It is an awkward task to define why you love what you love. To borrow Douglas Hofstadter’s description of consciousness, it is “almost as if it made itself out of nothing, and then disintegrated back into nothing whenever one looked at it more closely.”1
I like coffee, I suppose, because it clears my head and I have oh so much trouble clearing my head. That, and it’s bitter and I like to like things that are a bit of a struggle to like. Its bitterness is its spiritline. Its bitterness is Christ on the cross.2
I had a friend in college who liked making music because music is inherently abstract. With illustrating and writing, the ideas can be abstract but don’t necessarily have to be. You can draw a fruit bowl, for example, and that’s rather concrete. Or you could write about a fruit bowl falling to the floor, and that would also be rather concrete. And while you most certainly could use a fruit bowl as inspiration for a song, you could only hope to evoke it somehow. It was that indirectness that he loved.
Doc Burford says that everyone can tell stories. Storytelling is baked into language itself, and it is how our brains naturally construe events. But its familiarity is what makes it hard to evaluate: “No matter what you do, problems will not simply leap off the page the way they do in a bad illustration or a song that’s got no rhythm.”3
Coffee is bitter, music is abstract, and storytelling is too familiar to critique.
I went to a birthday party last summer. I stayed longer than I intended to, leaving only at 10PM when I was dead tired. I knew most people there, but I didn’t know Kevin. Kevin had messy hair, a lean body, a permanent smile on his face. He graduated with his bachelor’s in physics in May and was now in graduate school. He lived ten minutes off-campus, his patron saint was Michael, his favorite deadly sin was pride (and humility his favorite virtue), and though he looked bookish, he hadn’t read a book since senior year of high school.
I liked Kevin. I also like a girl at work.4 Why is that? Past the fluff of their field of work or gender or their patron saint (both of them, I think, were raised Catholic… does that mean anything?), what is it about them that I like?
David Bentley Hart says all objects of desire are reducible to other more general objects of desire except for a few transcendentals: beauty, truth, and goodness, which are really not disparate categories as much as they are different names for a single reality.5 For instance, at this very moment, I would be indisputably elated to receive $100. But I don’t want the money in and of itself. The desire for $100 is reducible to other things - a bag of specialty coffee, for example. And the desire for specialty coffee is reducible to a desire for happiness, and happiness reducible to goodness.
Mahayana Buddhism makes a similar assertion: there are no fundamental entities (dharmas) and everything is reducible to a single reality. Truth exists but can never be pinned down. As such, no particular philosophy is totally “correct”. And yet they are all correct in the sense that all available ways of seeing things are exactly the same.
Or, in other words: coffee is bitter, music is abstract, and storytelling is too familiar to critique.
I think I like Kevin and anonymous-girl-from-work because they are kind and earnest. Being perceptive to truth requires some amount of tenderness, willingness, and openness to the world. That’s what both of them have. I guess that’s an oddly heavy assertion to make about two people I barely know. Anyway, its true. And also they’re Catholic and maybe I have a thing for Catholics.
Footnotes
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, xii↩︎
Part of me wanted to leave these unexplained. Whatever. Sophomore year of college, I asked a professor for feedback on the design of a PowerPoint slide deck. He said it was too symmetrical. He said it needed a spiritline. A spiritline is “a small, but deliberate imperfection” in Navajo garments. Christ on the cross is a reference to a quote by Joseph Campbell: “That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there is no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable.”↩︎
Doc Burford, how to be a creative and good writer (its very hard)↩︎
Why did I choose to anonymize girl-from-work and not Kevin? Well, I’ve literally never seen Kevin after that one birthday party, but I do see girl-from-work every now and then at - you guessed it - work.↩︎
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 242↩︎