Lucidity, Where Art Thou?

"Human intellect is incurably abstract....

Yet the only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man.

When we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, 
we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain, or Personality.... 

This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste - 

or, more strictly to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience 

or to lack another kind because we are outside it.

As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about;

as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off:

the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think."

Myth Became Fact, C. S. Lewis  (reprinted in God in the Dock)

Gerrit Dou, Girl Chopping Onions, 1646

Hey, wild-eyed lady in the painting, surely that's a perfect time to think, right?  

I mean, you're just chopping onions? What's so hard about that? 

Well (apart from the flood of tears and smeared mascara that would grace my face at such a time) there's also the little boy, saying, "Mom? Mom? Could I have this onion for an experiment?"

And then you try to think. You try. Can he? What experiment?  I don't like experiments. Why does he make me have to think about this right now, when I'm getting ready to instruct the little person setting the table about which side to put the fork on, for the tenth time. And listening to that same wrong piano note from the other room. Can he? Think... think.