Since reading Sherwin B. Nuland’s Maimonides last year, I’ve acquired a taste for the thought of the great 12th-century Jewish philosoper. I first read his work in a medieval philosophy class 37 years ago. The text included Christian, Jewish and Muslim thinkers, and I began to understand how little of the Western tradition I understood – a realization comparable to discovering new ancestors, a previously unsuspected lineage. I’ve not read all of The Guide of the Perplexed but I’m moved occasionally to read random pages and meditate on their contents. The edition I have was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1963, and was translated from the Arabic by Shlomo Pines. Over the weekend I found this lovely passage:
“But sometimes truth flashes out to us so that we think it is day, and then matter and habit in their various forms conceal it so that we find ourselves again in an obscure night, almost as we were at first. We are like someone in a very dark night over whom lightning flashes time and time again.”
Metaphors work best when rooted in the familiar, and both sides of the equation are convincing. We all know the ghostly appearance of a nocturnal landscape lit for a nano-second by lightning – a shocking brightness more intense than noon. During the flash, I try to memorize what is briefly revealed, as though I were seeing it for the first time and did not wish to forget it. The truth, too, helps orient us in drawing a map of the world. Literally, albeit fleetingly, we are enlightened, illuminated, all the while still lost in Dante’s “selva oscura.”
Our Neolithic forebears must have known the lightning metaphor. Robert Burton did. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, when describing the appearance of Jesus, he writes “there was a divine majesty in his looks, it shined like lightning and drew all men to it…” I think Burton deepens the simile, for lightning is also fearsome. If we follow Burton’s poetic logic, Jesus was both attractive and frightening. Eugenio Montale repeatedly uses lightning as revelation in his poems. This comes from “The Storm” ("La Bufera"), as translated by Jonathan Galassi:
“the flash that candies
trees and walls, surprising them
in that eternal instant – marble
manna and destruction – which you carry
carved in you as your sentence and which binds you to me
closer than love, strange sister –”
The “eternal instant” (“eternità d’istante”) – that’s how truth arrives. And “candies” (“candisce”) is a delicious verb. In another poem, “For an Album” (“Per album”), Montale pushes the lightning metaphor even farther:
“And so you vanished into the vague horizon.
There’s no idea locks the lightning in,
But he who’s seen the light can’t do without it.”
At that point, we take our place beside Maimonides and other teachers “over whom lightning flashes time and time again.”
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3 comments:
That's certainly more dramatic than the more familiar line about stumbling over truth in the same way we stumble over the curb. We just hop, check to see if anyone noticed, and continue on.
Good post, Patrick. It's always nice to be reminded of Montale's greatness, and yes, the verb "candire" is a typically weird, striking choice. As for the flash of insight, there are times when I wish it would flicker on and off more regularly, like a loose bulb, but will have to settle for the occasional fulminataion.
As I was walking to work the other day on the magnificent mile someone had written "can't imagine how strange it is to be anything at all" in chalk on the sidewalk. I thought this was quite interesting and seemed to be the only person on the street to notice it. I tend to believe that the universe puts things in our path for a reason so I felt that this was some sort of sign to my soul. Then it became even stranger when I entered the building less than a block away and a white plate was displayed in the window with black lettering. It said "l'evidence eternal". . .it was just such a strange thing to have written on a plate. When I googled "l'evidence eternal" this was the first thing that came up. . .interesting. Meditation and knowledge is the key to enlightenment.
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