One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.
Interpretation
Being open to surprises is vital for both appreciating poetry and living a fulfilling life.
In this quote, Christian Wiman suggests that the ability to be surprised is fundamental not just for understanding poetry but for navigating life as well. When we allow ourselves to embrace surprises, we open up to new experiences and perspectives, breaking free from rigid expectations that limit our appreciation of art and our connections with others.
In practice
Using this quote in a poetry workshop to encourage participants to embrace the unexpected in their interpretations.
The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)
At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
Some people spend the day in complaining of a headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.
Wisdom, humanity & courage, these three are universal virtues. The way by which they are practiced are one.
I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.
What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.
Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.
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