There’s More To The Picture Than Meets The Eye

Here is your open thread for January 31, 2020.

This is the birthday of Johnny Rotten (Johnny Rotten, Johnny Rotten):

It’s also the birthday of Marcus Mumford and of Franz Schubert, and I probably should’ve gone with one of them for the music here. Ah well.

January 31 is the birthday of Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Nolan Ryan. Pitchers and catchers report in 11 days.

Gouverneur Morris was born January 31, 1752. The important things to know about Morris are that he wrote the Preamble to the Constitution; that he wasn’t a governor (his first name was pronounced “governeer”); and that he never said any of the things that people like David Barton are always accusing him of having said. He was antislavery, but otherwise an aristocrat and an American Tory. Politics aside, Morris lived a remarkable life. He lost a leg, was an eyewitness to two revolutions, represented two different states in Congress, had affairs with a French novelist and a then-famous American poet before providing a happy ending to the Bizarre Plantation Scandal. (Consider that last item to be your invitation to a dive down a Google hole.)

January 31 is also the birthday of Trappist monk and actual social justice warrior Thomas Merton. In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton describes his “epiphany” — a gift of sudden insight. It’s something I’m constantly chasing and hope, some day, to catch up with:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. …

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. … But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

Here’s a nice story describing how this moment came to be commemorated in “Louisville’s Enchanting, Peculiar Thomas Merton Marker.”