A Pattern of Thinking
A Pattern of Thinking
by
Stephen B. Waters
A pattern of thinking makes a few people in this world different than many others. It sets a few otherwise very ordinary people considerably apart from the rest. If was Michel de Montaigne who, three hundred years ago, deduced it and set it down clearly on paper in his Essays for all who cared to see.
Montaigne's Essays made the difference for me, but it was Dr. Lewis Thomas' essay, "Why Montaigne is not a Bore" in his book The Medusa and the Snail that brought me to him.
Montaigne made me comfortable with our similar but unusual brand of thinking which, unless managed well, can be as much a curse as a blessing: Dangerous are the eyes that see too clearly. "There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate," he advised, "as to play the man well and duly; nor any science so arduous as to know how to live this life of ours so well and naturally. And of our maladies the most wild and barbarous is to despise our being. . .. for my part, I love life and cultivate it."
He led me to other men who invested great thought in the simple daily problems of living--Seneca, Tacitus, Theophrastus--whose simple wisdoms were long ago wrung from our formal schooling as somehow unnecessary in this modern world. Montaigne reminds us that we are people now as they were people then and it is merely time that separates us, not circumstance.
So know I enjoy life and my search through today and history for the rare thoughtfulness of mankind: Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, H.L. Mencken; Jesus, Mohammed and Marx stripped of dogma; Confucious, Einstein, Bronowski, Kant.
The best find is Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His insight is that this rare pattern of thinking may just be an acquired trait, accessible to almost anyone who can perceive the advantage of it.
And I am learning how to teach it. What a sweet difference Montaigne has made for me.
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Copyright 1998 by Stephen B. Waters. This page was last built on 11/25/98; 4:18:09 PM. sbwaters@rny.com At the moment I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. |