. On Wednesday things were sluggish again and I entered fully into crone-hood and told two teenage boys to be quiet in the reading room (I couldn’t concentrate; that I was concentrating on browsing for holidays and new spring jacket is hardly relevant).
But on Thursday, I read an essay by Irish Murdoch in which, drawing a very elegant comparison between art, morality and love, she gives what is, in my opinion, a perfect explanation for why life is better when you read:
“Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” For Murdoch, in love, as in art and as in morality, it is necessary to confront, recognise and accommodate for difference: for that which is outside yourself, other than yourself. To do so requires imagination, the ability to see clearly, all the while understanding that, regardless of how capacious the imagination, you will always, to an extent, never quite succeed in seeing quite everything.
Murdoch uses Kant’s definition of the sublime to explain that it is as when we see a vast mountain range, or a spectacularly starry night sky: we cannot comprehend the whole, but we have a painful kind of reverence for it, what is sublime is the knowing that it is beyond our comprehension, knowing that we are so very small and mortal by comparison, that our perspective is so very partial, and yet — yet — we still strive to comprehend. Likewise, in love, as in art, we strive to understand that which is outside and beyond us, an experience Murdoch refers to elsewhere as “unselfing”, and in this essay as “the exercise of overcoming one’s self'“: both “exhilarating” and “painful.”
“The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.”
On Thursday, I had chosen to read this particular essay because I have a long reading list and the essay is relatively short. I was trying to read it quickly because I didn’t have much time. But, reading these words in the library, I felt suddenly and embarrassingly moved to tears. The teenage boys I had told to be quiet were, thankfully, sitting elsewhere today, and I was now nearly late for teaching so I packed up and left. But I revisited the essay on Friday, and then again on Saturday, and I felt much the same reading it as I had on Thursday: a profound sense of consolation, that the path my career or indeed my life takes, whatever path any life might take, has no bearing on a persons’s ability to access this feeling that Murdoch so perfectly describes, and her equation of art to love.
What she describes — this “indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others” — Murdoch applies equally to the experience of reading as writing. In fact, I’d say this experience is harder to access writing than it is reading, simply because, in writing, there is so much more wrestling with the ego to be done before you get to the actual exercise of apprehending outside of yourself. This was always why I read as a child, it is always the main thing that people will say that they remember about reading when they were children, even if they no longer read now. It’s a feeling you’ll still be able to access, perhaps if you revisit those books you read when you were younger, perhaps in books or stories you find now, perhaps even in the presence of those people to whom you will dedicate your life to knowing but never fully knowing — if you are lucky, and if you are patient.
It is the understanding, the realisation that there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves.
And here, my favourite line of all — to an extent we never cease discovering — expresses the unfinished business of reading, writing, loving. Not an ending, but a life’s work, one we never cease discovering.
With love, Rosie xxxx