Wager by Raymond Barfield;

Author:Raymond Barfield; [Barfield, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498292108
Publisher: Lightning Source (Tier 4)
Published: 2017-04-11T07:00:00+00:00

4. Rom 8:38–39.

5. 2 Cor 4:16–18.

6. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.

four

Being in the World

A Brief History of Being

In 1814 Adelbert von Chamisso wrote a novella called Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story. Peter Schlemihl sold his shadow for a bottomless bag of money. Unfortunately, he discovered that without his shadow he was ostracized from love and society. And so he became an observer in solitude, rather than a part of the world. He saw wonderful things and learned all sorts of facts about the world, but there was something profound that he missed, even in the middle of his life of exploration and discovery: he missed the intimacy of being in the world in the full human sense, the sense that illuminates beauty and suffering. At the end of the novella Peter Schlemihl tells the reader,

I have learned more profoundly than any man before me, everything respecting the earth: its figure, heights, temperature; its atmosphere in all its changes; the appearance of its magnetic strength; its productions, especially of the vegetable world; all in every part whither my boots would carry me. I have published the facts, clearly arranged, with all possible accuracy, in different works, with my ideas and conclusions set down in various treatises. I have established the geography of interior Africa and of the North Pole, of central Asia and its eastern coasts. My Historia Stirpium Plantarum utriusque Orbis has appeared, being but a large fragment of my Flora universalis Terræ, and a companion to my Systema Naturæ. In that I believe I have not only increased the number of known species more than a third (moderately speaking), but have thrown some light on the general system of nature, and the geography of plants. I am now busily engaged with my Fauna. I will take care before my death that my MSS. be disposed in the Berlin University. But, my friend, while you live among mankind, learn above all things first to reverence your shadow.7

Such is our life. We want to be fully in the world. We want to cast a shadow. If we try to isolate beauty from the rest of the experience of being in the world, we are left with a thin and false utopia. If we isolate suffering, we are consumed with a sense of dreadful vulnerability. The totality of what is real presents itself in the concreteness of individual things in a complex and mysterious world in which we also are embedded. We are engaged with, and dependent upon, a world where beauty and suffering show up together. We are not mere observers. We are fellow beings who cast shadows. We do not live inside brackets, and even when we bracket parts of reality for the sake of thought or action, our minds wander toward questions about the whole of reality. This forces us to acknowledge the ways that beauty and suffering are juxtaposed. Beauty is altered by the presence of suffering, and suffering is altered by the presence of beauty.

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