[Image: “Dragon*con 2010,” by Ethan Trewhitt. (This is just a static frame from a video a little over a minute in length; you can click on the image to see the video itself, over on Flickr. In any case, of course, I use it here under a Creative Commons license.) Says the caption, in part: “The Marriott lobby, crowded with the costumed and uncostumed, brims with disorder as people move in every direction at once. I think that it would be fascinating to track each individual person in this video and view their course as they navigate the maze and simultaneously create it by simply existing.” Implicit in the caption: that Trewitt himself added to the tumult… by simply existing. Heh.]
The French philosopher Henri Bergson has had a rather muddled, on-again/off-again reputation over the decades since he lived and died (1941). Philosophical controversy, of course, does not at all resemble pop-culture controversy — no one, to my knowledge, has accused him of scandalous personal behavior. But jeez, philosophers can sure fight zealously among themselves; this seems especially so when their philosophies depend, as Bergson’s apparently did, on deep understanding of other fields, particularly science and mathematics.
Anyway, I’ve never read a complete work of his, only excerpts quoted by others. It no doubt reflects my own lack of intellectual rigor that such excerpts have struck me as completely reasonable. Take, for example, the following from a recent whiskey river post:
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening.
Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.
(Henri Bergson [source])
I read through that essay (from 2015, and not by Bergson himself) at the link provided by whiskey river. Therein I found a nice metaphor — certainly for contemporary “civilized” life:
Picture yourself in a giant labyrinth. Billions of other people are also in the labyrinth, but it is so large and wild that you only see a minuscule fraction of them. At the end of the labyrinth is a nebulous It, a prize with no concrete existence, that means something slightly different to each of the maze’s travelers. You sometimes worry as you wander through the maze if you’ll ever reach It, or if there even is an It. You see some people running through the maze, knocking others over in the process, thirsty to finally discover It. Some people aren’t even moving at all, just hanging out, sitting against one of the tall hedges within the maze.
You can choose to judge the people who are unlike you in how they approach the maze’s challenge. Or, you can talk to them, show them respect and try to learn something from them as you work your way through the maze. You may find yourself in a standstill at times, or in a sprint.
What must be remembered over all else is that you’re in a maze. You’re part of the game, and it’s not just your game — it’s everyone’s.
(Charlie Ambler [source])
Sometime back in the 1980s, I worked as a computer programmer for a giant international telecommunications firm. Because our management was enlightened, we occasionally had chances to attend presentations and seminars outside our specific area of expertise, especially if they were clearly business-oriented somehow. One of these I remember was a small group session, led by guy who’d developed his own desk-calendar system of logging upcoming appointments, noting their results, and annotating those results in some structured way. (This was just at the very dawn of the personal-computer era, so it was all done via paper, held in a special leather-covered binder for which — naturally — he would be happy to supply the custom pages to support the whole system.)
I don’t think any of us present followed his system for more than a month. But the guy was an entertaining, self-deprecatory speaker, and it was hard not to like him. I never forgot one of his points:
He was talking about rush-hour traffic jams, especially in the summer. You’d be sitting there fuming, sometimes glancing nervously at the dashboard temperature gauge, and you might spend 10-15-20 minutes at a time without moving more than a few feet. Eventually your frustration would boil over and you’d start to project outwards. You’d glance around to the side, in your rear-view mirror, and you’d think: Look at all these idiots. All this traffic. Where are all these idiots going at the same time? What do they think they’re doing? Why are they in my way, and why the hell aren’t they moving?!?
And then, they guy said, sometimes if you were lucky, it would suddenly hit you: You’re out there too — the guy laughed at this point, as he pointed at each of us in the small room — you’re the traffic!
I always loved that story.
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