[Image: “Found Art,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river (italicized passage)… In the full portion of the essay from which this excerpt is taken, Mary Ruefle is musing about forms of communication — letters, smoke signals, the phone messages left by people trapped in the World Trade Center on September 11, 20 years ago (I don’t know if our whiskey river blogger friend made that last connection, but it chimed right with me, this week):
Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us – that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.
I took one of those nests and pinned it to a wall in my study. Then I pinned a folded handwritten letter inside the nest. I did this years ago. I don’t know why I did it. I just did it.
Nothing I understand haunts me. Only the things I do not understand have that power over me.
(Mary Ruefle [source])
In these terms, it occurs to me, a raging curiosity about, well, everything can be understood as a a desperate drive to be haunted by nothing: never again to lose sleep over matters mundane or cosmic, never to obsess about the substance behind a question mark… I’m not going to think too hard about this, because if I start to wonder — i.e., to act on my curiosity — about curiosity itself, well, that way lies madness. But I’ll let some others do my thinking for me, e.g.:
…and:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
(Albert Einstein [source])
…and:
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
(Bill Bryson [source])
Marta says
Goodness. This does speak to me.
John says
Oh, thanks for letting me know that!
Being on the road as we are sounds, and feels, on most levels like the ultimate freedom. But there’s a problem, which has to do with what can be loosely described as “work.” Oh, there’s the REAL “work” which still has to be done: paying bills and budgeting; monitoring the hardcopy mail still being sent to us despite our enrolling in every “paperless” e-delivery option available; planning routes and destinations… All of that requires time and attention which doesn’t feel even remotely like “permanent vacation.”
But there’s a subtler sort of “work,” too — work that we actually enjoy or find reward in doing, work that we feel compelled to do even when it’s not “contributing to the vacation”: taking and post-processing photos, archiving and organizing them all; keeping up with the news; posting and responding to others’ posts on social media… and, for me anyhow, blogging.
Unfortunately (or so it feels), I have too often had to rush several recent Friday posts at RAMH, including this one. Each time I do so feels like I’m doing myself a disservice, even if no one is reading them (let alone finding value in them). So a comment like yours, well, it means the world to me. Thank you again!