For lots of reasons, literary and philosophical, but all of them rest on one central observation: that, as Josef Pieper tells us, the human capacity for vision is “in decline.” Now your present correspondent is not generally one for declinist narratives. Rather, I stubbornly insist on hope, in the face of every valid reason not to maintain hope. Yet at the same time there is no denying we are in bad trouble, and getting worse. The first world has access to conveniences and contrivances and means of communication that most humans for most of history would have had trouble even imagining. That we largely do not know what to do with our luck—that we waste our words and our time on forms of verbal mimicry, frivolity, and destruction—that we could, with a little imagination, improve life for others, but instead we cling to the comforts that ruin us—all this is evident enough to the thinking person.
Sally Rooney’s co-protagonists in Beautiful World, Where Are You seem to spend almost all their free time worrying about this state of affairs (when they are not thinking about their jobs or friends or lovers, which, even they admit, occupy most of their attention. They also spend a good bit of time on aesthetics, a discussion that maybe we’ll return to). Yet even so, they acknowledge that their agitated fretting about justice and injustice is, precisely, fretting. They have seen that unless they know what to do about it (and to their credit, they know that they do not know), all their anxious self-examination is, to some extent, beside the point.
We are not likely to get to the stage of acting with justice unless we first learn to see with justice. This means, yes, a cleansing of the vision. It also means a nourishing—not a rejection, not an excision, not a denial, but a nourishing—of the heart’s legitimate and (let’s admit it) ravenous hunger. Because it’s as a result of that hunger that we grasp for more while clinging ever so tightly to what we have, fearing that otherwise we will never be okay, that there will never be enough, yes?
Have you ever seen a small child try to hold on to more treats than those little hands can wrap around? The child stops even seeing what she has, already, in hand. All that looms in her vision is the supply of unsecured treats—that which, if she can’t hold, right now, might not still be there later.
We are all this small child (it’s okay; it’s kind of funny once you see it rightly). We are all hanging on too tightly. It’s almost not possible to help it, especially if you have ever been without something you truly, genuinely, not just wanted but needed. But once you see it, you can begin to help it, just a little bit, maybe, sometimes.
In some ways contemplative realism is merely a vocation to the obvious. In other ways it seeks to uncover, in Josef Pieper’s words, “not what everybody sees, but what not everybody sees.” Because the blending of what is commonly seen and what is uncommonly seen will move us closer to as complete a view as possible. And—does this need to be said, or is it self-evident?—we need as complete a view as possible, as quickly as we can attain to it, so that we can know what is best to do, before it is too late to do it.