reading

Ellen Mandel, William Rothman, Alexander Liu, and my brother Peter Lydon all read this essay in first draft and offered helpful ideas and encouragement. John Tomaselli gave me the computer I used to turn the typescript into a book, and Peter Lydon came to my aid many times when the computer had me baffled. Neighbors in New York's East Village and colleagues and students at the Third Street Music School Settlement have given me, through a dozen and more years, daily confirmation of freedom and equality—not so much in words as in countless acts of cheerful fellowship. Thank you, one and all.

Not long ago my wife and I walked on a sandy beach in Florida looking at the waves, the sky, and the life about us. We noticed a flock of terns, grey and white, each wearing a little black-feathered cap. The terns stood facing east out over the ocean. From time to time one flew out on a scouting mission, eventually circling back and landing, while another took off to the same apparent purpose.

We soon observed that the terns were not just facing out to sea; they all faced in exactly the same direction. Why? we wondered, then realized: all faced directly into the wind. The next day confirmed our guess because then, with the wind from the west, the terns faced inland toward the sunset.

It made sense. When the terns face square into the wind, the air currents sweep along their smooth curves with the least possible resistance. To whatever degree they stand sideways to the wind, they must brace themselves against it to keep from being pushed over. With their sharp beaks into the wind, however, the terns can stand still and let the wind wash past them as evenly as may be.

To face life as the terns face the wind—this is the goal of my philosophy. A true philosophy, I think, gives a useful understanding of how the life we are born into works so that, as we live, we are not fighting life, trying to create life in resistance to life, but instead knowingly aligning our forces with the countless other forces at play about us.

To write my ideas, I need to put them into words, but I declare at the outset: whatever truth I write springs not from the words, but from how well the words convey experience—what life is like even when there are no words. If I can convey my experience of life to you, dear reader, so well that you can see in my words the truth of your own experience, my writing will have been worth the work.

Chapter 1

Let us begin with what we can do nothing about, the twin inescapable facts of life:

We live in a moving moment. The moment, never still, seethes with ceaseless change, but the fact of being in that moving moment does not change as long as we live.

Wherever we live, in what country, culture, or race, and whenever we live, in what century past or yet to come, we live in this moving moment. The moving moment, the changing present, daily life—call it what you will—this is a condition of the life we have been born into. I know of no way to change it, and indeed, I am so used to living in this always new now that I find it nearly impossible to imagine life happening any other way.

Since the now is always new, we cannot define it once and for all. We can ask, however, what does the now contain? The answer: everything that is happening now.

That, you may say, is a great deal, and I agree. The surge of life the now contains is immense beyond all possible human imagining. Life is bursting out all over. With my awareness of the now comes awe of its variety and titanic energy. I look out my window. A passing breeze shakes the leaves on the tree that stands before my house. People walk by, each with a different walk, a different look, and this is but one tree and one house on one street in one city, and there are trees and houses and streets and cities all over the world, and the cold moon and the blazing furnace of the sun, the stars beyond and spiraling galaxies—and there a yellow zinnia blossoming in the window box, the cat asleep on the piano, and this and that, me and you, and we are but a tiny part of all the now contains as it moves ever onward into the always new. This enormous now truly boggles the human mind.

Every experience of your life and mine, every mood and half-thought, every step on the way to work or home again, every imagination, painful or pleasurable sensation—all are episodes of the always new now. Whatever now we are in has grown from all the nows that have ever been, all of history everywhere, every era and every instant; each leaf munched by a dinosaur, each scratch an ancient Roman scratched—all were once now and new, just as the moment you see these words is now and new for you.

Need I say more? I fear I am stating the obvious: we are always in a new now. But—

This is the third inescapable fact of life: we are ignorant of the future. This ignorance is absolute and shared alike by all humans. No one knows what will happen next.

Our absolute ignorance of the future, I admit, is often tempered by partial knowledge of the future. We humans routinely make workable predictions, plan actions in advance and then accomplish them. We even plot the future motions of the planets, sun, and stars. We can predict because we observe that the latest now, though always new, is often much like old nows. We see the now changing in cycles, seeming to recur in rhythms long and short: morning, noon, and night; winter, spring, summer, fall; the beat of a hummingbird's wings, the curve of life from birth to death. The more we observe these rhythms, the more we can predict that the future will happen as the past happened. We rely on this commonsense prediction to give continuity to our lives, to connect the now we are in to past nows like this one and to future nows that will also be quite the same.

Without scanting the importance of this prediction in my life or yours, dear reader, I still say: living as we do in a moving moment, we are absolutely ignorant of the new that the now is ever turning into. Why? Because all prediction, the most detailed and mathematically exact, the farthest reaching and the closest to home, is at best partial. So incomplete is prediction in telling us what will happen next that, despite its value in guiding our actions, prediction makes no meaningful dent in our absolute ignorance of what may befall us in the very next second.

Prediction is partial because it selects and generalizes. A farmer who predicts rain tomorrow and therefore gets his hay into the barn today congratulates himself, when the rain comes, on successfully predicting the future. His prediction, however, selects one possible element of the future—rain tomorrow—because it matters to him; the many billion more elements of tomorrow that matter less—how many times, for instance, a turtle on a log in his pond will blink—he ignores. At the same time the farmer generalizes. “Getting the hay into the barn” sums up many million actions by the farmer and his fellow workers—every precise and unpredictable movement of their hands and arms hefting pitchforks, every flick of a hand to wave away a fly during a long dusty afternoon.

Yet as I observe life happening in the always new now, I do not see life selecting and generalizing. I see life exploding all at once with mind-boggling variety and energy. The more I pay attention to what is going on around me, the more I notice how specific everything that happens is. I can predict, for example that summer breezes will shake the leaves on the tree outside my window, but when I watch carefully, I see, not “leaves shaking in a breeze,” but this leaf, shaped exactly thus, moving just here and just there. Exactly where one breeze may push that leaf, when and how the leaf might brush the next leaf on the same branch, and how the whole branch might swing up and down—that I could never predict.

This, however, is truly how life happens, in uncountable zillions of specific events. Take a single handful of red and white confetti, toss it into the air and watch it settle to the floor. In whatever way those few hundred bits of paper come down, they will land in some precise and singular pattern, this red one lying in a certain position beside a white one, some piled on top of each other, some alone on a little patch of floor. Can you, can anyone, predict how that confetti would fall? No! But as that confetti falls, so life happens in the now. When we consider how tiny an event this scattering of a single handful of confetti is in all that is happening now, we begin to see how little we know and can ever know of all that is about to happen as the now moves relentlessly into the new.

Chapter 2

I cannot claim that the observation of these linked facts, that we live in an always new now and are ignorant of the future, is original with me. These are facts universally recognized, frequently expressed in common sense sayings like Fats Waller's humorous, “One never knows, do one?” and clichés that remind us that we live in an eternal today between gone-forever yesterday and a tomorrow that never comes.

These are the facts that lend surprise to life, give zest to gambling, and fascinate us with the fickleness of women and the weather. Wise businessmen warn investors that a stock's past performance is no guarantee of future earnings, just as mothers tell daydreaming children, “Don't count your chickens before they hatch.” Every sensible adult in the world, I think, would be forced to agree with what Vladimir Nabokov writes in the “Texture of Time” section of Ada:

…nowness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothing-ness of the nolonger and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future….in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another.

I say “forced to agree” because, as Nabokov himself writes, holding to this moment-by-moment view of life is difficult. Why? Because, as an equally deep well of common sense declares in as many sayings, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

I do not deny the value of partial prediction; neither can I deny that I see as much sameness in life as surprise, as much changelessness as change. Any review of history reveals humans of every generation and every epoch acting like humans of other generations and epochs. I delight in thinking of neighbors gossiping in ancient Egypt and Greece, of children playing and dogs barking, of merchants haggling with customers, young women shooting shy glances at awkward young men. There are rhythms in life so long and sure, stretching back so far into the past, that it makes sense to predict them continuing as our now becomes new. In this sense we do know the future: it will be like the past and the present!

These long rhythms support our lives; we depend on them. These rhythms are built into our very nature: much of what we are and what we do has been planned in advance. One man and woman cannot predict the play of exciting glances that pass between them, but those glances have been arranged by life itself so that men and women will make love and create new men and women to live in a future as like the past as possible.

I know my own life flows on day-to-day with a regularity that takes me away from the moment-to-moment view of life. Living in a country at peace, in a secure home and in good health, I feel I can extend my now days ahead into the future and days back into the past. I possess a modest certainty that I do know what will happen next; or, if I do not know exactly, that I will be able to adapt myself to what oddities occur and absorb their surprises into my confident extended present.

Now What?

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2