Last night I ate figs for the first time. In their small green plastic basket the figs, ripened to a deep purple, looked more like dwarf red onions. My wife chopped them up into a spinach salad with orange slices and a dressing of olive oil, honey, lemon and salt. A fig, I discovered, is earthy sweet like a date, the pulp a thick jam laced with countless tiny seeds that deliver a soft crunch. Although I knew I wasn’t the first to ever eat a fig, I felt myself in complete ownership of the experience, and I wished life were more replete with such authentic, tangible discoveries.
I turned thirty in July, which is not so significant in itself, though it does mean that over a decade has past since I last attested to any kind of authenticity. From birth through adolescence I couldn’t help but understand myself as the unassailable center of all things. In my teens I began to question, but I imagined my questioning much as Columbus must have imagined his first steps onto the island of Hispaniola. Never mind the tall, unfamiliar dark-skinned figures that seem almost a part of the landscape as they stare quizzically at you, kneeling in the wet sand, muttering your indecipherable proclamations.
In my early teens my friends and I stayed drugged up all night, working away at the various ontological, epistemological, and ethical Rubik’s cubes we had assembled from nothing but our own rebellious curiosity. By sixteen I had read the Beats and become aware that I had been playing the part of Jack Kerouac before I knew he existed, and he Baudelaire or Rimbaud. And in the wild crooning of the hero of my early teens, Jim Morrison, I was gaining a sense of a tragic arc resembling my own life’s at-that-time-pointless trajectory. It was the beginning of the end. My friends and I weren’t the first to lie on rooftops, shouting philosophical axioms at the stars, and regardless of whether we all burnt up in the atmosphere like Morrison or Kerouac or Cassidy, we wouldn’t be the last.
Luckily, I grew out of Romanticism and into a more grounded sense of my place in history. By the time I graduated with my Bachelors, I suspected my life would be comprised of one humbling unveiling of prior genius after another, and I learned to appreciate the more modest revelations of one struggling to find his footing amongst giants, never mind standing on their shoulders. And so I find it quite a pleasure to read accounts like Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, with its narrative of philosophical inquiry unraveling in a manner that bears a great resemblance to my own, although the lives of those doing the inquiring were very different. And although I would never claim any kind of autodidactic genius allowing me to reach the same conclusions at which the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce and John Dewey took lifetimes to arrive – neither would I dismiss the likelihood that such “metaphysical clubs” exist in all places and times, and arrive at very similar conclusions, with or without the validation of a Harvard diploma.
And that’s just it: Menand carefully balances his descriptions of his protagonists as idiosyncratically genius with the indispensible personal and historical context that made them – and allowed them to make themselves – who they were, as well as what they’ve come to represent in our collective imagination.
Ours is a time of pluralism. Yeats was right: the center could not hold. Luckily for the average human (maybe or maybe not so lucky for the average oligarch), plurality can be a good thing. It’s never been harder to carve out a significant niche for oneself, to project one’s voice above the crowd, or to make any kind of claim to indispensability or originality. In a global sense, we are coming of age. No more room for teenage delusions of grandeur. But that doesn’t make the individual revelations of our teenage years any less profound. Nor does it prevent us from applying what we come to know in the immediate, local situations in which we find ourselves, to make a difference in the lives we touch. Just as the world is shrinking, it is multiplying into an incalculable amalgam of overlapping communities, and we are learning as a species to be as aware as possible of all possible worlds while making the best of the only one we’ll ever surely affect for better or worse. In that respect, just as the world is comprised of an infinite number of metaphysical clubs, the world is all one metaphysical club to which we all hold membership, and in which we are all learning less to speak and more to listen and make room.
So it is with humble appreciation that I reflect on the few minutes I spent eating figs for the first time. That I could have that completely unoriginal moment all to myself, then turn it into something new – though not altogether new – to share with a few others who might do with it what they will.
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