Realness

When something significant changes in someone's life--a death, an upcoming move, a new job--people often say, "it doesn't feel real yet." Conversely, powerful dreams or hallucinations can feel just as real as daily life, and sometimes even more real. "It is as if," writes William James in the second chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience, "there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed."

In the drift of depression and anxiety, it is possible for this sense of reality to be eroded altogether. Everything that anchors us to existence--the need to eat, to sleep, to connect with others--can suddenly seem no more than dancing shadows, vain illusions. James quotes a woman describing this experience:

"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of heavens...when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'"

This sense of realness is strange. Like seeing or hearing, we don't control it. I can't will myself to see what I don't see or hear what I don't hear, and likewise, I can't will myself into feeling that dreams are life or that life is only a dream. Unlike our other senses, though, realness is caught up in our sense of life being worthwhile. Being fooled by any individual sense--hearing something and then realizing it's something else, seeing something and then realizing it's an illusion--doesn't threaten the worthwhileness of life. The realness does. As things feel more and more real, the sense of purpose heightens. As the soul unlaces itself from the body and drifts into that sense that life is mere illusion, fewer and fewer things seem to matter.

Consider Don Quixote. As long as he feels the realness of his beloved Dulcinea, of his quest, of his station as a knight errant, he moves forward with purpose and meaning, he is Don Quixote. He's capable of enduring hunger, cold, and violence because the palpable sense that everything he believes to be real is real sustains him. But at the end of the novel, doubt creeps in, and his sense of realness finally flips completely. He admits in the end that he was mad, and he dies, despairing.

Our sense of realness is not tethered to truth, so what determines it? I suspect it has something to do with the system formed by our choices and habits over time. What we attend to, we nourish. What we nourish strengthens. What we disregard withers. Alonso Quixano only took on the name "Don Quixote" and embarked on his quest after years lost to dusty bibliomania, feeding his fantasies with novel after novel chivalric literature. Depression and anxiety, I think, are best understood as negative feedback loops that emerge slowly between thought, choice, biology, and social interaction. Large changes take time to feel real because realness is a slow-growing sense.

 

On Irrepressible Curiosity

In Varieties of Religious Experience, just after the passage naming the two forms of judgment I wrote about last week, William James writes a sentence that has returned to my mind over and over since I first read it:

Irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on.

This sentence is poetry. The first three words are five syllables each. The first two, "irrepressible" and "curiosity" have identical rhythmic structures: the third syllable is heavily stressed, and the rest unstressed*. "Imperiously," though equal in length, violates this pattern: it is the second syllable stressed, not the third. This effects a turn in the rhythmic pattern of the sentence that concludes with three single-syllable words, each stressed––a percussive triple-beat. There's a musicality to the sentence that makes it memorable and sticky.

And "imperiously" turns more than the form of the language––it violates our expectations. In what other context have you ever seen curiosity described as "imperious"? It's a new formulation. "Irrepressible curiosity" is evocative and strong, but there's nothing novel to thinking about curiosity as an inner force that can't be contained. But to apply to it imperious connotations of dignity, power, expansion––sovereignty, even––that seems new to me.

What's more, "irrepressible curiosity" is purely descriptive––there's no value judgment. This kind of curiosity could equally drive one to break into locked rooms or to dedicate one's life to studying how plants grow. "Imperious" is not only a rhythmic turn, and it's not only a turn against our expectations: it's a normative turn, too. By choosing this word, James endows curiosity with the authority to guide one's path and suggests, however subtly, that our curiosities are the bedrock of our dignity, our power, our expansion––our sovereignty, even.

Contrast the evaluation of curiosity in this sentence with The Impertinent Curious Man, one of the many short stories embedded within the first part of Don Quixote. In this cautionary tale, the Florentine nobleman Anselmo becomes dangerously curious about the limits of his wife's fidelity. He convinces his friend Lothario to try to seduce her, just so that he can find out whether or not she would capitulate. At first, Lothario refuses, but Anselmo insists more and more until Lothario finally gives in to his request. After Anselmo's wife, Camilla, passes the test, he convinces Lothario to try again in different ways. Eventually, Lothario falls genuinely in love with Camilla, and she with him. After Anselmo finally learns of their betrayal, he dies of grief.

Far from imperious, Anselmo's irrepressible curiosity impertinently pulls him down. His curiosity is not the seat of his sovereignty, but the weight that drags him headlong into the abyss. On its own, curiosity is no more than a force of nature inside us. It transcends good and evil. It represents an inner drive for knowledge that has no mind for the consequences of knowing things. Anselmo was too eager to know whether his wife could fall in love with someone else to ever wonder whether he could handle knowing that she could.

So what to make of William James? I turn to his context and to his percussive triple-beat. This poem-of-a-statement is embedded within a preface dedicated to expounding a method for approaching questions about religion. James carefully constructs the path through reasoning and research long before he invites the reader to walk it with him. It is only when he finishes foregrounding his work that he writes to us, "still, you may ask me...why threaten us at all with so much existential study of [religion's] conditions?"

James writes of curiosity in response to a nihilistic question: why threaten us with questions about religious experience? Why should knowledge about these things matter if it threatens our very foundation? Lest we fall prey to the despair of believing that knowledge has no merit whatsoever, James reminds us of our natural urge towards knowing. He names that urge good, but tempers it with methodical considerations, with the patience to gain "acquaintance with the whole range of its variations." Most importantly, he names his chief aim not "the wholesale condemnation" of religious experience, but to "ascertain the more precisely in what its merits concist...[and] at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed."

James differs from Cervantes' Anselmo in his willingness to consider slowly, thoroughly, deliberately, and maintaining a balanced purpose to name the good along with the bad. As this line of poetry embedded in his prose echoes again and again through my mind, it reminds me of the imperious task of applying method, balance, and rigor to inner forces.

*The "ir" in "irrepressibly" and the "cur" in "curiosity" both strike me as being minorly and contextually stressed, but when I say this sentence aloud to myself, I do not stress them.