Small Thoughts

Just writing down the things I think about.

A heavy current of mystery pulses beneath the familiar placid surface of life. It is impossible to ever really be certain of anything. The signs and signals we use to make sense of reality are tricks we play to shield ourselves from the fact that the sum of the things we know barely registers as a dew drop in comparison to the vast ocean of things we don’t. 

I was reminded of this recently on a foggy day at my family’s property in the Hudson Valley. I was there with my wife and a friend of ours. We arrived at night – pulling up to the house in the heavy darkness of rural midwinter. We got some dinner, watched a movie, and slept. 

In the morning, we were surrounded by heavy fog. It was disturbing for the familiar landscape to be rendered invisible in the murk. I looked out the kitchen window. I knew that the old red barn was there, just across the road. But somehow, my inability to see it made me half-suspect that it was no longer there, as if the fog concealed some strange transformation of the known world. 

We took a late afternoon walk and the feeling persisted. We walked in a large circle around the property and by the time we were done it was dark. At one point, I led our friend across a field I’ve been traversing for my entire life. I became absorbed in conversation until suddenly, the woods on the east side of the field – not the direction I’d intended to walk at all – leapt out at us like an army of hooded monsters. I quickly managed to orient myself, but for a moment, I felt entirely lost. Standing in the place I know better than anywhere else in the world, I suddenly felt like I was trapped behind enemy lines, unable to get my bearings in a strange land. 

Earlier in the week, we went to an Edward Hopper exhibit in the city which I think is related to my experience in the fog. 

As I moved through the exhibit, I was struck by a quote from Hopper’s personal journal which stated his goal to “create a realistic art from which fantasy can grow.”

I think he succeeded. His painting is simultaneously stolidly real and bizarrely dream-like. For example, one of the pieces we saw in the museum depicted a couple standing on the stoop of an Upper West Side brownstone bordering Central Park. The couple, very life-like, stands on the steps of a very real looking brownstone, its facade aglow with exactly the sort of light one would enjoy on a summer stroll in Manhattan. 

But the Park, quivering greenly on the edge of the painting, is not the Central Park we know in real life. Instead, it sits at the edge of vision like some urban Arden. It is a repository of dreams, presenting the possibility of unknown and uncharted realities. 

 Hopper’s famous depictions of lives glimpsed through the windows of city apartments, eateries, and offices have a similar effect. Yes, there’s a hostess arranging flowers in a restaurant window, or a young woman sitting on her bed and looking out the window, but, one is compelled to ask: what’s on the other side of that bedroom door, who is that eating in that dark corner? 

Hopper is capturing something fundamental about life: when we look at the world around us with fresh eyes and a capacity for wonder, we realize that we are surrounded by these kinds of unanswerable questions. 

In a way, the “realistic” parts of his paintings are more fantastical than his dream-like visions, because it’s fundamentally true that the world as we mere mortals know it is far wilder and beyond comprehension than we like to pretend it is. We only apply a glaze of familiarity over it all so that we can avoid that feeling of lost panic I felt that evening in the fog, during the fearful moment when I lost my bearings. 

But the assurance we glean from the familiar is the true fantasy: in reality, the sum of all that we know amounts to little more than fluttering sparks – hardly illuminating and quickly extinguished –  in the face of the immensity of the universe. 

I don’t think this is necessarily a grim situation. It certainly is a bit scary to peer into the abyss of the unknown. But boredom is probably a greater enemy to happiness than fear, and our contemplation of life’s riddles is an invitation to awe. 

At least, I’d rather live in Hoppers’ world, where every city block is an infinite landscape of possibility, then in the drab dreamless world of those who are either too timid to or too arrogant to break free of the self-imposed confines of their own little self-created worlds.