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.
⩩ 21
Whether or not heaven exists may be less interesting than what it would look like if it did, and whether or not someone believes it does may be less important a fact about them than how they picture it. Because, for one thing, such a picture provides a window on just who that person is, on what experiences have shaped them most deeply, what activities and environments and moods they hold highest and consider most worthwhile. And because, for another, a picture like this is not only a hypothesis, a promise, something that may or may not be realized “at last,” but rather a conception of the ideal implied in the operation of living and expressed in the life the person leads.
A picture of the afterlife I carry in my pocket and keep with me at all times derives from Halloween, from the image of Halloween, and specifically from what happens at end of the evening, when the trick-or-treater is back at home. In short, when she is at home, she is done going from door to door and collecting candy. She takes the costume off. She dumps the goods out and looks at what she got.
The beauty of this is that, first, when she is done collecting, she gets to look at what she collected with no time pressure. Time is no longer a constraint. As our trick-or-treater was collecting them, she saw the goods only in passing. She glanced at an item of candy for a second or two, then threw it into her bag, so that she could continue on to the next house. Freed now from collection, she can look at any piece of candy for as long as she likes. So she picks up a single piece and gives her curiosity free reign.
But this is just the beginning. When she is looking at them at home, she can see two pieces of candy at once. She can compare them. When she was collecting them, she saw the pieces of candy only individually, one at a time, one after another, but now she can see them at the same time and in relation to each other. She gets to compare and organize them. She puts them in groups according to size, color, taste. Again, as time is not a constraint, she organizes them this way, then that. She tinkers, she experiments, she plays with different arrangements.
And, having inspected them all individually and through many combinations compared them with each other, she can finally see them in relation to the whole. She can both see each in its place and see her entire collection and judge its worth.
Metaphor is inevitably reciprocal. Each pole of the comparison bleeds into the other and informs how it is described. So this image of Halloween is interesting to me as a metaphor for retreat, retirement, for its ability to represent in story-form the domains of experience, thinking and judgment.
Going house to house, collecting the goods is analogous to experience, to moving through the world and acting in it. In being goal-oriented, action involves us in sequential time. In action some result is to be achieved and we are on the clock. Moreover, it implicates us in habit, the repeated use of a stereotyped means, such as going door to door. Action always involves costume, as opposed to the nakedness of inactivity. I have expressed my aversion to action, my preference for detachment. As opposed to examination, to wonder and looking around, action appears to me as looking ahead, as blinders and ignorance.
In fact, that’s why I retreated from action, from the collection of experience. That’s why I retired. I have had enough. I have had my fill of experience and don't want anything new anymore. Rather I want to go home, and I want to know what I have experienced. I am like a trick-or-treater who has collected enough candy and wants now to see what she has got. I want to go over what I have experienced again from the beginning, to experience it again but one level up, like an architect who decides not to build longer or wider but to build a higher level, a second floor. Experience needs to be told.
At home you experience what you have experienced. This is a theoretical activity, an activity of review, and, it seems to me, a conversation. In philosophical terms, it could be called thinking as opposed to experience. It is a freetime activity. Having retreated from the business of acting and moving in the world, we review our experiences and can consider them for as long as we like or as long as they interest us. We can pick up a single experience and give ourselves over completely to the looking at it, giving curiosity free reign. We can hold it close to our eyes or far from them, turning it over in our hands, looking at it from all possible angles. We can be floored by it, speechless in front of it. We can stare.
And then, we can compare it with others. When is it that one finds out, to one’s surprise, that one learns more about a thing by looking away from it, by taking up something else and examining it, and then looking back to the first, holding them side by side and looking at them put together? Comparing our experiences, grouping them, organizing and reorganizing them, we can begin to see them in the context of the whole, and to say what we have seen, to be able to speak what we have experienced. This is my picture of heaven: people engaging, where time is not a factor, in just such conversation. And instead of “going to heaven at last, I’m going all along.”
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 21, 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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A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
I’m really liking how you keep building upon previous posts. I was just talking today about how most people never just stop and think. They continue and think as much is necessary. But actually stopping and engaging in thought absent the need is rare, at least IMO. Also, love how you brought in Dickinson.
Garrett, I'm curious about the role of "conversation" here, which doesn't come up until your last paragraph. Does the examination, organization, and comparison you describe as retreat change if it is done with others rather than alone? For a while, maybe eight years ago, I used to daydream about heaven as a favorite coffee shop where you would sit down with every person you knew in your life and have a conversation with them for as long as you liked. In some cases, this conversation might be a kind of redemption, an opportunity to speak openly and honestly with people in a way that was impossible before. But in other cases it might look like what you are describing: looking over common experiences and seeing them better by comparing perspectives and filling in the gaps.