Albert Marquet, Vue de Céret, Le Castellas, 1940
I’ve never been someone who’s particularly good at believing in things before I see them. As a little kid, I remember finding it impossible to comprehend why anyone would get married—who would want to share a house with someone when the alternative was living alone and doing whatever you wanted all the time? Then I hit puberty and I was like, oh. Similarly I could not understand the appeal of mindfulness for the longest time. It seemed to do nothing other than make you annoyingly smug and less productive. I literally couldn’t conceive of “inner peace” being real. Then I did shrooms and I was like, oh.
I think this is one of the reasons why I’ve always appreciated fiction: it’s not perfect, but it’s always helped me empathize with situations I haven’t lived through. Madame Bovary, for instance, left a deep impact on me in my early teens (the lesson was, you can’t trust love). Much of the way I conceptualize reality has shaped by reading. Which is why it’s so surprising to realize in recent years that most knowledge is impossible to write down.
Maybe this isn’t surprising to you? The scale of it continues to be surprising to me. I’ve always been a Tractatus-era Wittgenstein fan: Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. But I think my actual experience of life is something like this: it’s always worth trying, but a lot of things can’t be explained believably. You can’t distil the insight into language, or at least it’s impossibly hard.
Many people who are talented in their various fields have access to insight they can’t share with others. They simply see something we can’t. They try to describe it—picture any Paris Review interview—and often hearing them talk about their process is interesting and informative. But they’re unable to describe the core thing—what gives them the story, what makes them able to write. In a similar vein, I’m convinced that most people who are charismatic don’t know exactly why they are. Of course there are the basic things communicated in self-help books—make the other person comfortable, ask them questions, listen—but there’s a level at which simple wisdom breaks down.
This is where my interest in watching people comes from, I suppose—the belief that watching very closely is the only way to learn. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of watching a friend navigate a situation and being like, so that’s how you do it. And mimicking them later and feeling amazed that you—you!—can produce the same results. There’s something both satisfying and disappointing about realizing that magic exists, it just takes the form of inarticulable knowledge. Dark matter.
First you see it—that’s the evidence it exists. Then you may or may not successfully replicate it. Or maybe you stumble into it of your own accord. Then you know how to do it, but you may not know how to teach it. Very few people understand on any level why they’re able to do what they do. Why their relationship works. Why they’re good at their job. Why they’re happy. I remember Helena Fitzgerald writing that people make more art about sadness because it’s so much easier to analyze than happiness, and that continues to ring true to me. It’s really, really hard to explain why something works.
I believe we do people a real disservice by claiming these things are quantifiable. There’s a way in which we try to reduce complexity in our society that often fails people—we teach people that if they go to college, get a certain kind of job, accumulate enough status they’ll be happy, and when they do those things and discover nothing but more complexity they’re confused and disappointed. I think in many ways this is a result of failing to accurately represent how much knowledge can’t be conveyed in writing, that there are types of skills and routes to happiness that are valuable but rarely disseminated.
It’s hard to believe in things we don’t see. But if we don’t live with the understanding that there are many inarticulable forms of knowledge, we miss out on hidden magic. We reject complexity. And the way we live becomes less beautiful, less nuanced as a result. Sometimes everything that’s valuable is contained in the part of the experience we can’t describe.
From the Jack Gilbert poem I love: