(about) beginning and ending

When I was twenty years old, I marked a few paragraphs (which you’ll find below) in an introduction that Abraham Heschel attached to his study The Prophets. Some forty years later, I opened the book and read the marked paragraphs again. I was astonished to find scribbled near them this note: “Curiosity may have killed the cat and may yet kill me—but what matters most?” All I could say to the kid now was “Thatta boy!”

Heschel writes:

“What impairs our sight are habits of seeing as well as the mental concomitants of seeing. Our sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see. The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.”

“Rather than blame things for being obscure, we should blame ourselves for being biased and prisoners of self-induced repetitiveness. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present.”

“Insight is a breakthrough, requiring much intellectual dismantling and dislocation. It begins with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the unfamiliar, unparalleled, incredible. It is in being involved with a phenomenon, being intimately engaged to it, courting it, as it were, that after much perplexity and embarrassment we come upon insight—upon a way of seeing the phenomenon from within. Insight is accompanied by a sense of surprise. What has been closed is suddenly disclosed. It entails genuine perception, seeing anew. He who thinks that we can see the same object twice has never seen. Paradoxically, insight is knowledge at first sight.”