Meditation I

When I sit at the window, as so often, looking into the garden my experience of the surroundings seems completely homogeneous, as if everything was made up of the same stuff, in variations of course, grouped, structured, displaying different colors, textures, and so forth, difference everywhere, but not of sorts.

On the other hand, as soon as I take up the current reading in metaphysikal theory, whatever it may be, and I follow my guide the author in his attempts to make sense of reality, the garden quickly turns into a mysterious object, full of miracles. When I put down my book, to relax for a moment and enjoy the quickly unfolding Alberta spring, my experience of the garden is overlayed with the voiceless discussion between me and what I remember from my reading, and it becomes an alchemistic laboratory of concepts. Trees are now aggregates, and split down into monads instead of firewood. And even if it is at first hard to understand how it could be possible, or thinkable, that the garden is, ultimately, made up of substances without extension, after some mixing, distillation, purification in the complicated alembics of reasoning the clouded brainsaps clear for a moment, but quickly bubble up and flow away like the foam that burst from our dish washer when we tried to clean it a few days ago.

It is not the fault of the guide at all. Because, if I tried, entirely on my own, to understand how I perceive, experience, think our garden, I'll fare much worse. I enter another garden, much messier, wilder, darker, thick with foliage, shadows, full of rusty debris overgrown with fantastically blooming evergreens, impenetrable, the world of my private, unkempt metaphysics. In similar gardens will most others dwell, not in the beautiful spring landscapes of Plato or Leibniz, not even in the dry autumn pastures of Descartes, or Kant. But what exactly will those gardens be like, and would it be possible to talk about them, I wonder, in any meaningful way.

And then I have to go, to pick up Jakob from school, and I meet the parents of his friends, and they ask me, what I think of Ajax' future, now that Van Basten has resigned. I am at a loss, since I have no idea and I don't dare to tell them what I had been thinking about just a few minutes ago.