Footnotes is a series of essays that build on each other. This one is part of a chapter on the idea of retreat and the image of Halloween. If you haven't read it already, I recommend starting here.
⩩ 20
What is it to have enough? “Enough” ultimately means two things. First of all, it means satisfaction, the contentment of the world as it is being enough, of not wanting anything you don’t have, the quiet joy that falls on life like the sun’s blush on the horizon. In principle it is available always. Second, in the actual process of living, enough means a limit has been met and marks a shift. It heralds change. In a sequence of activities, enough means you can go on to the next activity. It is the conclusion of one act and the beginning of another.
So what does it look like when we have had enough? I think about this through the Halloween image. During the first stage, we are going from house to house collecting candy. When we have gone to enough houses, we go home and enter the second stage: looking over the goods and seeing what we collected. But it is not just about trick-or-treating but this stands as an image for other activities — reading books, getting promoted, making money — and the fact is that we have a hard time with this enough, the going home, and that it is not hard to understand why. It sets off a transformation in the shape of the activity and the corresponding understanding of the end, as I like to use the image to show.
While in trick-or-treating knocking on a door is a good only if there is candy behind it and if you can bring it home, in the stage of collecting doors and goods are so closely associated, and the association is so often repeated, that they come to be equated. The conditionality drops out. We act as if a door is a good, and the more doors we go to, the better. In general terms, the means becomes an end in itself. Going home, on the other hand, requires remembering that conditionality, i.e. seeing that visiting doors and houses is not good in and of itself but insofar as it contributes to a higher, more remote end and that it is no longer contributing to it.
This is a massive turn in thought, and one reason we fail to make it is just habit itself. Here is a picture of this innocent failure. Imagine a trick-or-treater who is still going door to door with a basket she doesn’t know is full. For each goody thrown in, one falls out, so that her path is littered with casualties, her trail a cemetery of wasted goods. This failure is innocent because the trick-or-treater doesn’t know her continued action is useless.
And yet there is a more interesting kind of failure, one that involves our compliance. We often somehow know that we have reached a limit, that we have had enough, but do not explicitly acknowledge it. We are apparently afraid of something, afraid of admitting it, afraid of the consequences of this admission. This leads me to develop the image further.
It is not only one trick-or-treater that comes out of the house at the beginning of the evening on a wave of excitement but three, and likewise three that we meet now again later in the evening, when their baskets are full, when their legs are heavy and tired. The first hurries on down the street, rushing breathlessly from door to door, with her basket overflowing and the goods spilling out on the street behind her. Seeing that her basket is full, that going on doesn’t make sense anymore, the second sets it down and sits down on the spot in despair. The third looks at the one, then the other, says to herself enough, and goes home.
What particularly interests me is when we are in denial of the fact that we have reached a limit, or had enough, and the status and function of the action that ensues. Because an action may be useless without our knowing it is useless — the innocent failure — but when we realize it is useless the action either stops, or shifts and becomes useful in a new way. This girl has been going door to door, for each thrown in, one spilling out onto the street behind her, with no inkling that her action is senseless, but as it dawns on her, — her heavy arms, her tired legs, the sound of things steadily falling out of an overflowing basket, the memory of home, — she plunges forward ever more frantically, as if convincing herself with busyness: look how many doors she is visiting, how many goods she is putting into her basket! But the trail of goods behind her betrays her, and she knows it. Now her activity is useful in this way: it distracts her from its uselessness.
We who perspire habits and rules sometimes become the victims of this need. Because what gives us the feeling of action and progress as much as a habit, a rule to follow without looking around? “The more houses, the more good.” That is the kind of world we long for, one in which we know what to do and no longer have to think. And so we hug to our habits and hold them close, these corpses of thought, and they come to serve a new purpose: comforting us.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 20, from the third chapter, on Retreat. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Retreat
⩩ 19 Storytelling
⩩ 17 Halloween
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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