This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive by Riggle Nick

Author:Riggle, Nick [Riggle, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781541675506
Amazon: 1541675509
Goodreads: 60769931
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-12-06T08:00:00+00:00

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?3

If Oliver were “seizing the day,” then she would not be strolling so idly. No, she falls down. She stares at this grasshopper. Her actions are not organized in favor of some concrete or well-imagined future good. Her actions are not even an expression of her deepest and best desires, at least not ones she has clearly articulated to herself. No, the world itself is her guide as she engages with it through her attentive eyes: the chance encounter with a fascinating grasshopper, wandering through the field all day. Falling down in the lush grass is fun; grasshoppers are wonderfully strange. Oliver is literally in a field, harvesting its goods. The poet is the grasshopper falling down in the grass, at home in the grass, her eyes also “enormous and complicated.” She knows how to pay attention to the day, to the field of grass, plucking away, finding poetry in it.

What else should I have done, she asks, follow my “plans” for the day? And with a dose of sarcasm, she asks what do you “plan” to do with your one wild and precious life? Should you make a list: arrange to visit the field, desperately look for grasshoppers, carefully count of those you have found, and fall down in the grass at least once? Or should you open those wild and complicated eyes and venture forth?

When you understand carpe diem as get the most out of life, get shit done, grab–tackle–seize the day, then although it is questionable advice, at least you understand exactly what it is telling you to do. In that sense it is down-to-earth, and that is good because carpe diem is supposed to tell you how to live. But when you understand it as harvest the day, it might seem to lose some of its force. After all, who among us can be in a (perhaps metaphorical) field all day, skipping and falling down, staring at bugs and writing poetry? Where does that fit into this life of work, bills, kids, exercise, friends? What if the only field you know about is a vacant lot in the middle of the city? And even if you do have some field time, surely you cannot visit every day.

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