A note from an ordinary person

Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and it,
so I am as I am not.

——Heraclitus, “Fragments”

29 September 1904

I wonder at everything, and everything is a wonder to me. I do not know where this comes from, just that it lives within me and maybe emanates from me. I assume the same is true for everyone else, but there is no way for me to know—and even so our interpretations of any shared conscious experience will differ, even if only slightly, because we are fundamentally different.

I have seen things no one else has seen merely because I stood in a specific locus on this earth and kept my eyes open to the surrounding world. I am not special because of this—only different, because I have seen what I have seen. Others are different, because they have seen what they have seen with the eyes they possesses.

There is a lot of talk about the “ordinary person” and their significance in society. I think the ordinary person is a fallacy—a furthering of a hierarchical structure that psychologically lifts those who think themselves extraordinary, and pummels those who are told they are not. If one is ordinary then all are ordinary. If one is extraordinary then all are extraordinary, because, as I alluded to before, no one is identical. Not even identical twins! Even they, through the process of living their first instant of life, begin down the path of radical difference from each other.  If that were not so then all identical twins would live identical lives, pursue identical careers, find identical lovers and friends, etc.

I am what you would call ordinary. I am of average height and weight for my sex, age, and region. I am of average intelligence and educational background. I am stochastically sat in the middle of any bell curve for all things done and experienced by reasonable people. Perhaps this will dissuade you from hearing anything I have to say here; that is okay. That is your prerogative just as it is mine to pencil my thoughts in these marginal pages at the end of an essay by William James. Though, I think, if you have read, or are reading, this article then there is a greater likelihood that you hear me out than you shut the book (or more aptly fold over the stapling) on my scribbled thoughts here. I certainly hope you will continue reading on. Although I am ordinary (or extraordinary: we covered above that either is possible) I have high aspirations for myself, i.e., my life. My life is mine and mine alone. Just like your life is yours and yours alone.

Where Am I?

I currently sit in the annals of my university’s library. There are cement walls all around me; to compensate for this harshness there are infinite rows and stacks of books. Books about history and human evolution and philosophy and the development of languages and love stories and tragedies and comedies and——

I sit here at this lengthy wooden table, alone, and I write to you—a perfect stranger, who will remain a perfect stranger—that is unless you are somehow watching me write this down and decide to follow me home to my dorm and knock on my door presenting my own inner thoughts to me——

That is unlikely because I just finished taking surveillance of my surroundings and all is clear and quiet in this university library tonight. As I was saying, I’m writing to you—a perfect stranger, or more likely an imperfect stranger, and I share these thoughts with you as they present themselves to me in an attempt to understand what I have just read.

I am studying English, so these psychological and philosophical pages are a foreign continent to my usual Woolf, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Dante, Dickinson, Dickens islands of interest. I am practiced in reading articles of this nature, but not of these contents. For context, I will reread this article for a fifth time after I finish up my thoughts here; not because I am some sophisticate, but because I seek to understand. I sit here and think about things I am not qualified to think about—out of pure curiosity. Perhaps that is a poor approach to learning, or to life, but it is what has lead me thus far, and I am yet to find anything more motivating than that inner pull to understand everything that is not me.

I realize James wasn’t really asking me for my contribution to the discussion, but I’d like to throw my own thoughts into the “bubbling vat of publicity” in response to his call on page 533, “If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable rearrangement, the time should be propitious for anyone who has suggestions of his own to bring forward” (James 533). Perhaps, more optimistically and less self-effacing, I could be part of that “ferment of new growths,” or better yet, “a nucleus of new crystallization” (533).

It’s a good thing I’m sat in this library because many of the names rattled off so easy breezy by James are cement walls I crash into in my own mind. When James presents an alien name or idea to me all I have to do is push out my chair and marshal myself up and down the stacks where I am guaranteed an eventual answer. You’ll notice this act of research in the margins of James’s essay where I searched for meaning with blue ink.

Onto my thoughts now—James says:

“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, not exclude from them any element that is directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is not directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement” (James 534).

The universe of my human experience incubates in the realm of my individual imagination. How can I hope to understand anything about anyone when the contents of our minds are so divided?  If “knowledge lives inside the tissue of experience,”  and it is “made by relations that unroll themselves in time” how can I hope to understand anyone other than myself (539)?

We are the experience and the thing itself? According to James: living this life, I choose to indulge in every day, I experience myself and am myself all at once. If that is so, does that mean I am the only one who can experience me? Am I an island amongst other unknowable islands in the vast sea of consciousness?

✧✧✧

Helen closed the many books spalled across the old oak table, returned the miscellaneous ones in her bunch, and curled her arm around those she would check out at the circulation desk on the 1^st floor. It was nearly 1 a.m. when she walked herself back to her dormitory. Jill, a 3^rd year, sat behind the check in desk of their building. She held an edition of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and appeared to be about part way through it—assigned reading in Mr. Scofield’s lecture for Juniors. Helen was only part way through her second semester, but Hard Times was one of her favorite novels.

She gave Jill a friendly smile and said, “Now, what I want is, Facts” quoting the opening line of the novel, “Facts about how you’re liking that book.” There was silence for a moment and Jill’s eyebrows did a strange dance, like a retired ballerina trying to recall steps she learned as a child now in middle age. “Chapter one,” Helen said, her voice lifted up—trying to sound approachable and non-snobbish—praying she could resuscitate the possibility for a moment of connection with a fellow student. Jill dog eared the page she was on and fanned the pages back to the first page, read the opening paragraph, “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them” (Dickens 7).

Jill chuckled, “Great memory! I’ve been reading this beast all night and can hardly remember the page I’ve just read.”

“Oh, well, it’s not a fair comparison; that’s one of my favorites.” Hellen took a step closer and motioned to Jill’s copy of “Hard Times” now hanging in the balance of Jill’s thumb, forefinger, and index finger. This conversation thing was new territory for Helen. She didn’t want to screw up the miracle unfolding before her. “You’re in Scofield’s lecture?”

“Yes, and leading a languid existence because of it.” Jill drew her face down into an exaggerated frown. She flew her eyes up to Helen’s; the result was a comical expression of overwrought sorrow. Unable to hold the excessive display of emotion the two burst into a unison of giggles and snorts, which inevitably lead to further displays of youthful jocularity. “My name’s Jill, by the way.” Jill reached out her hand across the desk, flexing her feet against the metal bar of the chair she sat on to reach over far enough to meet Helen.

“Oh, I kn—nice to meet you Jill.” Helen shook hands with Jill, whom she’d known of since her first week on campus. “I’ve heard Scofield can be quite demanding.” By heard she meant overheard other third years discussing his class in the mess hall while she sat alone at a nearby table with her writing pad and a coffee.

“You’ve heard right, friend.” Jill divulged further details of the class, but Helen was unable to hear any of it. She was far too overtaken by her new moniker, “friend.”