For a while here, I’ve been on radio silence. It’s been frustrating, to say the least. It wasn’t writer’s block: I’ve been churning out a great storm of work for academic pursuits. But going from the jostling, bruising, frenetic life in Cairo to the bucolic, ivory-tower pursuits of Blacksburg, Va., has left me groping for the same sort of obvious writing inspiration I had become used to, the sorts of things that would grab my deeper awareness and shake me firmly.
Ah, but like a bad travel writer I was trying to figure out what was “different” about my “new” surroundings in order to play up the point as something worthwhile to talk about. And when nothing “new” came along, I sat, frustrated, hands folded, wondering when something would fall from the sky and set me to thinking.
To fill the time and let off some steam, I’ve been wearing my friend’s ears out with yakity-yak about this or that minute cultural point or piece of obscure trivia or semi-humorous story about life away from home. I felt like I had to fill my yawning internal silence with a lot of talk.
But after the blabbing, the silence inside my head had become deafening… until I realized it was the silence that I needed. After all the sound and the fury that was my life for half a year, it was time to, as Mike and Mike say, just shut up.
There is a sense of quiet wonder that I have felt creeping over me since my return to the U.S.A. From becoming simply awestruck by the hazy majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the soft way that I have re-joined those who I left for so long to the feeling of snow blowing through my window this morning, I feel as if I see the world through new eyes, feel what is going on with a heightened sense of engagement.
If I had to say there was an atheistic-humanistic quality close to that of spirituality, I’ll hazard so much as to say this would be it. It’s the way I felt looking at Van Gogh’s self-portrait in Amsterdam or sitting next to the pyramids at sunset now directed towards things I had always thought of as ordinary.
I’ve been trying to think of a neat way to tie this into the way that Christians or Muslims experience “revelation” or perhaps just a little more proximity to God.
But I think I’ll just be quiet.
Comments (1)
"... I feel as if I see the world through new eyes, feel what is going on with a heightened sense of engagement."
When I was about your age, fifty years ago, I spent several months working in a country whose language did not use Latin letters.
When I then first arrived in a Latin-letter country, I had trouble recognizing the Latin-letter words. I saw the letters simply as geometric shapes, just as I see Arabic words today.
When I got to Grand Central Station after disembarking from my returning ship, I saw for the first time how Americans really walk: different from the people where I'd been travelling and seemingly very strange.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern."
-- William Blake
Certain kinds of travel can indeed put a new window in the cavern and cleanse the doors of perception. I'm glad that you experienced that effect.
Posted January 18, 2008 10:58 AM
Posted on January 18, 2008 10:58