Mushroom digressions--Too Busy to Seize the Day

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – "Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future. --Horace

On the contrary, any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting. --Heidegger


Seize the Day, is a novella by Saul Bellow that is on my reading list. I read from Wikipedia that it is supposed to be great, “a small grey masterpiece.” I plan to read it in the future when I am less busy, not so hectic.

“Sorry that…but I’ve been extremely busy.” “It has been such a hectic week!” “Life is so busy!” To say that one is being busy is not really an excuse, because we are actually, factically busy. Everyone has so many things to do that the busy-ness is undeniable. But what makes us essentially busy is probably more what to worry about than things to do. There are ten things that we really want to achieve, five items that we really desire and three things we really afraid that it will happen. The future sucks us in onward, out of the present.
Everybody is a busy-ness-man, because everyone has a bright future that he projects his vision into. We seldom live in the present; our eyes always look forward (In Chinese, looking forward would be punning on looking for money. Thus, having a future is having money). This is our state-of-life, almost.


Let me suppose that I can have the day off. I am trying to seize the moment and enjoy it. It is a beautiful day. I decide going for a bike ride to see the falliage on Charles river at sunset. With this purpose in mind, I set off to the river bank. I spent half an hour strolling along the bank, comparing different spots, and picked up the best one. I looked for the beauty—it is indeed gorgeous! Very colorful, very pleasing to the eyes. To capture this moment, I took a photo of myself there on the bank with all the colorful leaves behind me. I brought them home and stored them in my computer. The purpose is realized and the time was spent seizing what I wanted to seize. There is no difference between this seizing and the seizing in my days on, in tasks I normally carry out. The day slides off my hands when we stretch them out to try to seize it, leaving only some colors of it in my computer.

OK. Maybe I should relax, lay back, let the for-the-sake-of-which rest and cut myself momentarily from future. Indeed, in a cold autumn day, 5pm, after a nap, I found myself having nothing to do, or rather, having nothing to aim at, not looking into future for anything. I was purposeless. But as soon as I found myself purposeless, lost sight of the future, I at once fret. All of a sudden, I lost the ground of being and am sinking into a bottomless abyss. It is not a fall-and-crash kind of thing when you jump off a cliff. It is rather a dreadful weightlessness of losing the sense of gravity, some kind of unbearable lightness or hollowness. (T.S. Eliot, “We are hollow men!”) Upon a reflection later, I think that was caused, figuratively, from the huge, invisible cobweb as the world, where a gigantic black spider will finally eat us up. “Why did you shut in my room, brewing all these nonsense? Look at the future. Tomorrow is another day!” So a kind, normal person will admonish me.

This kind of the admonishing voice, from The Normal, is everywhere and minutely repeated. To quote a Chinese saying, it gets into every tiny hole and corner. Our parents, advisers, peers, girl/boy friends, wives/husbands, then, later, children, we all admonish us like this, with love, and genuine love that I feel obliged to cherish. Rather obvious and not fun at all. Let me talk about other things. So I heard Saul Bellow, he is said to be famous. So I googled him and found him on Wikipedia. I checked the reviews, a big name claimed Seize the Day to be a great work. So it’s supposed to be good. And I put it on my list. I check out some famous movies on rotten potatoes. I inform myself of what is going on from New York Times. All good. And I will read Sieze the day when I am less busy and watch Bright Star maybe the weekend after the next. These fill the blank slots in my calendar up. And once my calendar is up, I feel myself is almost full (fool is separated from full only by a thin parenthesis) as a being—so many things to do in the future, and great things, too! So, yes, I am busy, and being busy is being lively, is being good.

Good! I feel this little word has so much pressure on me. I immediately get my sense of weight back when hearing this word. A burden on my shoulder, a burden of word, and world, too. So much so that I wish him and his cousins never have existed. But there are good “goods,” as there are lifey (A good friend of mine liked to greet me with “How’s life?” My answer is “very lifey”) life. I heard the name of Tarkovsky, too. (This Russian director was a sort of the cult of Chinese intellectuals. A completed collection of his films was made. And many of them possess it.) Yet the winds that blow the tree leaves in a black-and-white screen moved me as if they are breath of God. Nostalgia, the lyrical poesis that transcends plot, discarding convention aside, with such a power, lifts my spirit up to look at my own being.

In a similar way, I encountered Wordsworth. Although Heidegger declares that “Dasein can, should and must, through knowledge and will, become master of its mood,” the only way to do so is to use counter mood. Also, into there, the world, we are thrown (the referential whole and the totality of involvement). But how are we master of our mood if we are thrown to mood and have to use one mood to counter another? What is the way up if existing is falling? In the following passage, Wordsworth maintains that the virtue to repair, relieve, and elate is “in our existence.” That is it is innate in us, not just a counter mood. Spots of time, with their power, lift us up from the burdensome character of existence (the round of ordinary intercourse is both the They, their idle talk and the whole of involvement as essential character of the world into which we are fallen), when we are fallen. Is the Wordsworthian man-and-nature an alternative to Dasein thrown into the world and exists as falling? I only hope the following passage will be the start of your reading Wordsworth.

There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired—
A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. (Book XI 258-267, The Prelude 1805)

(Note that this passage on spots of time has three versions in the 1799, 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude. Many of the quotes on line cite 1805 and takes it as 1850. The passage, thus miscited, also is put into calendar, quote books, etc. This means this extraordinary passage is incorporated into calendar art, into the every idle talk.)