Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finallyโthat what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps itโs true that nothing matters more to us than that.
Mark DotyTo choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.
Mark DotyQuestions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.
Mark DotyHere and gone. Thatโs what it is to be human, I thinkโto be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.
Mark DotyIt's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.
Mark DotyGrief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think weโd better look at what grief might offer us. Itโs like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.
Mark Doty