One of my favorite bloggers—Justin Taylor—has an excerpt from a book by one of my favorite Catholic philosophers—Peter Kreeft—on one of my favorite thinkers—Blaise Pascal.
In his Pensees, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
Kreeft’s commentary on this passage is insightful and convicting (though it ends with a mixed metaphor that would make even Thomas Friedman cringe):
We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.
In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .
[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .
We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.
So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . . .
If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions. (From: Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees, pp. 167-187.)
November 4th, 2009 | 10:06 am
Perhaps the avoidance of Pascal’s quiet is also an avoidance of reckoning with the existential loneliness human beings have come to in the absence of God. Perhaps the absence of a Divine purpose for us and our lives turns us manic, driving us to fill our lives with something and everything in a search for that one elusive thing that will make everything make sense.
Pascal always makes for a good start to the day. Thanks, Joe!
November 4th, 2009 | 11:05 am
Why don’t we enjoy the vacationy lifestyle now that we have machines (slave-substitutes)? Because the devil works quietly and relentlessly through the entropy of clutter, dust and grime. Machines have given us a new way to fight back against the encroaching disorder but the battle is neverending. The old cliche about cleanliness is still true; finding God is much easier when the rug is vacuumed, the laundry’s in the washer and the garbage is in a can on the curb. In AA the saying is, “Do the dishes,” which means stop thinking about yourself and your little problems. The physical act of tidying shuts off the white noise of our own brains so that God’s voice can be heard. We don’t seek to be “harried and hassled and busy.” In our small, normal lives housecleaning is our way to be warriors in the eternal struggle. Order is Good.
November 4th, 2009 | 11:29 am
Joe, what you suggest may very well be for many. But I think another part of the problem is that we’ve been told we can have it all. We can “realize our potential,” “pursue our dreams,” etc. So we practically kill ourselves trying. But along the way, hard choices must be made. And perhaps, in a land of overwhelming plenty, we’ve lost the ability to “just say no” to some things in favor of others.
And then, we want to prove ourselves, because success in our culture is measured in terms of product/commodity, or things like fame, fortune, and outward beauty, or how many “prizes” we’ve won. So we get pushy and greedy, or run on overdrive, feeling we can’t rest or we’ll miss the prize.
Perhaps we need to accept life’s limitations rather than push blindly through them, leaving destruction, or at the very least negligence, in our wake.
(rhinoceros? I thought it was “elephant”…)
November 4th, 2009 | 1:18 pm
I recommend Thomas Merton’s “Ascent to Truth” for all those interested in this topic. He reflects very powerfully on Pascal and others in Church history (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, Ecclesiastes) who have identified endless activity as a symptom of spiritual illness.
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.” Pascal.
November 4th, 2009 | 2:19 pm
Much as I like Pascal, and much as I concur with Kreeft on this, my only comment on this post is:
Best. Title. Ever.
November 4th, 2009 | 4:43 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by First Things and Charles Lehardy, David Hornor. David Hornor said: RT: @ROFTERS: Life is Like a Mansion with a Wallpaper-Covered Hole Leading to a Rhinoceros Covered with Millions of Mice http://bit.ly/eRLZX [...]
November 5th, 2009 | 9:16 am
[...] Metaphor noted. [...]
November 5th, 2009 | 9:18 am
[...] Metaphor noted. [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact