Part way through the first movement of Bach I played, it happened. It’s happened before, but it doesn’t happen every concert. I could feel the energy of everyone in the room listening to the same sound and entering the music with me. When that happens, it’s almost as if you become a spectator too, hearing the music through the ears of everyone else. A 300-year-old piece of music I’ve played for almost twenty years was brand new, as vivid and alive as the day Bach wrote it down. Like a Bob Dylan song says: “every one of them [notes] rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”
It is a sacred moment.
Bede Griffiths (quoted in Taylor’s A Secular Age, in the same opening discussion as that other quote):
One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.
Vaclav Havel, June 19, 1982*:
Again, I call to mind that distant moment in Heřmanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning—this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and which has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what. Once, in one of my letters, I reflected upon this experience; now I think—at least in the perspective of these essays—that I understand it better.
Evidently there exists an experience in which the longing of separated Being for remerging with the integrity of Being is satisfied, as it were, in the most mature and complete manner. That experience is typically and most profoundly human: it is the experience of meaning, and of meaningfulness. The need for meaning and the search for it—regardless of their form, their strength or their depth, or how definite or indefinite they may be, though they be nothing more than a vague sensation of the absence of “something” without which life is worthless—accompany the human “I” from its beginning right through to its end. They are inseparable and its most important dimension (because it embraces all the rest), its maturest and most complete expression, and the instrument of its self-constitution. Perhaps it could be said that the “I” is, in fact, this search for meaning—the meaning of things, events, its own life, itself. Certainly this dimension of its longing for “Being in Being,” or rather this aspect of its thrownness into its source in Being, is somehow the “last” to come to light: it is something more than just the spontaneous intention of the “pre-I,” in which there are still echoes of the “prenatal” state of nonseparation; it is even something more than the vigorous effort of the mind to grasp Being by perceiving and throwing light on it; these intentions are, of course, present in the “I,” but they do not explain it entirely: it transcends them—by virtue, for example, of how it contains them within itself, mutually increases their strength and consummates them: paradoxically, the “I” seeks fullness of participation, but an alert participation, one that already knows of itself; it seeks a totality of merging, but a totality—so to speak—that is fully aware of its own unrealizability.
The experience of meaning is thus, essentially, the maturest or “highest” form of the “I” ‘s quasi-identification with the integrity of Being. It is the experience of genuine “contact,” but contact as something both autonomous and integral—paradoxical as that may be. Perhaps it might be described as the experience of “counterpoint” between the “voice of Being” in the “I” (in its source) and the “voice of Being” in the “non-l” (in the world), wherein the meaning of this counterpoint does not just lie in a harmony that amplifies the original quality, but in the new quality it brings, a quality that knows neither of the two intersecting voices. It is in this counterpoint that it first seems possible (if only for a fleeting moment) to hear a suggestion or an echo of the as yet unfamiliar theme from the symphony of Being. The semipresence of Being in the “I” and its hidden presence in the “non-I” encounter each other here for an instant as “insight,” a joyous sensation of participation and the vertigo that comes with it. The reflection of Being in the “I” renders us open to the mystery of Being in the “non-l”; Being concealed in the world, or the Being of the world, opens itself up to us. It is a meeting of two opennesses—but opennesses that are directed exclusively toward each other: it is not just that we seem to be here because of Being, but that Being seems to be here because of us. The greatest attainable closeness, fullness and completeness of Being would therefore seem to call forth the greatest degree of fullness and completeness of the “I.”
Perhaps it will now be clear why I link the experience of meaning with what I called the third paradox of our thrownnesses: the nearest we can come to the fullness of Being also gives us the clearest indication of how unattainable it is; the most mature identification is most powerfully revealed as quasi-identification. Joy has an undertone of horror, tranquillity of anxiety, good fortune a touch of the fatally tragic. This experience reveals to us that in complete and unlimited identification, total insight, utter happiness, lies the end of the “I,” death. It is by no means accidental that at the very heights of meaningfulness, happiness, joy and love, the specter of death inevitably appears with particular clarity. The experience of meaning also differs from less mature expressions of our longing for Being in that it contains within it—while at the same time, oddly enough, losing nothing of that sense of supreme happiness—the most forceful awareness of futility. But is it not precisely this that brings it closest to the contradictory essence itself of human life and the human mission?
Being spellbound within me and Being spellbound within the world can join hands anytime, anywhere and in any way: when I look into the crown of a tree or into someone’s eyes, when I succeed in writing you a good letter, when I am moved by an opera on television, when a passage from Levinas sets my thoughts swirling, when our visits work out, when I understand the meaning of my compassion for the weather-woman, when I help someone or when someone helps me, when something important happens, or when nothing in particular happens at all. But whenever and however it happens, such moments tend to be rare and fleeting. Given the contradictory nature of separated Being, it can’t be any other way and it is right that it should be so: after all, the uniqueness and the unpredictability of such moments combine to create their meaning: it is the meaning of “islands of meaning” in the ocean of our struggling, the meaning of lanterns whose light is cast into the darkness of our life’s journey, illuminating all the many meanings of its direction.
* A portion of this is also quoted in Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, but I find the whole letter is worth quoting. For another sample, see this one from August 21, 1982 that I posted last year. I want to say a lot more about these letters, particularly the last 16 of them which Havel intended to be read together. In fact, after his release they were originally published together in samizdat form. Regardless of whether or not I get around to it, I think the one from August 21st, the third to last of the 16, is a good summary. And quite frankly, I think it summarizes, or gets at, very nearly everything — from the general malaise to the political unrest to the global birthing crisis — pretty well.