Incorrigibly Plural

Steve McQueen, the actor best known for “Bullitt” and “The Great Escape,” died of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.  The exposure was due in large part to McQueen’s love of doing his own stunts, particularly in driving—the protective suits and helmets he wore contained asbestos.

Owls have dull-colored feathers that make them almost invisible in their environments. Their feathers have serrated edges which work to muffle the sound of their wings, allowing them to be so silent in flight that their prey doesn’t hear them coming.

C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast. A friend of his described him as “woefully lacking in common sense,” using the fact that Lewis had failed his driving test 17 times as an example.

These are odd bits of trivia that I learned in the past three days.  I thrive on these types of random facts—they give me life, in a way, because learning them keeps me engaged and interested in the world.  If I’m not interested and not learning, I know that I’m in trouble—for me, apathy is the first sign of boredom, which leads me down the road to depression.

In Volume One of her published diary, Anais Nin wrote, “The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness.  The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death):  absence of pleasure.  That is all.  It appears like an innocuous illness.  Monotony, boredom, death.  Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. . . and then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”

Nin uses the word “hibernating;” I use the word depression—but they’re the same concept.  When I hibernate from the world because I’m starting not to care about it, I experience exactly what Nin wrote about: monotony, boredom, and a complete absence of pleasure.  And the descent into depression begins.  Nin refers to a “shock” that can jolt a person out of those feelings.  For me, this jolt came from a book I read many years ago—“The Complete Poems” by Louis MacNeice.  When I discovered MacNeice’s poems, I was jolted out of the monotony and apathy I was feeling at the time.  His words came alive on the page, stirring me back to life.  And when I began to study his life, I grew even more interested and engaged.

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet whose greatest works were written in the 1930s.  In his autobiography, MacNeice wrote that a poet should be “able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.”  Reading that description of what a poet or person should be like was life-changing to me.  I realized that if my life was like MacNeice’s description, it would be impossible for me to, in Nin’s words, hibernate.

Again and again, MacNeice described his approach to life as one of curiosity and learning—of searching for answers.  The variety of life was vital to his existence.  In his poem, “Snow,” he writes:
“World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.” 

He took such joy in all the different aspects of the world that, when thinking about it, he felt a sense of “drunkenness.”  He believed that the world was packed full of variety, and he wanted to learn as much about the world as possible in as many different ways as he could.  He was intensely curious about the enormity of the world and the beauty and tragedy it holds.  Some of his greatest poems are written in response to that curiosity and the questions it pushed him to answer—by travel, discourse with other writers, or engaging in the politics of his time.

That insatiable curiosity about the world was contagious to me.  I began to seek out answers to my own questions.  I still do.  I pick any random thing that even remotely interests me, and I find out everything I can about it.  I can do this even when I’m unable to get out and be in the world because of illness—it’s easy to Google the answer to a question.  To watch a documentary.  To listen to a different genre of music.  Keeping my mind engaged and interested has saved me again and again from the times when I say to myself, Who cares?  Why bother?  It doesn’t matter.  My response to those questions is this: You will care, Renee.  You will make the effort to bother.  And you will find out why it matters.  When I do, I get as excited about the enormity and variety of the world as MacNeice did.  And I simply cannot be apathetic or bored.

Try it.  When you ask yourself Who cares? or you feel like life has become monotonous, think of something that interests you, no matter how trivial it seems.  Look it up.  Read a book and write down every unfamiliar word and every idea that fascinates you.  Then learn the words and research the ideas.  If you can, go out in the world and find out more.  You’ll never be sorry you learned something.  You’ll never regret the small effort it took to rouse yourself from the stupor of boredom and re-engage with the enormous variety the world has to offer.  Learning about one fact will lead you to another.  And another.  To a song.  To a poem.  To a person who’s an expert on the subject you’re curious about.  To a place you want to go.  It’s a chain reaction that will transform your life from one of hibernation to one of mental and physical engagement.  Dory puts it this way in “Finding Nemo:” “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”  My mantra is a bit different: “Just keep learning, just keep learning.”  And you’ll stay afloat.  Always.

A musical example of the sheer variety in this world: