The Instant

Didion and Plato on Remembering Impermanence

For at least the next month, my offerings, posts, and reflections will be less consistent. My partner and I are in the early stages of navigating a transition following a sudden loss. We are all right and safe—and grieving, too.

I appreciate your continued support.

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Joan Didion’s A Year Of Magical Thinking, the memoir that catalogs Didion’s life following the sudden death of her husband, opens with:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.

Of course life changes fast. Of course life changes in the instant—note the definite article—and in every instant before and after the one identified as the one, too. Of course. Of course. Of course.

(You can read some of my recent wrestling with these truths here and here.)

Didion, however, is not offering a banal statement about the truth of impermanence with the above words. Instead, she is sharing how it feels to remember that life changes fast, that life changes in the instant.

For the person writing these words, life’s fleetingness is not often felt in that way. I suspect that this is the case for many of us, though I have nothing other than a feeling to support such a suspicion. I do not often feel life’s fleetingness despite holding close Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s observation that we are born and we die six-and-a-half billion times in twenty-four hours, and that it happens so fast often we do not notice it.

Words and ideas can carry you only so far. Direct experience cuts through to the heart of the matter.

I did notice it recently, though, and felt it deeply when I witnessed a clear shift in someone’s body language, a distinct change in their delivery of words and tone of voice—never mind the content of what was said. In the instant, the entirety of the energy in the room changed. It was as if a vacuum designed specifically for the task of instantaneous removal of the whole of what was present so that something else could emerge and fill the space executed its design flawlessly.

Woosh.

It was sudden. It was shocking. It was sad.

What was (or is) this indefinite “it”? It was the trust essential to a certain sort of relationship shattering within me. It is looking within and seeing—not in any ordinary way, mind you, but in a way that is more directed and focused than mere feeling, for I need not exert any special effort to be aware and feel the cool breeze on my skin—the pieces scattered here and there, no longer forming a coherent whole.

Was there ever a coherent whole? What just happened? What have I been doing here?

“The question[s] of self-pity,” writes Didion.

Photo by Thomas Smith on Unsplash

When I was a scholar of ancient philosophy, I spent much time studying Plato’s shifting perspective on the perceptible world (for example, rocks and trees) and the non-perceptible world (that is, the world of the Forms, the objects of knowledge and truth). In my experience, much attention is given to the latter and significantly less to the former.

Why? I can only guess and your guess, should you care to make one, is just as good as mine.

I suspect, though, that because the non-perceptible world is so mysterious—we cannot see it, never mind Plato’s description of the soul “gazing” at the Forms in the Phaedo—and so precious—it promises that which we desire the most—to know—we are drawn to any sustained effort to offer an account of it. The mind is enchanted by that which they eyes are forbidden from seeing.

The perceptible world, on the other hand, is immediate and supposedly obvious. Open your eyes, and there it is: my cell phone, a cup of instant coffee, and a string of mala beads on the table in front of me. What is mysterious and precious about any of this? Yawn.

Lately, however, my attention has been fixed on Plato’s perspective on the perceptible world, especially as it is presented in the Theaetetus. Socrates describes to the young Theaetetus the point of view as:

[…] there is nothing which in itself is just one thing: nothing which you could rightly call anything or any kind of thing. If you call a thing large, it will reveal itself as small, and if you call it heavy, it is liable to appear as light, and so on with everything, because nothing is anything or any kind of thing. What is really true is this: the things of which we naturally say that they “are,” are in the process of coming to be, as the result of movement and change and blending with one another. We are wrong when we say they “are,” since nothing ever is, but everything is coming to be.

The qualities in question grow with the conversation: size, heaviness, color, temperature, bulk and number, pleasure and pain, desires and fears, sounds, speed of motion, and even whether something is “active” or “passive.” Eventually, the point of view includes so-called “aggregates of these qualities”: human beings, animals, and stones, for instance. Socrates provides confirmation that the perspective is in its final form all-embracing when he says:

The verb “to be” must be totally abolished—though indeed we have been led by habit and ignorance into using it ourselves more than once, even in what we have just been saying. That is wrong, these wise men tell us, nor should we allow the use of such words as “something,” “of something,” or “mine,” “this,” or “that,” or any other name that makes things stand still. We ought, rather, to speak according to nature and refer to things as “becoming,” “being produced,” “passing away,” “changing” […]

This and much more, which you can feel slipping away too just as there arises a moment of understanding, begets groundlessness, uncertainty, and dis-ease because there is nothing solid on which to rest your feet, let alone the whole of your (and lest we forget non-substantial) self.

Yet, because all that comes to be is coming to be in this way—allow me to try and write as Socrates encourages—

[You can remember that] Life changes fast.
[You can remember that] Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Body language, delivery, and tone changed, and life as I knew it ended. Trust shattered. The question of self-pity in its myriad forms arose in the minutes, hours, and days that followed. It is still arising, too. It is still appearing everywhere and in ways that prompt surprise and invite wonder. And now I remember—I remember that life changes fast, that life changes in the instant—and remembering that hurts.

It is time for processing and I will be processing for some time. And I will be sitting with the question: So, now what?

Other recent offerings include:

Looking Back And Bowing

Wearing The Tathagata’s Teaching