Thereness
Of the many blessings of our age, few have been as great as the internet. In the back pocket of every soul is a Library of Alexandria. Within a matter of seconds anyone, rich or poor, can access the complete works of Plato, Augustine, Eliot, or Gibran. Connecting with family members across the country, or meeting new people in a foreign land, once the privilege of those wealthy enough to travel, is taken for granted today.
Blessings, through misuse, or overuse, can be harmful. Wine, a blessing to “maketh glad the heart of man” (Psa 104:15), can be turned into a means to drown out difficult feelings, something I am all too familiar with. Our pocket Library of Alexandria can become a distraction too, sometimes in the same way a man becomes a shut in with books, never leaving the reading room. Something I fear is too rarely noticed is the “thereness” of the world, which can only be noticed when all attention is focused outwards. By “thereness”, I simply mean that things are there, and they are there irrespective of us. Brick buildings that jut into the sky, the greenness of leaves, or, what always presents itself to me, that there are other minds, other lives.
I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the city, smoking a cigar, and watched maybe one-hundred people walk by, and it hit me that each of them has a family, dreams, sorrows, trauma, loves, and a profession. As much as I have an “I”, a center of subjectivity from which I look out into the world, they also have an “I” which is unique and unrepeatable.
Each building has a story, someone who had a reason for that building to be built, some dream, some necessity. Somone laid each brick, had reason for the way it was designed, and picked out the door. A photo album of doors has always appealed to me…
These moments are trivial if explained, they are just there, it is the brute facticity of Being, yet if you are quite enough, allow yourself to be open, and become a receptacle for the there, the experience is something wholly profound.