This is really a note on aging; if you are young, come back
as you’re approaching eighty. The notion today is that as we become ever more
aware of a life of the mind the more keenly I feel and sharply see the ridiculous
side of physical life.
By “ridiculous side” I mean my own body and its ingestions
and excretions, its dirt, smell, fatigue; its aches and pains—not what I’d call
“nature,” thus its trees and birds and sky and grass. These days I feel directly
a kind of general disgust my Mother expressed when she was the same age as I am
now. I understood her at the intellectual level; now I actually feel what she
must have felt then.
The life of the mind is also difficult to characterize
fully. It is mistaken for intellectual pursuits. Those certainly play a role
but are by far not identical. The life of the mind is simply an awareness or a
feeling and oddly, also, a place that is not really a place in the sense of a
spot you can define by using coordinates; it is a country but not one on any
map of the word. It is a state of consciousness. It is a quite active state but
not in the sense that that word has when local TV talks of Action News.
In this dimension everything is linked to matter not least
the life of the mind. That life is closely tired to what I’d call natural
activities like taking walks and engaging in handicrafts or chores, chores of a
quiet type, thus sweeping but not vacuuming. The work may be quite complex like
gardening or carpentry or writing or cooking—provided that it is routine and
neither willfulness nor anxiety are present in the chest. Reading may be a part
of it but not all reading; the subject matter and the tone are highly relevant.
The more absent certain aspects of the physical life are,
the more the life of the mind comes to the fore. And here I note that,
curiously, the physical as such may be quite potently present in it as, for
instance, grime and effort are present in gardening. The physical, therefore,
has two aspects: the “natural” and the “social”; by social I mean the
collective activity of humanity. And it is the latter that needs to be muted to
a maximum extent to experience the life of the mind as fully as we are able.
The thought occurs that life’s course is designed to enable
us to experience the life of the mind, the inner life. And in that process
minimizing involvement in the hurly burly of collective life may be of great
value at any age.
