Tag Archives: W. B. Yeats

Ignorance is Bliss

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The more I learn the more I know how little I know. (It makes me think of an old quip from a pastor of mine, “If ignorance was bliss, we’d be blistered.”)

William Butler Yeats put it this way, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun. Now may I wither into the truth.”

I once read a book entitled, “The Art of Unknowing” in which a psychiatrist explained how his clients were taught to un-learn many of the basic assumptions they had imbibed in their early life.

In the end, life comes down to mystery. We assume we know what is going on but from time to time Reality visits us and we are stunned, bewildered, and humbled. Most of the time we shut this experience out and try to arrange our lives to keep it from happening again. W. H. Auden wrote, “And Truth met him and held out her hand. But he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But we should welcome the occasion. Grace is trying to visit us. It could be amazing! And on that note, let me conclude with a thought from the poet Mary Oliver:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

Action vs Reaction?

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Here is a marvelous poem by a contemporary theologian who understands “working out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” describing it as creating “a clearing in the dense forest of our life…” This is such a powerful image as most of our lives are often such a “dense forest” and creating any space in that wilderness is challenging.

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world so worthy of rescue.
(Martha Postlethwaite)

And the notion of “waiting for our song” brought to mind the wisdom of William Butler Yeats:

O God, guard me from those thoughts
Men think in the mind alone.
He who sings a lasting song
Must think in the marrow bone.

(note:  Postlethwaite poem was cited by Blue Eyed Ennis blog recently.)

The Hamlet Syndrome

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I love Shakespeare. I think he is the profoundest individual I have ever come across, demonstrating more insight into the human imagination and heart than anyone else has even approached. And of his work, I prefer the tragedies and especially Hamlet.

Hamlet was a very depressed young man who was stymied by indecision. This indecisiveness stemmed from obsessive thinking, a thoughtfulness which he noted, “if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” Shakespeare valued thoughtfulness but realized that being lost in thought was as much a problem as being incapable of thought.

In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he concluded “thus conscience (i.e. “consciousnessness”) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great kith and kin, in this regard, their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Shakespeare realized that excessive “self-awareness” was merely a ruse, an escape from the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind of life. He realized I’m sure, that self-awareness was critical in life but needed to be balanced with a willingness to plunge head-long into the fury of life, to make a commitment in action.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness has given rise in the past few decades to the clinical conception, the “Hamlet Syndrome”, describing young men…usually they are young men…who are similarly stymied and incapable of taking the plunge into life.

And I close with a relevant observation from W. B. Yeats:

God, guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone…

Or perhaps, from an anonymous source:

The centipede was happy quiet
Until a toad in fun, said,
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Faith and doubt

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I was taught in my youth that faith and doubt were incompatible.  Now, I find they go hand-in-hand.  I feel that faith without doubt is largely dishonest, or as Sartre described it, “Bad faith.”

And note what Unamuno had to say on the subject:

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself. ~Miguel de Unamuno

And William Butler Yeats puts this truth so pithily:

Oh God, guard me from those thoughts

Men think in the mind alone.

He who sings a lasting song

Must think in the marrow bone.