I’m remembering all over again the precarious excitement of my early college days. It was both a new beginning and a disaster. I was a mass of anxieties, depression, obsessions, and compulsions. That was the year I began seeing a therapist, an opportunity that came with going to college. One day when we had just been talking about my earlier life and development, he asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘an accident waiting to happen,’ Jerry?” It turned out I was the accident, and I was happening.
Somehow through the miasma that was my consciousness, I managed to have some meaningful encounters that year—I made some good friends, met some excellent professors, and read some transformative books. One of the latter was Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, which we were reading in a history of philosophy course. Although Descartes did not supply the levity that my life was lacking at the time, the text provided a parable of starting over; for he adopts his stance of systematic doubt to get rid of everything he’s learned but doesn’t need, so that he can begin philosophy all over, beginning with what cannot be doubted. Of course, he doesn’t really do this. For one thing, he cannot actually get rid of what he’s learned and how he was formed by it—for example, his famous Cogito, ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”), which appeared in his later Principles of Philosophy, echoes St. Augustine’s Si fallor, sum (“If I am wrong, I am”), which he probably learned from the Jesuits when he attended school at La Flèche. Nor could he have carried out his meditations without the heft of the very tradition that he was rebelling against.
Nevertheless, I was compelled by the thought that one could sit at one’s desk and meditate one’s way into a new manner of thinking. His Fourth Meditation begins, “During these past few days I have accustomed myself to leading my mind away from the senses; and I have taken careful note of the fact that there is very little about corporeal things that is truly perceived, whereas much more is known about the human mind, and still more about God.” What impressed me most was the mixture of high stakes (what we know about the human mind and God) with the casual tone (yeah, here’s what’s been going through my mind the last few days).
The other book from this time is Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. I wasn’t reading it for a course, so I must have picked it up at the suggestion of my English professor. It’s the first book I encountered that took metaphor seriously as something that forms our very consciousness, and which we must treat with great care; for metaphor can both inform and mislead. Thus, Sontag critiques the Romantic myth of tuberculosis as the “artist’s disease”; as she says, “The Romantics invented invalidism as a pretext for leisure, and for dismissing bourgeois obligations in order to live only for one’s art.” I read with fascination about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, about a sanitarium for TB patients who undergo spiritual refinement as they heal from their disease. Of course, Sontag was critiquing Mann’s use of the Romantic myth, but I wanted to find my own magic mountain where I could retire to my thoughts and other pursuits, like Descartes into his room, and remake whatever of my life needed to begin again.
It’s a thought worth returning to, not to Romanticize disease, but rather to remind myself of the need to take some time apart, to find some relative calm. We’ve learned in our world the value of moving fast, of being active and making things happen, but we also need reminders of the value of slowing down, of silence and contemplation. One need not come down with a devastating disease to allow this to happen, nor need one set out to remake all of philosophy. To read slowly and well, to reflect, to allow oneself to sit in silence for a time—in these things is value enough.