A certain blindness [Bryan]

Not far from Yellowstone National Park sits the small town of Chester, Idaho. On the outskirts of Chester once lived a relative of mine, now deceased, an elderly great uncle. When I was a teenager, we visited this uncle before our backpacking trips to the Grand Tetons or Wind Rivers. He was a widower, a kind and gentle man, retired from the Forest Service, living alone in a perpetually unfinished house. The house was surrounded by enormous uncultivated fields, full of weeds, dust, sagebrush, and swirling wind. Every morning, this uncle would go out with a weedwacker and wage a Sisyphean struggle against the quarter mile of weeds lining his driveway down to the main highway. It was hard, difficult labor, and I failed to see what the point was – the weeds, after all, weren’t causing any obvious harm, and they grew back as quickly as he could cut them down. A wasted effort, I thought. A sad way to end one's life.

I have since learned, however, that life is a continual struggle to overcome our blindness to the inner significance of other human lives. As William James writes, "Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives."

And so it was. As I became better acquainted with this uncle, I learned that his wife had designed the original plan of that house. I learned that he and his wife had been very close. I learned that he was intent on finishing the house to her every specification, even though she had died many years earlier. The daily struggle against the weeds, I came to suspect, was an act of affirming the relationship with his beloved. It was a heroic refusal to let her memory die.

Hence, the stupidity and injustice of my opinion. Every person has an inner secret, I think, a "vital" secret, a secret that gives each life its driving energy. It is a great adventure to uncover and understand, however dimly, the eagerness that drives the lives of those who surround us. Even prisons and sickrooms have their own revelations. Our job is to to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.