The Self in the Wake

On Curiosity as a Form of Love

I.

Last night I overheard a conversation that has stayed with me. Someone asked a man whether he believed in a literal reading of the Bible. He answered, "Yes, and I also believe that none of us is intelligent enough to understand it."

He said it simply, without a hint of paradox, yet his answer brought together two things I had always taken to be opposites. He accepts the text completely—it is true all the way through. And he grants that he will never fully understand it. Most of us assume these cannot go together, that we can call something true only once we have grasped it, so that we either master it or give up the hope of mastering it. He refuses the choice. He accepts that the truth is real, complete, and far larger than his mind, and he treats his incomprehension not as a defeat but as the fitting posture before something that exceeds him.

This is not only a religious idea. He refers to scripture, but others also assume that posture in a broader context. Anyone who holds to a truth greater than his understanding and declines to shrink it to something he can manage stands in the same place. Consider the scientist who trusts that the data mean something he has not yet worked out, the reader who allows that another's argument may be stronger than his own, or the person who loves someone and knows that loving them is, in part, the permanent condition of never completely knowing them. What the believer says of scripture, the honest researcher says of the evidence, and the lover says of the beloved: I am committed to this, and it exceeds me, and the exceeding is not the problem.

This is the posture I seldom manage and want to get better at. It is rarer than it should be. We usually approach the world with a predetermined idea of what it can teach us. And the strange thing I noticed, what made me sit down to write this morning, is that when I refuse to let things be larger than me, I end up unable to see myself, either. If I refuse the stranger the standing to be more than my idea of him, I learn nothing about him. Nor do I learn how I am shutting him out, which may be the more important thing. The part of myself I am protecting stays hidden as long as I keep protecting it. It is only when I let something else be fully itself that I catch, in the corner of my eye, the outline of what I had been.

II.

Why is the posture so rare? Not because we lack the desire to know; we have that in abundance, more than any people before us, and we are drowning in the means to satisfy it. We lack something else, and it took me a long time to see what, because it hides inside the very faculties that feel like curiosity.

Begin with the plainest case. A great deal of what passes for engagement with the world is the mind bending the world to fit our group's requirements. We call it tribalism and locate it in others, but it is less perceptible and more intimate than the word suggests. It is the small, continuous adjustment by which I arrive at the conclusions my people hold, not because I have examined them but because holding them is how I remain one of my people. The world is sorted in advance into what confirms us and what threatens us, and the threatening is not engaged but explained away. This is not stupidity. It is loyalty, doing its work beneath perception. The tribe bends the world toward the requirements of belonging, and the bending feels, from inside, exactly like seeing clearly.

There is a subtler version that does not need a tribe at all. I can bend the world directly to the requirements of the self, with no group involved, simply by consuming enormously and encountering nothing. I read widely; I am well informed, and I can hold the day's arguments in my head. And nearly all of it has been selected in advance, below awareness, to leave me as I am. The information arrives already shaped to my preferences, and I mistake the volume for openness and the fluency for thought. This is the more flattering counterfeit because it looks like the life of the mind. But information bent to the self's requirements is not inquiry; it is ego or a lack of courage. It is a mirror I have mistaken for a window.

Both bending to the tribe and bending to the self are motions in the same direction. They take a world that exceeds me and cut it down to a size I can comfortably hold. Both are ways of arranging not to be changed. And they are the ordinary condition, not the exception; left to myself, this is what I do all day, with great sophistication. The mind is a machine for reducing what it meets to what it already contains.

Curiosity is the name for the opposite motion. Not a stronger desire to know; the counterfeits have plenty of desire. But it is a reversal of direction: instead of bending the world toward the self, the self bends toward the world. It is the discipline of letting what is in front of me be larger than my idea of it, stay larger, and change my idea rather than be trimmed to fit it. Where tribalism and fluency arrange the world so that I need not move, curiosity moves me. That is the whole of the difference, and it is why curiosity is so much harder than it looks: the two counterfeits are frictionless, and curiosity is all friction, the sustained refusal to reduce.

It helps to see the reduction where it is starkest. The theologian handed a mystery and tasked with explaining it knows the assignment is a trap: a mystery he could fully explain would, by that very success, have stopped being what he was asked to explain. The demand to make it comprehensible is a demand to make it smaller. And here, the believer and the unbeliever both make the same mistake from opposite ends: the believer shrinks the mystery to a doctrine he can hold up and defend, while the unbeliever rejects it because it will not fit inside the mind's ordinary measures. Both require the infinite to become manageable before granting it standing. The refusal to let something exceed you wears devotion's clothes as easily as skepticism's. Under either, the motion is the same: the self diminishes the world to the size that fits within.

III.

A question presses here, and any honest reader will have it. If the man cannot understand his text, how can he say it is true? To call a thing true seems to require understanding enough to back the claim. His understanding, by his own admission, runs out. So isn't his "yes" just credulity?

The objection holds for a certain kind of truth. Some things I can fully survey: that this page holds words, that two and two make four. For these, understanding and warrant coincide; I affirm exactly what I comprehend, and no further. If every truth were like this, the objection would be fatal to this essay, and last night’s man would have overreached.

But the truths that matter most are not like this. Think about how you affirm that a person you love is good, trustworthy, and worth the commitment of your life. You did not arrive there by auditing their soul. You affirmed it on contact: enough encounter to be held, to be sure in the way that matters, while knowing and not minding that the person exceeds every account you have built of them. The exceeding is bound up with the affirmation. Part of what you mean by their goodness is that they keep opening past what you know of them; a person you had entirely comprehended would be smaller than the one you love. If someone demanded to know how you could call your beloved good without fully understanding them, you would hear the demand for what it is: a refusal of the only kind of knowing that people permit. We affirm a person through contact that exceeds comprehension, or we do not affirm them at all. The scientist trusting a theory whose every consequence he has not yet derived; the reader granting that an argument is strong before he has traced its last implication affirm the same way: on contact sufficient to hold them, past the edge of what they have surveyed.

This is not a lesser rationality, a regrettable shortfall from the ideal of total survey. It is the only rationality that is adequate to large objects. To insist on complete understanding before affirming is a demand that the object be small enough to fit inside a single mind, and most of what is worth affirming is not so small.

So the man's incomprehension is not the weak point in his position; it shows he has grasped the largeness of the thing he is dealing with. To affirm that something is inexhaustibly true is to affirm that it exceeds you. The second clause does not qualify the first but follows from it. Were he to claim he had wholly grasped the text, that would be the refutation, for it would mean he mistook it for something containable and shrank it to the dimensions of his own head. His not-understanding is his most accurate perception.

And now, what we have been circling comes into view. What does it mean to let a truth be true in this way, to hold it as real, to be held by it, and to leave it room to exceed you? It is to refuse to reduce it to what you can manage, to grant it standing to be larger than your idea of it, to surprise you, and to be more than you have yet found. But that is not an epistemological operation. That is what love is. To love anything—a person, a truth, the world—is to grant it room to be more than your grasp of it, to hold it without closing your hand. The demand to understand before affirming, which presents itself as intellectual conscience, operates oppositely: it insists that nothing may be real until it fits inside me, and that I remain the measure of what is permitted to be true.

Call it what it is: not humility but the subtlest form of pride, the refusal to let anything exceed me, masquerading as the refusal to believe without warrant. Curiosity is the overcoming of that refusal. It is love in the domain of knowing: consent to a reality larger than myself and willingness to be enlarged by it rather than reflexively cutting it down. I do not thereby surrender judgment; I make it possible. Only what I have let become itself fully can be weighed for what it is, rather than for the smaller thing I had made of it.

IV.

If the self distorts, and if the world bends to my requirements before I have consciously chosen anything, how can the self correct itself? I am the one doing the bending. I cannot simply resolve to stop, because the resolution is mine too and comes complete with all my requirements intact. A man cannot lift himself by his own collar.

I know this because I have tried and failed. When I have set out to be humble, I have mostly produced a more sophisticated pride, one that has read about humility and can perform its gestures. The determination to be open is still the self, managing its image, and a self that manages its image is the opposite of open. No exertion of will gets me beneath my own will. The harder I work at displacement from the inside, the more securely I am installed at my center, only now congratulating myself on the effort, vain as that may be.

So displacement does not come from pushing. It comes from being stopped. Something outside me arrives with enough reality to arrest the machinery, to catch me before the bending is complete, and to hold me still in front of something that will not reduce to my account of it. I do not talk myself out of the center. I am drawn out by an object that compels a kind of attention I did not decide to give. Simone Weil called attention the rarest and purest form of generosity, and she meant something exact and strange by it: not effort in the usual sense, not strain, but a waiting, a suspension of the self's demands long enough for the thing to reach me in its own way. You do not seize the truth. You make yourself available, and the truth seizes you.

This is why a discipline is necessary, and also why it is not enough. The deliberate reading against myself, the exposures I arrange, and the search for the case I hope is weak do not, by themselves, displace me. They cannot; they are my own exertions, and my exertions carry my requirements. What they do is more subtle and more preliminary. They clear the ground. They hold me in front of what might reach me, longer than I would stay on my own, and lower for a moment the defenses that keep the other at the size of my present idea of it. The discipline does not produce the encounter. It makes me available to be encountered. Whether something then reaches me is not finally in my hands, which is a hard sentence for any man who has organized his life around things being in his hands.

I have learned this most painfully not from books but from loving people. There is a way of loving that is really a way of not seeing, a love that arrives already knowing what the beloved needs, already holding the solution, already competent. I have loved like that. I have loved people whom I insisted on understanding and mistook that insistence for love. It felt like devotion; it was a refusal. To meet another person as a problem I could solve was to keep them at the size of my competence, to require that they be no larger than my capacity to help. Keeping a person that small means you are not loving them. They are being managed by someone who has confused his need to be useful with attention to who they actually are.

What broke that, when it broke, was not a better technique. It was the plain refusal of the other to be solved, the way a real person, loved closely and long enough, finally exceeds every account you have built of them, including the generous ones. You reach the end of your understanding, and the person keeps going, out past the edge of what you know. You must choose: either insist on and love a diminished version you can control, or stop and love the real person, who is and always will be greater than your understanding. The love was never in the understanding. It was in the willingness to stop needing to.

That willingness is the self displaced, not by an act of will, but by a reality that would not shrink. I did not achieve it. Someone who simply would not fit brought me to it. And this is the shape of things in every domain, though I learned it in the one that cost the most: the self does not get out of its own way. It is drawn out by whatever it consents to hold as larger than itself.

V.

Something happens on the far side of this that I did not expect.

When I stop bending the other to my requirements, when something reaches me, and I let it be what it is, I learn about the other. That much I anticipated. What I did not anticipate is that I also, in the same motion, learn about myself. Not because I turned to look. I had turned away from myself entirely; my complete attention was on what was in front of me. And yet the self I had stopped guarding became, for the first time, visible only while I was looking at something else.

By this I do not mean the self-knowledge that our age keeps recommending. We are told to look inward, to examine ourselves, to search our depths as if the self were a room we could enter and inventory. But I have never once found myself by looking. When I turn my attention directly to myself, I find only the looking; the self already arranging itself for inspection, presenting the version it has prepared. The eye cannot see itself; it can only see what it has decided to see. Introspection returns me to my management of the question, which is the one thing I was trying to get beneath.

The self appears, when it does, only in its dealings with what is not itself. I learn what I am by watching what I do to others: where I flinched, where I shrank him, where I let him through, and where I could not. My requirements become visible only in the moment I stop indulging them, the way a current becomes visible only where it breaks against a rock. The other is the rock. He is what my self breaks against, and in the breaking I finally see the shape and speed of something that was, until then, perfectly transparent to me because I was swimming in it.

Montaigne, who spent his life on this, said it exactly: Je ne peins pas l'être, je peins le passage. I do not paint being; I paint the passing. He did not mean he had given up on the truth about himself. He meant that the self is not a being to be surveyed but a passage to be caught in motion. You find it not by holding still and looking down, but only in transit, in the act of meeting whatever it meets. He knew himself by writing about everything else: cannibals and thumbs and horses, and grief. The self was never the object. It was the wake.

There is an imitation of this so close to the real thing that I have practiced it for years without noticing. It is possible to attend to others in order to learn about oneself, to make the other a mirror, an instrument of my growth, so that even my curiosity becomes one more way of being interested in myself. That is not what I am describing, and the difference is everything. The moment the goal becomes self-knowledge, the other reduces once more to a device for my improvement, reversing the entire motion; I am back at the center, bending the world to my purposes, only with a subtler purpose. The self-knowledge that is worth anything cannot be aimed at. It comes only as an unplanned byproduct to someone who has genuinely forgotten himself in attention to something else. You receive the outline of what you were only if you were not looking for it. Seek it, and you get the prepared version again.

So the account comes back around and tightens. To love the other is to grant him room to exceed me. Granting him that room requires me to stop bending him to my size and to be displaced from the center. And displacement, when it comes, hands me back the one thing I could never get by grasping: a true glimpse of myself, caught in the act of meeting what I could not command. I set out to know another and am given, as change from the transaction, the beginning of knowing myself.