“In trying to reveal the clash of elements that we are—the intellectual, the animal; the blunt, the ingenious; the impudent, the imaginative—one dare not be dogmatic. We are a many-foliaged tree against the moon; a wave penetrated by the sun.”
When I was young and
working in a Cleveland bookstore, we had a regular customer who, in retrospect
I realize, was probably mentally ill. At the time, I diagnosed him as merely
annoying. He seemed to take pleasure in making us think he was a shoplifter. He
spent hours in the store, keeping to himself, seldom speaking, browsing in unrelated
categories – science fiction, used magazines, sociology – and never buying
anything. My instinct was to bounce him. We had to keep an eye on him while we
stocked shelves and waited on real customers. He was a distraction.
I complained to Gary Dumm,
the senior clerk and now an accomplished artist and old friend, and he replied:
“Oh, he’s just a human.” My instinct was simultaneously to argue with Gary and
thank him. He said it casually, not stridently. Immediately I started looking
at our customer differently. It cooled me off and it remains a core proposition
when I’m dealing with difficult people. I might still get steamed but usually I
pause and think: “One dare not be dogmatic.”
The passage quoted at the
top is from comments made by Marianne Moore in the anthology Trial Balances
(1934), in which established poets introduced newcomers – in this case, Elizabeth
Bishop, who had three poems published in the collection. It sticks with me like
Gary’s forgiving admonition, and reminds me that though there is an
identifiable human nature, it is contradictory and unpredictable, “a
many-foliaged tree.” No one is all good, though some are all bad. In each of us
is latent the ability to commit acts saintly and evil. Across life we make
millions of decisions, often for reasons we don’t even suspect. We are
self-serving and selfless.
[Moore’s essay is
collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C.
Willis, Viking, 1986.]
"All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent according to how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and discord." Montaigne (Frame)
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