Experience

Emerson had an essay titled "Experience," and I don't think I got it until this past year. It's impressionistic, recursive; a writing teacher would have told him he had no argument. But the argument, I think, is for an appreciation of the sensation of experience itself. We had a visiting scholar at W&J for a day, and he said Melville mixes so many genres in Moby-Dick (some chapters are written like a novel, others like a play, others like--theology? poetry? philosophy?) in order to reflect the nature of experience. Maybe that's what Emerson was doing.

I've been thinking about experience because of something else I read in the Bonhoeffer book:

At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess:

'I now do see that we can nothing know.'

That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the inital data it cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.

I loved this! It articulates something I've been wondering about: how to convey things that can't be taught by telling. If I tell my students the theme or interpretation of a text, they will dutifully write it down and memorize it. But they won't have had the experience of the text working on them and bringing them to that conclusion themselves . . . and perhaps by hearing about it first, being inoculated with it, they never will. Even asking questions I think sometimes gets in the way . . .