It is easier to welcome a stranger than to welcome a stranger. While welcoming strangers involves extending hospitality and finding common ground, accepting the opposite sex requires a deeper level of tolerance and acceptance of the unknown. The poet John Keats famously described this as a “negative capability,” or the ability to exist in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt. Don't reach for facts and reasons in frustration. ” This means immersing yourself in what is in front of you without moralizing or making excuses for universal truths.
In art and life, Keats believed that this openness was essential. Healthy relationships, like good art, require room for growth, exploration, and ambiguity. Intimacy requires distance. Intimacy requires room to breathe. Just as mystery adds to the appeal of drama, uncertainty adds depth and intrigue to personal relationships. Without it, the plot becomes predictable and boring. Strangeness creates room for interpretation and discovery, allowing relationships to develop in complexity. In Keats's view, negative capabilities were not a technique, but something intrinsic to human experience.
The modern world often has a hard time embracing mystery and strangeness. Many people talk about disillusionment like this: “The world does not starve because it has no wonders; it just starves because it has no wonders.” (Chesterton) “The spell of life is so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.'' (Emily Dickinson) One of the commonly used phrases, which is now approaching cliché, is a quote from author Gertrude Stein. It's something I borrowed. “There's nothing there.”
It's not there here. Stein's words resonate in our lives today. Mystery has been replaced by mastery. Truth is a soundbite, a meme. The strange, the mundane, and the ironic are the new sincerity. Transcendence becomes tamed. We live in what economist Thomas Friedman calls a “flat world.”
In this McDonaldized world, you can buy a Big Mac in a Chinese village and a Trump T-shirt in Antarctica (McMurdo Station, pictured above). fifty shades of gray Written in 52 languages, the Bible is made into comics. What was once strange has become familiar, as familiar as chatbots.
The modern British poet wrote of “the importance of other places.” excerpt:
“I am lonely because Ireland is not home.
The strangeness had meaning. Refusal of salt in speech,
They insisted on being different and welcomed me.
Once it was recognized, we got in touch. . .
Just because you live in the UK doesn't give you that excuse.
There is nothing else here to confirm my existence. ”
Another writer asks: “If you didn't know what was going on before, maybe you wouldn't care, right?'' my friend replied. “But it's happening so fast you can't do that.” do not have We know what happened before. It was about 2 seconds ago. ”
The flattening of time and place has erased the other places that once defined us. Historians warn against making people of the past “just like us.” Foreigners are our neighbors and increasingly like us. The problem we have these days is more about our similarities than our differences. Freud explored the “narcissism of small differences,” while René Girard's theory of mimetic conflict says that the sameness of the world makes differences decisive for defining oneself. Canadians often emphasize how different they are from Americans, or from New Zealanders and Australians, even though they share many cultural similarities.
Other insights from literary theory are also helpful. The characteristic effect of literary works and all good art is a version of negative capabilities. not being intimateIt suspends our habitual perceptions in order to see things anew, lifting the veil of familiarity from the world and us.
Growing up in Latin America was an exercise in non-intimacy. In English, you might say “I miss you.” In Spanish, this is expressed as “Me haces falta.” This means “I miss you” or “I feel your absence,” and so does “goodbye.” Sometimes, when it's hard to leave someone close to you and it's hard to let go, Spanish can come in handy. “hasta luego,” or “until later.” Although I said it casually in Spanish, it was a phrase that reaffirmed the intimacy of “until we meet again.”
Words are kinetic. They reinforce norms and behaviors and often become unintentionally political. This is especially true of the word “stranger,” which in other cultures is unfamiliar and carries both fear and fascination. People use the same words to describe adversaries, allies, guests, relatives, aliens, and respected figures. In Biblical language, “strangers” include outsiders and welcomed sojourners. Like Julia Kristeva's foreigner in the quote above, she embodies alienation, intimacy, threat, and abundance all at once. Other cultures often approach and welcome strangers with greater understanding and inclusiveness than modern English connotations suggest.
Today's heated debates about immigration, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and border fences/walls, tame otherness and treat foreigners as welcome or fearful, humanitarian obligations or threats, economic benefits or burdens. Or, it reduces them to a dichotomy between individuals with rights and illegal aliens.
Instead of a world of “perfect harmony,” we can imagine a world of complete difference and strange familiarity, where no one is ever outside. The United States' motto is “E unum pluribus,” not “E pluribus unum,” which means “out of many, one” in Latin. many. ”
notes and reading
“plurality Because while we are all similar in that we are human, we are never like anyone else who has lived, is living, or will ever live. ” – Hannah Arendt human condition (1998), 8.
“Gentiles live among us…” – Julia Kristeva our own strangers (1991), 169. Xenophobia results from a repressed awareness of one's own foreignness or an inability to fully feel at home in who one is. – From Chapter 8, “Universality may not exist…our own foreignness?”
Words have spiritual or magical properties -”NoViolet Bulawayo”, the pen name of Elizabeth Zandil Zere. power, identity, imaginationand resilience inspired by Robert Mugabe's 2017 coup. in her novel glory (2022), she writes: “Words were not only important, they were power. Words were weapons. Words were magic. Words were church. Words were wealth. Words were life.”
Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion – Margit Tavis and Efren Perez (2022). – Mr. Tavis is a professor of political science and Mr. Perez is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
John Keats – “Negative Capabilities” – Some of the correspondence collected by Keats in 1817. selected character (2009). In opposition to Coleridge and Wordsworth (the “ventriloquists of truth”), Keats said that poets should be “receivers” of sensations and impressions, rather than seekers of universal truths to explain. . In Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), T.S. It is extinction.”
The world is flat: 21st century history – thomas friedman (3rd edition, 2007). Friedman won several Pulitzer Prizes for his work. new york times As a foreign affairs columnist.
“The importance of other places” – Philip Larkin (d. 1985), one of the great British poets of the 20th century.
“It was about 2 seconds ago. ” veronique greenwood Nautilus (November 19, 2024). Greenwood is a science writer and essayist. (“Time is a slippery thing. Once you lose your grip on it, the string may slip away forever.” anthony doerr All the light that we can't see – novel, 2014).
The word “stranger”, which is familiar in other languages and cultures, expresses both fear and fascination. ”- Various sources online. Also, Oxford Etymology Guide, and They have a word for it – Howard Rheingold, known for his research on the cultural, social, and political effects of media (1988);
Words are dynamic – Oxford English Dictionary The items “polysemy'' and “multivalence'' indicate the dynamic aspects of language. So is JL Austin and his classics. how to do things with words (1962, 2020).
Heterology: a “new” form of knowledge? – Migration: A contemporary challenge to theological thinking (Lecture given at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, October 12, 2017) – Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer is Professor of Theology at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Bingemar focuses on Kristeva, Michel de Certeau, Gustavo Gutierrez, and the Bible and the Fathers of the Church.
Tip #162 – We have our limits.
Approximately 2 + 2 = 5: https://williamgreen.substack.com/about
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