August 6, 2011, 12:46 pm On Reverie
By RAPHAëL ENTHOVEN
It’s a sweet drug that plays with fire. A waste land — forest of ruins or paved-over jungle depending on whether wakefulness or sleep tips the scales. An old city where the shadows still hold a trace of vanished occupants, where detailed buildings, patiently reconquered by nature, suddenly still are there, sand castles. Through the dreamer’s kaleidoscope where the absence of desire is taken as reality, birds slash through the twilight, cypress trees dive into the pool, stars sparkle in the sea, clouds take on shapes, water lilies bloom in the sky, plans become flexible, the limit to how far things can go relaxes, thought dances, light is lit by shade, opposites are juxtaposed, merge and become linked in a prelude to beauty: reverie is contemplation’s prehistory, the education of the gaze by the eyes of the soul.
Suddenly, the world before concepts.
Daughter of consciousness and sleep, reverie blends their realms. Like intoxication, reverie is lucidity without an object, an activity but one that’s passive, a search that begins by giving up and lets itself be dazzled rather than looking. It remains, happily, somewhere between imagination and the ability to put it to use. The dreamer, unlike the sleepwalker whose consciousness lies fallow, has his head on his shoulders as he meanders on; he’s a daywalker who sleeps with only one eye like a dolphin, drowsy enough to see the unseeable but awake enough to mumble what he has glimpsed. The more absent he becomes, the more the dreamer opens to the merging of types and images. Reverie is the one way in which, without contradiction, one can want to not want. “When,” says Proust, “we are in reverie, thinking back in order to mull over the past, trying to slow down and suspend the perpetual motion sweeping us along, bit by bit we see appear all over again, juxtaposed but entirely distinct from one another, the different colors that a single name had for us throughout our lives.” Reverie is contemplation from within, letting the person who gives way to it feel change.
Born of the desire — and not the need — to be directly involved in our surroundings, reverie strips the world of its utility. It borrows the power of narration from wakefulness and the power of divination from sleep, and keeps them vying to suspend the alternation of day and night. Reverie is how one arrives at immediacy.
Leif Parsons
Between the sweetness of being and the pain of thinking, between sleep that is opaque to itself and the blindness of one who can’t see the stars because of daylight, lies the talent to glimpse what escapes us, the equivalent of the dawn that threatens at every instant to evaporate into dream or condense into knowing, but in that interval (and pen in hand) replaces something impenetrable with something immaterial and reveals the imaginary foundations of reality. Reverie never rests.
“Thought,” Bachelard says, “is reverie brought to a center. Reverie is thought turned loose.” One of the lessons of reverie is that you have to sleep with your eyes open occasionally so that knowledge can find the path hearts take. For reverie is not an artifice of hidden meaning but, instead, works to squeeze every last drop from appearances. Its grail is not truth but the merging of types, just as Geoffrey Firmin, the consul in Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” became sensitive in his drunkenness to the “beauty of an old woman in Tarasco playing dominos at seven in the morning,” or Proust’s Léontine Cottard, half asleep, heard her husband using words such as “confrérie” and “tapette” about the Baron de Charlus and, knowing that in Cottard’s language the first meant the Jewish people and the second a wagging tongue, came to the conclusion that Charlus must be a garrulous Jew which, when all is said and done, isn’t so stupid.
Because it generously accords the world the absentmindedness it deserves, reverie is light years distant from being a distraction, which does reality the considerable honor of turning its back on it. In fact, reverie celebrates the rediscovery of understanding and imagination, sets free the secret of disinterest which, because it lets you see beauty without your consent and see nature without ego, invests the world with intense interest. “In the trembling of a leaf,” says Baudelaire, “— in the color of a blade of grass, in the shape of clover, in the buzzing of a bee, in the sparkle of a drop of dew, in the sighing wind, in the vague fragrance coming out of the woods, an entire world of inspirations is
produced, a magnificent and colorful parade of disorganized and rhapsodic thoughts.” Like a good genie who would replace the world left behind with a shimmer, or a novel that, as you read it, immensely intensifies emotions, engraves reality, unleashes pleasures and joys that one life would not suffice to reveal, reverie — intuitive nescience —shatters the dreamer into an atopia of sensations outside himself and responsive intuitions. It’s a transition, a passage where the heart, confounded, inseparable from what it feels, converts habit into astonishment. It’s a fugue into harmony, an awakening in the shape of an exile that grants a human being the intuition of change. A salutary desertion that from time to time allows you to enter the heart of the matter.
Translated from the French by Betsy Wing.
Raphaël Enthoven teaches philosophy at École Polytechnique and Sciences Po in Paris. He has served as producer and host on French television and radio shows, including the weekly show “Philosophie.” His most recent book is “Le philosophe de service et autres textes” (“The On-Duty Philosopher and Other Texts”), from which this post is adapted.
PhotofestPLAY MATE — Center stage in “Bedroom Farce,” on Broadway in 1979.
“Drama” begins with John Lithgow’s debut, at age 2.
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