It’s All In the Touching

I may have mentioned before at some point that I was a fairly late bloomer to ‘books’. I certainly had no interest to read in high school, nor at any point through my teens in general. Most, if not all, of the books on my school’s “required reading” curriculum would have been left uninspected, and certainly unexplored. I just didn’t see the value of reading for pleasure. The return on investment didn’t seem to add up.

But man…..how things can change.

In a delicious slice of irony, I just finished reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”, which was a standard book on many high school reading curriculums during my time in school, although I don’t recall seeing it……but then I would not have read the reading list. Reading was so far from my concerns and interests that I don’t recall ever once reading for the fun of it. In fact, the knucklehead at the wheel during those years would have been unable to name a single book read. 

Fortunately for me, “time”, for all of its bemoaning to keep things moving, still manages to allow for some redemptive corrections along to way, for a chance to make right a past wrong. And that has been the case with this book. Had I read it at 16 or 17, it would have been met with uncomprehending confusion. Bradbury’s dystopian future would have bounced right off the thick skull of that incurious kid.

But now with forty years of books under my belt, I found Bradbury’s tale of a book burning society surprisingly captivating, a bit unnerving, and oddly relevant, for there are always factions in society arguing to place restrictions on ‘inconvenient’ ideas. For them, the freedom to explore new ideas should come equipped with a governor to limit the potential damage to their precious dogmas. The power that a ‘bound book’ has to ignite the mind of its reader has always been met with suspicion by those in power. Copernicus, for example, writing when the flames of the Inquisition were still burning strong, smartly instructed friends to publish his “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” posthumously and Galileo nearly met the flames himself for not doing the same, only his full recantation of the heliocentric model saved him. Of course, we no longer worry about public book burnings any longer, but that is only due to no longer needing such drama. Our modern-day book burners (administrators) simply use a different method, or as Zach Del Rocha noted in “Bulls on Parade”, “……they don’t have to burn books, they just remove them now”.

But all of that is an argument for another day. On this day, there is another idea I wish to place on the docket, and surprisingly enough, my enthusiasm was ignited by a line from Bradbury’s dark, dystopian world. That’s right, a sinister and unsettling story of a future where something as innocent as reading a book was a criminal act and free thought ruthlessly crushed by the State, a single paragraph stood out with such poignance that the ghost of Voltaire stood and applauded.

It occurred near the end of the book, after Montag’s narrow escape from the grasps of his former colleagues (firemen who burned books) when he stumbled across a small group of men living quietly in the woods outside the city in relative safety. The leader of this band of free-thinking renegades was “Granger”, and as they stood next to a small fire, warming themselves against the night chill, he aimed the following dictum at Montag, which for me was the payoff that made the investment to read the book worth every minute.

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“Everyone must leave behind something when he dies….a child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way, so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do….so long as you changed something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hand away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener, is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have never been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

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What a stunning thought….and the implications there are deep, and even life altering for anyone tuned in to its particular frequency. The broader implications of Bradbury’s phrase can be fully seen when we expand the definition of “touching” into “engagement”, which encompasses a wider array of associations, such as embracing a sharper attention to detail, a more authentic level of self-awareness, the dexterity to flow with the ups and downs of experience, and a patient desire for self-mastery. In other words, as Bradbury’s ‘gardener’ analogy alludes, this “touching” is the cultivation of a philosophy of life.

One of the first thoughts that came to mind was Matthew McConaughey’s recent memoir, “Greenlights”, that I finished just a few weeks ago. Spread throughout his book, which I found to be  excellent, were scenes that made it quite evident that he lives by his own philosophy of life and appears gives his best effort to approach it with this same desire to “touch” everything he encounters.

There were a number of accounts he described that confirmed that commitment, such as one instance of having an intuition to get away from the comfort and vices of his success and go on a ‘walk-about’ to get himself reacquainted with his core principles. In other words, he felt the need for a reboot to his internal operating system. So, he decided to travel to Africa, alone, which he had never traveled to before, in search for a local musician that he recently discovered and admired. That was his only directive. He wasn’t sure exactly where to find the man and knew no one in Africa once he landed, but off he went with nothing more than ‘the adventure of it’ leading the way. He found his man and spent time with him, learning along the way an amusing and surprisingly poignant aphorism regarding the difference between wet and dry……shit. One remains with you while the other doesn’t.

At one point, a local man who knew nothing about McConaughey, asked for his name and what he did (for a living), to which McConaughey randomly blurted out that he was an American boxer, not realizing there could be consequences. Well, he quickly learned that the young men of the town engaged in aggressive, bare-footed, bare-chested wrestling matches in dirt pits to prove ones standing in the community, and was immediately invited to join in. Much to the man’s credit, he did not excuse himself but instead fully accepted the consequences of his blunder; paying the bar tab, in other words, to honor his philosophy of life. After working his way through their ranks, he was eventually challenged to wrestle the biggest wrestler there, and ended up fighting him to a draw, and thus earning their respect….and re-establishing his own in the process.

That digression was not meant as a call to schedule your own walk-about to some far-off land in order to rediscover ourselves. Of course not. As memorable and inspiring as his excursions are to read about, they are his and his alone. Few of us have the time, disposable money, and certainly not the gumption for that particular form of ‘touching’. Speaking for myself, and perhaps others, I am simply too introverted for that type of outward form of engagement. I admittedly lack McConaughey’s extroverted self-assurance, and honestly don’t even want it. I say kudo’s to those who do, but I would argue that it’s not necessary. My suggestion is that a much gentler hand can be applied just as effectively. 

To that point, I would offer up as a counterbalance to McConaughey’s more extracurricular examples with the words below by Henry David Thoreau, taken from “Waldon Pond”, written after spending a year living alone in a small one room cabin that he built himself on its shore. It must be said that I consider this to be one of the most powerful sentences in all of literature, and one that cuts straight through to the very heart of Bradbury’s “touching” ideal.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“To live deliberately”, that is the key to this entire conversation. In fact, it is precisely what Bradbury was alluding to with his own beautiful phrase. Both require a dedicated and purposeful engagement with the life that has been placed in our care and to respect it enough to ensure that it flourishes. But surely there is a middle ground between these two extremes, between the flair of McConaughey’s walk-abouts and Thoreau’s self-imposed seclusion. Surely the answer to how we can draw closer to our own ‘promised land’ doesn’t require such extremes.

As it turns out, the answer doesn’t accept the framing of the question, at least not to its narrow definition. The fact is that there is not a single answer, nor a single methodology that can be prescribed, but only suggestions based on our own temperaments. Profound experiences do not require profound circumstances, they only require us to see the world with softer, more intent eyes.

A nice example of seeing with softer eyes would be a scene I caught recently from the marvelous movie, “Lost in Translation”. The setup is that Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a young philosophy major searching vainly for meaning in her life. While staying in Tokyo, she visits a Buddhist shine with that focus in mind, and observed Priests performing their dutiful observances in an ancient Temple, the very image of reverence and piety, yet as she confessed to a friend, she “felt nothing”, which can be viewed as her heart rejecting a prescribed, dogmatic answer to the questions her heart was groping for. No, her heart was looking for something more authentic, something that would resonate with her deepest desire.

During her next outing, this time to a different Temple, while casually strolling about its gardens she spots an approaching wedding ceremony in the distance heading toward the Temple. She thoughtfully moved out of view so as to not interfere and watched with deliberate intent from a distance. It was then that she captured what her heart was secretly longed for, genuine human contact. Even while surrounded by the trappings of ceremony and customs, she caught the key moment to it all, that of a fiancée tenderly taking the hand of his future bride. And Sofia Coppola, the writer and director, made sure we all took notice by isolating that touch (shown here), which was followed by Charlotte’s warm acknowledging smile at witnessing such an eloquent moment. As you can see, the scene was beautifully framed by Coppola to show how a common, even ambiguous moment can still carried the force to pierce us. We simply need to step back and learn to ‘see’, as Nietzsche once said, “as beautiful what is essential in things, then I will be one who makes things beautiful”.

In order to bring this to a close, I want to circle back to Bradbury’s wonderful phrase again, in particular his reference to the “gardener,” for it exposes an interesting conundrum, which is how to fully live by the principle it implies, by “touching” our life intimately. The difficulty, of course, as mentioned earlier, is that we are all predisposed to widely varying degrees of interests, temperaments, and certainly depths, so attempting to apply a one-size-fits-all solution will simply fail. But an idea came to mind that seems to fit comfortably with what I’m attempting to convey here, and that is the simplicity and repose of a Japanese Garden.

First, I should clarify what I mean by that. A Japanese Garden, as I understand it, is not entirely about gardening at all. The attention and care paid to the garden’s aesthetic appeal and repose is the main factor, of course, but that ideal can also function as a type of meditation. In other words, the physical garden, the plants, the stones, the Koi swimming in their pond, etc. are to be understood as representative of our inner garden, so the care exerted tending to it is meant to translates to the caring of ourselves. The two go hand-in-hand. The deep sense of calm and serenity that a gardener works to establish, is meant to create the same repose for the gardener as well. Therefore, as the logic suggests, how we move through our daily lives should be considered with the same care. And it truly doesn’t matter whether there is a physical garden to tend to or not, but rather to the quality of our attention, because this ‘tending to our garden’ theme, ultimately includes everything in our lives. For instance, I consider the chore of washing dishes, or the care I take working in my yard, or sweeping the floors as I do every Saturday morning as equivalent to the care of a garden. It is all part of the same mantra, the same care and attention that I would commit to as a master gardener.

What I am suggesting here is that the ideal of a Japanese Garden can be seen as pure metaphor. There is no need to create one for ourselves in order to reap its benefits. We simply need to regard any task, any daily drudgery, any banal chore with the same focus and repose we would give when pruning a bush or removing weeds in a garden. If that can be achieved, even if only occasionally, then the boundaries of our awareness will have the room to stretch, and perhaps a broader vocabulary will come to exist in our lives. All the mundane and seemingly frivolous moments that we mindlessly discard into the daily trash bin as wasted time, can actually become excuses to cultivate. In other words, it is possible, even if only momentarily, to live draped within a melody of wonder and enchantment. It’s all in how we touch our lives.