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.
⩩ 23
This chapter has been based on the idea of retreat, explored through the image of Halloween. The focus was on the moment when you get to look over the spoils of the evening at your own pace, that is, when you have collected the candy and gone home. It is as if we have had all our experiences already, as if we had finished living, and are merely reflecting on our lives and telling the story. The fantasy is that we are done.
But we are not done. The faucet of experience cannot be turned off. Even in a cabin in the woods, as long as we are still living and breathing the world continues to flow into us like a river into the sea. We lay open on one side to the new and untried. In the terms of the metaphor, we are always still moving door to door, house to house, day to day. Moreover, we seem to play a role in choosing what neighborhood we will explore, what precinct our goods will come from.
This is the main disanalogy between the Halloween image and the process of living. While trick-or-treaters go through the process only once — collecting candy and going home — we go through it again and again. We constantly toggle back and forth between acquiring new experiences and making sense of them. And this means we transition in two directions. We not only go from having new experiences to thinking about them, but also from thinking about the experiences we have had to actively immersing ourselves in new ones again. We set out. We embark.
Though we play a role in deciding where we go to, what role we play is hard to understand. As I have expressed repeatedly already, in no way can I believe that we “act,” plain and simple. In the philosophy schools today this is sometimes assumed. “I needed a bag of sugar, so I went to the store and bought one.” But in broad strokes this is not the nature of our reality. Achieving finally an intended result is not within our power. It is not merely that I don’t like action, though I admit I don’t; I don’t believe it exists. This is the main point of my first chapter. What comes from our efforts is not what we intended but something unexpected, unforeseen, strange. It is a mistake, a digression, a frankenstein. Results are always a surprise.
We do, however, decide our motivations, our reasons for action, our values and internal ends. For instance, we decide whether we value material possessions or social virtues and qualities of character. We decide whether we place ourselves in status hierarchies and work to move within them or at the bottom of them and work to move beyond them. We decide whether we accept the mediated and institutionalized nature of our social, political and religious lives or insist on wrestling with these things firsthand. We decide many other things as well.
And all of these things, taken together, constitute a way of life, a habit of living in the broadest sense, and I have already explained my reasons for picturing habit in a comprehensive sense as clothing, as dress. Now it just so happens that in the meantime we have worked out an image of Halloween, that we have focused on the moment at the end when we are at home, costumes off, and that in comparison of the image with the process of living we have noticed that unlike the original subjects we must go out again, venturing out again into the night to be tricked or treated. We have to select a costume, to put it on, to go out into the world in its guise.
We are like Er and arrive at the place where we look over the whole field of lives and select what one we will have. This is the beginning of another cycle that will end in death, in retreat. So on the plain before us are all kinds of lives. There are lives of inventors, entrepreneurs, founders of corporations and internet empires. There are lives of politicians, athletes and celebrities, some famous for their beauty, some famous because of their parents or ancestors.
The best life is to understand the soul, to know its movements. It is to see that experience, thinking and judgment are parts of one whole, stages in the growth of one thing, root, stem and flower. Our health is to pass through the entire scale, to turn over from one to the next, to the next, always onward. In this ecosystem judgment plays its role. Judgment is the door and the passageway back to experience, not as guarantee but as attempt, not as habitual but as experiment, not forever but fornow.
It may matter less than we think whether, when the trumpets sound, we go whole heartedly or halfheartedly, joyfully, sorrowfully or even angrily; what may at last matter more is that we go, that we hear them and go. Because this is about the thing I’ve noted most often, in myself and others, and am most sure of about human beings: we don’t know when something is ending and when something is beginning, just like our young trick-or-treaters. And what if it really is so? What if, when we retire, when we go home to tell the story, life is beginning? Or haven’t you heard? The world is full of judgment days.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 23, from the third chapter, on Retreat. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Retreat
⩩ 21 Review
⩩ 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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