One of the delights of living in upstate New York is that when winter ends spring/summer tends to come all at once. For the past week we have basked in temperatures in the 80s with blue skies and gorgeous sunshine. Ithaca becomes blossom town, the grass becomes the deepest green, the chipmunks, squirrels (red and grey) and bunnies scamper about, everything comes alive. After such a hard winter joy abounds in the garden.
Early Saturday morning, I was sitting in the hot tub, listening to the melodic symphony of birdsong. The pugs were sitting by the tub, looking out over the garden, eyes content, little noses twitching furiously taking in all the smells of springtime. I was loving the spring smells too. But it occurred to me that they were smelling in ways I could not even dream about. They would catch a smell on the gentle breeze and turn their noses into the wind. What were they smelling? What did they detect? Something smelled good, but it was beyond the feebleness of my merely human nose. I know there's more to nature than my nose can smell.
The other evening we were walking the pugs in the darkness round the neighborhood. It was a cloudless night and the stars were many and bright. Yet, knowing the sky map, I was well aware that what I could see was merely a tiny fraction of the reality of the universe. My eyesight is limited, even more so when I take off my glasses. The pinpricks of light in the night sky then become blurred. I lose most of them, save for the brightest. I know there's more to the universe than my eyes can see.
There is an episode of the 1990s British sitcom As Time Goes By, when the family fear that Lionel—the lead man—is losing his hearing. Hilarious scenes follow, where Lionel mis-hears all kinds of things. In the end he visits the doctor to discover he has wax in his ears, receives treatment and begins to hear better again. The truth of the matter is as we age our hearing diminishes. I can no longer hear as well as I used to. I miss the highs. The TV volume is louder than before. My sympathies are with Lionel! I know there are more sounds than my ears can hear.
I'm not much of a wine expert, but I do enjoy a glass or two. Our local wine store holds tastings every Friday 4:00-6:00 pm, with usually half a dozen wines to taste. It's a fun way to relax after a week's work. I'm trying to develop my taste buds. The first wine was a Riesling. One sip and I poured the rest into the bucket. The tasting improved with a nice dry, oaky Chardonnay. I passed on the rosé and enjoyed three full-bodied reds (Clarets as Rumpole of the Bailey would say). The wine demonstrator (is that what you call them?) asked me how I liked the Riesling. "Too sweet for my taste!" I responded with an appropriate face. "And the Cabernet?" he asked. "Ah, I liked that," I said smiling. "Did you know that the residual sugar in the red is twice that of the white? It was not the sweetness you objected to but the fruitiness" he informed me, and gave me a little lecture on why the tannins in red wine make it appear dry when in fact it is sweet! Clearly, there's more to taste than my mouth can tell.
This summer marks 42 years since I bought my first guitar. It was also the summer of my first job. I worked for three weeks, saved every penny, and bought the £32 nylon string beauty I had coveted in the shop window. I left the job and spent the summer after my "O Level" year playing guitar. The downside of guitar playing is that you develop callouses on the tips of the fingers of the hand you use to fret the strings. When once the playing bug gets you, and you spend hours strumming away, it can be agony! If you persevere your finger tips become hard and it doesn't hurt anymore. But, then you can't feel like you used to. Like many guitar players I have lost most of the sensitivity in the tips of the fingers on my left hand. It's a small cost to be a musician, but I know there is more to touch than my fingers can sense.
And then there is the Ultimately Real, the Spirit, the Noumenon, the Thing-In-Itself (Ding an sich). Some years ago, when I was working on my PhD, I gave a paper at a conference at Leeds University in England. I was on a panel with a chap from Cambridge University, also working on his PhD. I was up first and read my paper on "The Rise of the Religious Right in the USA" or something to that effect. The chair of the panel, a professor I knew quite well, ripped my paper to pieces! I sat dejected as I listened to my co-presenter. His paper was on the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. I know the presenter was speaking English—at least he was using English words—it was just that they were put together in a way that I found incomprehensible. After the presentation, the panel chair said, "Splendid! Simply splendid!" Later that evening, over a beer in the hotel bar, I asked him why he demolished my paper and simply said "splendid" to the erudite Cambridge philosopher. "Well, at least I could understand yours!" he said with a grin. Bertrand Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, said “The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty,” (1912, 100).
This springtime I have luxuriated in the richness and limits of my senses and thinking—my inability to grasp, to know, to comprehend—but still enjoying the "fewness, muchness, rareness, Greatness of this endless only Precious world in which we say we live" (Robert Graves Warning to Children).
Clearly, there's more to life than my nose can smell!