Of depths and surfaces

When was the last time you complimented somebody for her depth?

Often times we say somebody is "deep" or has said something that's "deep" to mean the person is thoughtful or not superficial. However, on most occasions we don't know what we precisely mean when we use the word deep as a qualifier of human character.

David Brooks comes up with an interesting perspective on what constitutes depth in human character.

Depth connotes the bedrock or something that lies at the bottom. When navigators plumb the depths of the ocean, for instance, they plumb the ocean bed wherein are rooted, some say, the fundamentals of life as we know it.

What is the human analogy for the ocean bed? Is it the human unconscious?

Thanks to Freud, we now know that the human unconscious, like the ocean bed, is home to all those impulses, primary emotions and mammalian instincts that we try our best to tame and discipline with reason. 

Generally speaking then, the primary emotions constitute our depths, while the rationality makes for the top of who we are. By this definition, if a person is able to dredge up the primary emotions and live them out in her daily life, then that person is said to be invested with a depth of character.

How wrong we would we, writes, Brooks, to confuse our deepest selves with our unconscious.

When we attribute "depth" to a person, we are, on the contrary, alluding to the rational self, the one that a person has acquired through a life time of experience and "suffering", compromise and negotiations with the other self in us, which is the emotional and instinctive self.

Brooks says:

When we say that someone is a deep person, we mean they have achieved a quiet, dependable mind by being rooted in something spiritual and permanent [...] A person of deep character has certain qualities: in the realm of intellect, she has permanent convictions about fundamental things; in the realm of emotions, she has a web of unconditional loves; in the realm of action, she has permanent commitments to transcendent projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.

Depth is not a biological predisposition, but is something that we cultivate over time. "Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made, engraved by our thoughts and actions", writes Brooks:

So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. People make commitments — to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones — and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions.

When the 19th century Romantic poet and philosopher, William Wordsworth said that the child is the father of man, he meant that children have greater depth than adults because, chronologically speaking, babies are closest to our creator spatially and temporally, and their minds are still filled with those "intimations of immortality" that our creator shares with us. These intimations or these sparks of depth get dispersed and weaken over time under the surgical knife of experience. 

Experience, said Wordsworth, severs us from our natural depths.

David Brooks says the opposite: Experience creates depth depending on how we as adults wish to live our lives. If we cling to our biological dispositions exclusively, then we are unlikely to acquire depth of character. In Brooks' terms:

Babies are not deep. Old people can be, depending upon how they have chosen to lead their lives. Babies start out very natural. The people we admire are rooted in nature but have surpassed nature. Often they grew up in cultures that encouraged them to take a loftier view of their possibilities than we do today.

Looking back, I now wonder why Captain Ahab, the one-footed, obsessive whale-chaser of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, resented Moby the whale so much for its depth. I had understood the root of Ahab's obsessiveness with hunting down the whale, as a quest for something humans are incapable of attaining--depth. The whale in Ahab's eyes didn't acquire depth, but was born with it by virtue of living in the depths of the ocean.

Ahab must have labored under misperception; he was by far the deeper entity in the tale.

Bakeries as havens

We all have our special places where we find, or arrive at, a certain thing called peace of mind.

It's hard to define what "peace of mind" is, but one can at least identify a site, as it were, where it's experienced.

Delia Ephron, American bestselling author (and the screen writer of such perennial favorites like Sleepless in Seattle) names a bakery as her place of peace.

Peace of mind is a feeling where she says she has intimations of having had it all. In the process of writing of the American obsession with "having it all," Ephron takes a crack at its inadequacy:

Having it all seems to breed wanting more. And since we can’t have it all because it is statistically impossible, and since there is no such thing as more than all, the whole notion seems, I’m sorry to say, depressingly American.

In many countries, having it all is learning to read. Having it all is getting to choose whom you love. Having it all is walking to school without worrying that you might get raped on the way.

Having it all is like an "eclipse:

To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A total eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the earth is at its greatest distance from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science Web site, but one thing is clear: it’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes and 31 seconds.

Having it all is also a moment of peace:

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

Which is why I love bakeries. Peace descends the second I enter, the second I smell the intoxicating aroma of fresh bread, see apricot cookies with scalloped edges, chocolate dreams, cinnamon and raisin concoctions, flights of a baker’s imagination, and I know I am the luckiest person in the world. At that moment, in spite of statistical proof that this is not possible, I have it all. And not only that, I can have more.

A Quote

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

Courtesy W. Daniel, Hillis, Physicist, Computer Scientist, Chairman of Applied Minds, Inc.; author, The Pattern on the Stone.

Thinking in Black and White

"It just wouldn't look right to have the world without color television in today's society."

The above is a sentence in a student-essay on the topic of technology and how it could both "free" us as well as enslave us to itself, simultaneously.

The one thing I like in the sentence is the stupendous conviction. The writer firmly believes in what she says.

But everything else radiated by the sentence is ripe for critical thinking.

The writer is technically stating the obvious: Color televisions are the only televisions available today in the market, is my guess. Black and white TV’s are out, aren’t they?

Perhaps, the child is implying something else?

Were you to be discovered with a black and white television set in your possession, you might be perceived as someone not belonging to this era, or you might simply be perceived as “weird”. Would you not you look askance at the owner of a flip-phone?

In the world of certain types of technology, I believe, the progression from old to new is mercilessly linear. In the world of audio-visuals, the march from black and white to color and silence to sound, among other marches, is irreversible such that black and white is now a subset of color and silence, as is demonstrated so exquisitely by the 2011 Oscar nominated film The Artist, is a part of the wholeness of sound.

However, what the writer of the sentence does is not just confine the statement to a specific context, but draw an absolute truth of “life”, as it were, from it.

And that is precisely where the trouble—of me accepting the sentence’s conviction at face value is—begins.

The writer believes, I feel, that the movement from black and white to color is a movement of progress in general. To have color is to be modern, but to have black and white is to be anachronistic. 

I feel the writer reflexively draws from the advancement in the field of technology an unexamined truth and applies it to the field of life.

The syllogism is faulty, reducing the sentence itself to black and white.