So, I’m at a huge sidewalk art fair in downtown Madison, Wisconsin…many blocks long, booths down both sides of wide, closed streets circling the capitol building. I’m walking and walking, looking at art and constantly dodging people.
Suddenly I realize everyone, thousands and thousands, are all moving in the same direction, like a river or wind, or like blood in an artery. And their direction is not mine!
My first thought was, “Why does this always happen to me? Why am I constantly going against the grain? Who writes these rules anyway? And why don’t they tell me?”
But then my curiousity takes over. Now I’m asking, “How do they know?” There were no signs, no directional signals. So how does everyone know to move one way or the other?
It dawned on me that there must be some innate tendency within us to do what others are doing, to join and flow, to merge…like raindrops falling into a stream. But raindrops falling into a stream are no longer raindrops. They cease to exist as an individual.
Thinking of it that way helps understand why people will join 50 cars at a drive-through to get a chicken sandwich, or line up 10 deep at a red light when the next lane is empty. I’ve heard it said jokingly that if some people see a line, they will join it. I’m wondering now if that’s really a joke.
But I still have to wonder, “How’d I miss the memo?”
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We really are herd animals and have far more in common with wildebeests than we would care to admit. But a few of us, not many, follow our own road and derive considerable meaning from its being OURS and no one else’s.
This episode in Madison is a metaphor for a lifetime of going against the great unwashed masses. It is not simply that you are curious about Life in a way they can never be, but that your interiority resonates to an altogether different tone and is illuminated from an altogether different source. It is not enumerable in a few characteristics but represents a comprehensive alternative in the way of living a human life. The grim reality is that full access to herd interiority would be appalling, a benighted corridor barely hinted at in conversation.
“How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. The rest live their lives in this dream not very differently from the animals, from which they are in the end distinguished only by their ability to provide for a few years ahead. If they should ever feel any metaphysical need, it is taken care of from above and in advance by the various religions; and these, whatever they may be like, suffice.”
—Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, p. 123
Schopenhauer on solitude and The Sublime: “Let us transport ourselves to a very lonely region of boundless horizons, under a perfectly cloudless sky, trees and plants in the perfectly motionless air, no animals, no human beings, no moving masses of water, the profoundest silence. Such surroundings are, as it were, a summons to seriousness, to contemplation, with complete emancipation from all willing and its cravings; but it is just this that gives to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime. For, since it affords no objects, either favorable or unfavorable, to the will that is always in need of strife and attainment, there is left only the state of pure contemplation, and whoever is incapable of this is abandoned with shameful ignominy to the emptiness of unoccupied will, to the torture and misery of boredom. To this extent it affords us a measure of our own intellectual worth, and for this generally the degree of our ability to endure solitude, or our love of it, is a good criterion. The surroundings just described, therefore, give us an instance of the sublime in a low degree, for in them with the state of pure knowing in its peace and all-sufficiency there is mingled, as a contrast, a recollection of the dependence and wretchedness of the will in need of constant activity. This is the species of the sublime for which the sight of the boundless prairies of the interior of North America is renowned.”
Thanks, Michael. I read stuff like this and I realize my hubris at ever entertaining the idea that I am a thinker or an intellectual. Compared to someone of his depth, I am.the shallowest of beings.
Schopenhauer was one of the greatest figures in the intellectual history of the West. Any comparison to him is, for most of us, an invidious comparison. The point of reading him is to learn how to live a human life, how to think about what it means to be a human primate in the context of the Universe. He has a great deal to say about such themes, much of it of excellent quality. You are by no means “the shallowest of beings” if you have not achieved his perspicacity or depth — very few have. You spend a great deal of time thinking and that is precisely what he would have us do.