Sunday, Sunday...
Sep. 9th, 2007 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaSo, apparently I'm just going to post my way through the morning paper this morning. One of the really annoying things about living with me is that everytime I read something I find interesting, I want to talk about it. Sunday mornings are about long, philosophical, conversations re: the morning paper and anything else I've read in the past week; making love (providing its that kind of relationship, etc.); and cooking huge, greasy, messes in the kitchen. In other words, aside from taking a long Wander (which is something I also often do), it embodies three of the things I love most about life.
This is a far cry from the Sunday mornings of childhood in which we got up early to go to church, ate hurried meals, and had to dress in our best, most uncomfortable, clothes. We were always running late so there was usually a lot of yelling. And once we got into the car (with a distinct possibility of being carsick, as we lived in the mountains at the time) an uncomfortable silence would descend, where we would dwell until we got to church, at which point the public face would go on and everyone would be all smiles and good mornings.
Then the services would go on for hours with praying and singing and the occasional speaking of tongues (depending on what kind of church we were attending at the time.) Followed by Sunday school/coffee hour (depending again on what church we were attending at the time.) Then we'd either go to someone's home for Sunday dinner (inevitably someone without other children to play with) where we had to be on our best behavior, or we would go home where mom would always have a headache and dad would always be in a bearish mood, and we'd have to be quiet and go play outside (weather depending) or hide in our room.
After all this, Monday mornings and school were a relief, even if school was not a particularly safe place. Where were my safe places? In a book, or up in a tree. Sometimes both. Brother and I still hate Sundays and are prone to moodiness on bright, sunny, Sunday mornings. The only thing I miss about those Sundays are singing in church, and occasionally Sunday dinners at people's homes, because I loved eating different foods and being occasionally allowed to watch television and having the elderly couples get out strange toys for me to play with, or give me lots of attention. (Boy do I miss singing in church. The hours of praise songs are one of the few things I really loved about church, listening for harmonics and being convinced I could hear the angels (which were not pretty people with wings, but more Ezekiel style wheels of fire, or gobs of eyeballs, or minotaur monstrousities) sing.)
So this is all a long prelude to another NYTimes article, this time about the hikes of William James (American philosopher, founder of pragmatism, and brother to novelist Henry James). It references a trip he took that was influential to his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has been used as a kind of codex (particularly in psychology) to describe religious experiences ever since. (Religious experience in his definition is fleeting, ineffable, and something else I've forgotten.)
Scientists often refer to his definition it in their attempts to reproduce the religious experience through chemical squirts. Everyone wants to know WHAT causes religious experience and whether or not it can be reproduced.
I'm not so cozy with the later Victorians (someone here at LJ once posted about having a pre-Joycian society, and someone else joked, why not tack on a couple years and make it a pre-Jamesian society) being more of a Romantic/Transcendental girl, but I am suprised by all the sidelong looks I've given William James over the years. (I can live without the insufferable Alice James, however, whose journals on late-19C politics are one of the most annoying things to ever be required in the Women's Studies departments. And one of the things that made me wonder, "Is Women's Studies so hard up for women to study that we have to read Alice James, again?")
And The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of those books that should absolutely be on more reading lists, less because of its individual merits, and more because it's a starting point for the way we are exploring not only modern spirituality, but neurological phenomenon as well.
This is a far cry from the Sunday mornings of childhood in which we got up early to go to church, ate hurried meals, and had to dress in our best, most uncomfortable, clothes. We were always running late so there was usually a lot of yelling. And once we got into the car (with a distinct possibility of being carsick, as we lived in the mountains at the time) an uncomfortable silence would descend, where we would dwell until we got to church, at which point the public face would go on and everyone would be all smiles and good mornings.
Then the services would go on for hours with praying and singing and the occasional speaking of tongues (depending on what kind of church we were attending at the time.) Followed by Sunday school/coffee hour (depending again on what church we were attending at the time.) Then we'd either go to someone's home for Sunday dinner (inevitably someone without other children to play with) where we had to be on our best behavior, or we would go home where mom would always have a headache and dad would always be in a bearish mood, and we'd have to be quiet and go play outside (weather depending) or hide in our room.
After all this, Monday mornings and school were a relief, even if school was not a particularly safe place. Where were my safe places? In a book, or up in a tree. Sometimes both. Brother and I still hate Sundays and are prone to moodiness on bright, sunny, Sunday mornings. The only thing I miss about those Sundays are singing in church, and occasionally Sunday dinners at people's homes, because I loved eating different foods and being occasionally allowed to watch television and having the elderly couples get out strange toys for me to play with, or give me lots of attention. (Boy do I miss singing in church. The hours of praise songs are one of the few things I really loved about church, listening for harmonics and being convinced I could hear the angels (which were not pretty people with wings, but more Ezekiel style wheels of fire, or gobs of eyeballs, or minotaur monstrousities) sing.)
So this is all a long prelude to another NYTimes article, this time about the hikes of William James (American philosopher, founder of pragmatism, and brother to novelist Henry James). It references a trip he took that was influential to his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has been used as a kind of codex (particularly in psychology) to describe religious experiences ever since. (Religious experience in his definition is fleeting, ineffable, and something else I've forgotten.)
Scientists often refer to his definition it in their attempts to reproduce the religious experience through chemical squirts. Everyone wants to know WHAT causes religious experience and whether or not it can be reproduced.
I'm not so cozy with the later Victorians (someone here at LJ once posted about having a pre-Joycian society, and someone else joked, why not tack on a couple years and make it a pre-Jamesian society) being more of a Romantic/Transcendental girl, but I am suprised by all the sidelong looks I've given William James over the years. (I can live without the insufferable Alice James, however, whose journals on late-19C politics are one of the most annoying things to ever be required in the Women's Studies departments. And one of the things that made me wonder, "Is Women's Studies so hard up for women to study that we have to read Alice James, again?")
And The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of those books that should absolutely be on more reading lists, less because of its individual merits, and more because it's a starting point for the way we are exploring not only modern spirituality, but neurological phenomenon as well.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-09 04:58 pm (UTC)What's annoying about that? I think it's one of your best traits.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 02:07 pm (UTC)"Please Sarah, I just want to eat my toast!" you say.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 12:51 pm (UTC)I can't quite remember his definition either, but it's a tettaropartite typology with two addendum clarifications. Ineffability, inconstancy are two. Third is that it's noetic (you have something to say about it afterwards). The others I can't recall...
Little did he know that a century later no reader would be able to think of a "Starbucks Survey" without lusting for an overpriced latte.
His perfect slam on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as "wheezing sewer rats" will forever stay with me and provide a little distance from the allure classical pessimism.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 02:03 pm (UTC)BTW - I was at Caffe Sole the other day and the diacriticals may be on the sign, but do not appear on the take out cups. I've saved one as evidence to mail to you or wave at you shouting 'nyah nyah' next time I see you. (I'd take a picture, but I don't have a camera. Shame!)
"Weezing sewer rats!" I hadn't heard that one. I can't understand why people don't give (Will) James his due. Most ordinary, educated, people have never heard of him and he's shockingly influential, as you say, not just in the way we think, but the way in which we describe out thoughts. But it just goes to show that academia has fads just like everyone else.
Haven't read much Henry, yet, I think I'm only just old enough to be able to separate his obvious hatred of women with his keen understanding of the way they tick. Truly disturbing.