1-22-2013

"A stranger here

Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;

Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair world appear,

Strange all and new to me;

But that they mine should be, who nothing was,

That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass"

-Thomas Traherne-

     Once I, too, was new born and saw all the world as strange. Since then I have lived, and I have acclimatized, and I have learned to predict the passage of the sun and the underbelly of the leaves, but I am mistaken if I think that, just because I have seen it daily, in and out of so many months and seasons, the world can no more be new to me. For the world was not new when I arrived in it. It was I, and my new-found perception that rendered it strange. The world holds no tyranny over perception, nor forces one to see it in one way and one way only. No, rather the world is as a Virgil, a guide. The world sets up certain parameters beyond which perception may not stray: objective reality does not function wholly at our behest, nor can we view things entirely according to our whims, but even within reality's unbreachable limits, perception exercises much wiggle room. Chesterton says "if you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe." Chesterton is right. Yet though we are not free to draw giraffes with short necks, we are eminently free to draw them with necks of many different altitudes, provided only they are all long ones. 

     The world does not demand to be viewed as old or commonplace. The world admits to being viewed as new and strange, as it is viewed by infants. I am not an infant, yet nor am I debarred from infantile perception, that perception in which, as my mind conceives it, there is so much joy and comfort. Let it all be strange to me again. Let me enter the world afresh with each breath.