Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Consciousness
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (March 18, 1911) : 21
hathitrust : link
We have invented, with our human perversity, such hundreds of means by which we may avoid becoming conscious. We “do” with such unflagging activity that thousands of us present the appalling picture of a person bustling from birth to death without ever having raised her eyes from her pervertedly compelling employments, and with never a pause in which to become conscious, or a desire for those quiet moments in which we live. Almost all human tangles, and surely all those resulting from the conflict between generations, are caused by the people who have reached years of maturity, perhaps of venerable authority, without ever having become conscious beings. As the petty activities they have busied themselves in pass naturally into other hands , and the control they once exercised by right of their position is lost because they had no other right to it, they are seen as pathetically dumb children, wondering unhappily that the comforting fallacies they had imagined would protect them are somehow of no avail. To awaken late in life to the realization that one has bustled outwardly, while inside an immature blankness reigned, would be so awful that after a while to become conscious is out of the question. It would be too painful, to[o] rending a process, and these old people prattle like children, depressing us, almost frightening us, while we step gently about them, lest they waken to the knowledge that they have grown up in their sleep, a knowledge which must not come to them.
It sometimes seems as though our only important business in life was to become conscious, and that he who has grown most limpedly so has done more than those who can point to the visible things they have accomplished. It is only after a taking possession of ourselves, of knowing and in some manner directing ourselves, of being vibrantly, sentiently aware of ourselves, that we can understand and elucidate life with even a vague justice, and when we have done this we are the source from which the active, oddly blind people — for there is always something near-sighted to the point of blindness in numbing, haphazard activity — get their idea of direction which sends them off at such a pellmell rate that they do not wait for the qualifying word at the end, and throw their full force into the least essential side of the question. The great men who have felt impotent, wasted, and died convinced that they had done nothing, were, by the agonized movements of what they felt to be despairing futility, pulling the world forward on its path, jerking the big men who make laws and countries, and all the little people who make plans, fortunes, and puddings, on in spite of themselves — and always “in spite of their better judgment.”
In our eager appetite for life we have the fear of blankness to excess, the panic dread of never living, and when definite things fail to happen to us, when some of the links in the usual sequence of normal experience seem in danger of being omitted, we feel cheated, annulled, laid aside and refused our rightful uses. But to see a person rise from contact with a great tragedy tamer than ever, more drab and weazened, with nothing new fired in him, no expansion of his hampering dimensions, or clarifying of his opaque dulness , with at most an interrupted air of one made resentful and dizzy by a sudden contact that jarred the stolidity he had long called his dignity — this gives cause for wonder whether life’s great adventures do not come during those moments of surrounding monotony when a divine fermentation within us marks an epoch; and we issue from these inner experiences stamped with a design, not so much a person as an ordered plan, a radius of perception which illuminates and harmonizes surrounding objects.
There are two ways in which we may become vivified; and let not those who pay calls, feel appetites, marry, live the round of obtuse normality, for a moment think that they have ever gained the great privilege. We either get the world through first getting ourselves, or the process is reversed, and less consciously, by a beautiful gift of receptivity, we become conscious of the world, and through a realization of it know our place in it, and finally, as part and parcel of our vision, see ourselves.We either get the world through first getting ourselves, or the process is reversed, and less consciously, by a beautiful gift of receptivity, we become conscious of the world, and through a realization of it know our place in it, and finally, as part and parcel of our vision, see ourselves. The world sometimes seems so far away, and we so irretrievably enclosed in our stagnant pool. To deny a thing at times so painfully real to us is to appear to verge on complacently stodgy morality, and to be rendered a little embarrassed and apologetic by the appearance. But to be able to deny the world’s seeming elusiveness is just one of the white lights which occasionally come, and that the world’s desertion of us or our complete possession of it is a matter of our inner keenness is one of those electrifying facts which are difficult to grasp because of their extreme simplicity. You cannot work out and finally comprehend a single fact; it has to come with a blinding flare, dazzling you with the wealth of your new-found possessions. And when we have realized that there is no centre of the world from which we alone out of all the deserving and undeserving are banished, but that each of us must of necessity be for himself the centre of his world — because by the liveliness of our perceptions alone are we enabled to become aware of the Ibsen drama evolving in our own literal family and the Tolstoi plan on which our neighborhood is writhing and teeming out its existence — we are then and then only in possession of a piece of life so typical of the whole that we gape and probe spellbound, finally conscious of life, alive ourselves and alive in the one essential way that is consciously and triumphantly so.
weazened :
from wiktionary
Thin; sharp; withered; wizened.
from etymonline
“become dry or shriveled,” Middle English wisenen, from Old English wisnian, weosnian “to wither, dry up, waste away,” from Proto-Germanic *wisnon (source also of Old Norse visna “to wither,” Old High German wesanen “to dry up, shrivel, wither;” German verwesen “to decay, rot”).
24 July 2026