I read this article in the WaPo the other day on Aliveness. Well, it was actually a book review of On Giving Up by Adam Philips. It ended up being a fascinating intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. It started with a quote from a young James Joyce:
At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.
The literary references continue throughout. The review contains a wide ranging look at the essays within the book and is worth a read. But to draw on one more quote from the review:
Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference.
I like that. In a way, it recalls the opening Joyce quote. When we’re alert to the details and differences and curious, suddenly we realize the drama in what could have been glossed over as commonplace.
Joyce is speaking about writing and this is all applicable to that craft, but of course Philips is really concerns with how we live. This combination of alterness, awareness, and curiosity – engagement at its heart, what the article calls aliveness, seems akin to flourishing, in the technical sense of “a combination of physical, emotional and mental well-being,” “experience engagement and joy in their lives… characterized by a sense of connectedness to life, relationships, and career.” vs. languishing: “disconnected and disillusioned,” “joyless blah feeling.” To thrive, to flourish, to be alive beyond the biological sense requires us to seek out the details and differences and be curious, not just left things pass us by in a blur of commonplaceness.
Ramblings 