{"id":218553,"date":"2022-09-26T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=218553"},"modified":"2022-08-25T10:37:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T09:37:32","slug":"the-mirror-of-enigmas-chance-the-universe-and-the-fragile-loveliness-of-knowing-who-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/09\/the-mirror-of-enigmas-chance-the-universe-and-the-fragile-loveliness-of-knowing-who-we-are\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThere is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths \u2014 and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge.<\/p>\n

A recent brush with those limits reminded me of a short, stunning essay by Jorge Luis Borges<\/strong> (August 24, 1899\u2013June 14, 1986) titled \u201cThe Mirror of Enigmas,\u201d found in his Labyrinths<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the 1962 collection of stories, essays, and parables that gave us his timeless parable of the divided self<\/a> and his classic refutation of time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Titling the essay after St. Paul\u2019s famous cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate<\/em> \u2014 loosely translated as We now see through a mirror, enigmatically<\/em> \u2014 Borges considers the tribe of thinkers who have perched their efforts to reconcile knowledge and mystery, the scientific and the spiritual, on the assumption that \u201cthe history of the universe \u2014 and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives \u2014 has an incalculable, symbolical value.\u201d With his characteristic poetic precision, he condenses this common and somewhat tired hypothesis:<\/p>\n

The outer world \u2014 forms, temperatures, the moon \u2014 is a language humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one, Borges argues, has taken this precarious hypothesis to more surefooted ground than the French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer L\u00e9on Bloy<\/strong> (July 11, 1846\u2013November 3, 1917).<\/p>\n

Digging through the surviving fragments of Bloy\u2019s written thought, he surfaces a passage emblematic of Bloy\u2019s uncommon physics of the metaphysical \u2014 an 1894 passage fomented by his interest in the teachings of St. Paul. Translated by Borges himself, Bloy writes:<\/p>\n

[St. Paul\u2019s statement] would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament\u2019s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own<\/em> abysses, perceived \u201cin a mirror.\u201d We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart\u2026 If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from Thomas Wright\u2019s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe<\/em><\/a>, 1750 \u2014 the first book to describe the spiral shape of the Milky Way. (Available as a print<\/a> and as a face mask<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A century before Milan Kundera considered the eternal challenge of knowing what we really want<\/a> in his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being<\/em>, Bloy shines a sidewise gleam on the elemental self-opacity with and within which we live:<\/p>\n

Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the secret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These ideas haunted Bloy, animated his pamphlets, his poems, his novels, then culminated in his 1912 book-length essay The Soul of Napoleon<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a philosophical prose poem that sets out, as Borges puts it, \u201cto decipher the symbol Napoleon, considered as the precursor of another hero \u2014 man and symbol as well \u2014 who is hidden in the future.\u201d Bloy, translated again by Borges, writes in this uncommon work:<\/p>\n

Every man*<\/a> is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light\u2026 History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But as you contemplate these existential immensities, you face the limits of contemplation \u2014 the limits of meaning-making in relation to elemental truth.<\/p>\n

Borges recognized this, closing the essay with by acknowledging \u201cit is doubtful that the world has a meaning\u2026 even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recognized this upon sitting down in for morning meditation in my garden after a nightlong storm and watching an almost otherworldly deposit roll onto the cushion: a tiny, perfect robin egg, improbable and sorrowful in its displaced blue beauty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Singing Only Is<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I considered climbing the neighbor\u2019s colossal tree to find the storm-shaken nest and reinstate the egg. (Perfectly, the tree is an Ailanthus altissima<\/em>, known as \u201ctree-of-heaven\u201d in its native China \u2014 a migrant now rooted in Brooklyn, like me.)<\/p>\n

But then I considered this chance-event as the product of the same impartial forces that deposited the exact spermatozoid of my father\u2019s onto my mother\u2019s ovum at the exact moment to produce the chance-event of my particular configuration of atoms animated by this particular consciousness that just is<\/em>, the consciousness mourning the robin that will never be. To call one expression of chance good and another bad is mere human hubris \u2014 the hubris of narrative and interpretation superimposed on an impartial universe devoid of why<\/em>, awash in is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No one knows the meaning of why anything comes to be, or doesn\u2019t. Here is this pale blue orb, dropped from the tree-of-heaven onto a tiny Brooklyn point on the face of this Pale Blue Dot, itself a \u201cmote of dust suspended in a sunbeam\u201d<\/a> within an immense and impartial universe, conceived in the creation myths and early scientific theories of our meaning-hungry ancestors as a great cosmic egg.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe<\/em><\/a>, 1750, illustrating Thomas Wright\u2019s model of the cosmos as an egg-like structure of nested infinities. (Available as a print<\/a> and as a face mask<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here I am, and here you are, and here is the robin\u2019s egg in its near-life collision with chance. To ask for its meaning is as meaningless a question as to demand the meaning of a color or the meaning of a bird. On this particular day, at this particular moment \u2014 the only locus of aliveness we ever have \u2014 the contour of meaning comes in shades of blue, singing only is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is.\u201d It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths \u2014 and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge. (Jorge Luis Borges)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":218554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1169,2919,1177,2635,1170,1183,2638,308,2918,2237],"class_list":["post-218553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-death","tag-ignorance","tag-inspirational","tag-knowledge","tag-life","tag-metaphysics","tag-mystery","tag-philosophy","tag-self-knowledge","tag-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}