Lusciousity

As promised, this Wednesday will be the first installment of a recurring series, Literary Lusciousity. Since I got the idea to make Wednesday lit day because it is also the day that I have poetry workshop this semester, it seems appropriate for me to include a little something we got in our first meeting, today. My professor put three quotations on our syllabus, and this one is from our luscious French friend, Paul Valery:

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most [wo]men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. –from Man and the Sea Shell

This got me thinking about that article that has been at the top of the NYT most-emailed this week called Happiness 101. I read part of it, and one thing that sticks with me is how when they gave students the assignment to be mindful of the world around them for five minutes a day, they all wandered back into the classroom awestruck and high on life and said things like “I never knew there were so many different kinds of trees on the way to campus.” So many of the hours of my day are spent trying to know more, I’ll admit that I pretty much forget that sometimes it pays to approach the world as if I knew nothing about it, because really, I don’t. Like anything alive and luscious, words and the world and the people we know are constantly under transformation.  We struggle to navigate their fluidity by trying to establish constants, but there is so much joy and discovery in letting everything befuddle us again. On that note, I think I am going to take a walk and be ignorant for a while.