the assessment by J. W. Krutch, the desire to be envied is almost surely what King Louis had in mind: ‘“It will be evident to all,’ so he said to himself, ‘that no one else in all the world can have as many tulips as I can, and they will envy me—though God knows, the whole eighty-seven thousand of them look dull enough to me!’”
We easily become jaded by more than we need. Shakespeare, in King Henry IV, described the syndrome in relation to the public seeing too much of Richard II, but it has a wider application, does it not?
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
In addition, in a culture of abundance, the perfectionist mentality lies close at hand. I recall a concert performed by a large city’s symphony orchestra. It was a marvelous program of several pieces of classical music of great difficulty, and it was performed almost flawlessly. I say “almost” because midway through the clarinet solo of Brahms’s First Symphony the reed in the instrument stuck, and the result was a sour note. After that, the soloist and the rest of the orchestra went on to play expertly for more than two hours. Following the concert, my wife and I went out looking for a place for dinner; almost every restaurant was filled with people who had been at the same event. It was interesting—amazing, really—that most of the overheard conversations were not about the superb renditions of the score and of how, with precision, timing and true finesse, several dozen men and women had produced for our enjoyment some of the world’s greatest music. Instead, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of notes, that which captured people’s attention was the single one that was slightly “off.” The object of one’s focus does make a difference.
Something similar happens to many of the affluent millions who live in the suburbs and who take to the road to “experience nature,” led to do so by the advertising that presents the land as a commodity, a package providing entertainment. Many of the 3 million people who visit Yellowstone National Parking Lot each year are disillusioned. Nature, as visualized on glossy and oversaturated photos on calendars, cannot live up to expectations. Barry Lopez summed it up: “People only able to venture into the countryside on annual vacations are, increasingly, schooled in the belief that wild land will, and should, provide thrills and exceptional scenery on a timely basis. If it does not, something is wrong, either with the land itself or possibly with the company outfitting the trip.”
When you travel on a train, you can sometimes watch small children peering out the windows and saying, “Look, Mom, a cow! Look, Mom, a horse!” Parents are often tempted to apologize for that attitude, as did one by saying to the other passengers, “You know, she still thinks everything is wonderful.” Well, not everything is wonderful, but many things are.
There was a person who was tired of living in the same place for many years and decided to move. She wrote an advertisement to put her house up for sale, in the process listing its attributes. She described its convenient features, a great location, the view, and so forth. When the newspaper came out, she read the ad and decided that it described a place as good as any she could ever imagine, and she cancelled it. All it took was a fresh pair of eyes, something that surely holds in relationship to the wider world around us.
If we can simply perceive things for what they are, even the most ordinary part of the world is far from ordinary. Ronald Reagan said, quite famously, “When you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” We can give thanks that he did not speak for everyone. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” Emerson, in his essay on art: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
In, with, and under the ordinary is the extraordinary. There is an entire literature of mystical experience that speaks of a deeper perception called enlightenment. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, says that “although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always . . . a gift and a total surprise.” She described an experience thus:
I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame . . . The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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