I’ve devoted a significant chunk of this one life I have to reading, though I really don’t believe that books offer any greater chance of salvation than, say, windsurfing. Yet I can’t help feeling that I was saved, for a while, by William James.
About 10 years ago I was hurting; not from a broken heart so much as an exhausted one, having spent several of the previous years caring about people whose own hearts and minds were in states of distress. When I picked up “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” an edited version of 20 lectures that James delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, I wasn’t expecting it to be a profound balm, but that’s what it was.
I immediately read more work by and about James. I began to verbally annotate everyday life to friends by referring to things he had done or said, with the same frequency with which I had once (no less annoyingly, I’m sure) called on scenes from “The Simpsons.” He was a Swiss Army knife of psychological and emotional insight.
It’s a cliché for people unswayed by religion to still believe in William James, to allow him access to their souls because of the way he sneaks in through their brains. A psychologist and philosopher (and oldest brother of the novelist Henry), James was not a follower of any church, and had little academic interest in institutional religion, but he was obsessively curious about the inner experiences of believers...
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