Cultural roots. In praise of the long-sighted
A few weeks ago, I read a book by G. K. Chesterton on the history of England. A Short History of England isn’t, as one might imagine from the title, a smattering of dates and events that are more or less important. Rather, it is a true and ingenious essay about the cultural roots of said nation. Chesterton, with the irony and familiarity characteristic to him, analyzes the distinct layers into which the History of that British isle has settled and sedimented. To undertake this ambitious task, he observes the irregularities and outlines which affect men and women of his era. What has made us become what we are? the author seems to ask. And his theory proposes that perhaps it is not the battles, nor the turning tides of the government that configure culture: it is the ideas, whispered into the citizens’ ears; the unaltered thoughts that endure and perforate the various layers of History. This is why Chesterton does not depreciate legends — nor old jokes, given that they hide profound realities. But England isn’t what I want to talk to you about, although I do encourage you to discover its history led by the hand of Chesterton. He mentions something else in his Short History of England, something that proves crucial if we want to be capable of piercing layers and layers of earth and words, until we find the roots which configure cultures and persons: long-sightedness.
Long-sightedness is not delving fussily into details, nor the analysis of a specialist. Neither does long-sightedness skim over empty generalities. Perhaps the right capacity to discover roots is better understood in Chesterton’s own words:
It is a quaint accident that we employ the word “short-sighted” as a condemnation; but not the word “long-sighted,” which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots of their favourite race or races. — G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
The British writer may have been referring to History, but I think that “long-sight” can be also applied to the passage of time as it molds the world and molds each man; to the sedimented layers of wisdom which gradually transform into the man’s roots, and into the culture of each moment. The long-sighted person is he who knows how to identify both the pillars that support him and the origins that shape him; he who knows how to be grateful to his legacy and how to discover in it an essential part of his identity and personal history. The man of broad vision, the cultured man, is not the encyclopedic scholar who stores information; rather, he is the man who knows how to look at, and look into the common heart of humanity in the myriad layers of earth and time. Petrarch warns us about rootless knowledge:
Of what use is it to me to know the nature of fierce beasts, of birds, of fish and of serpents, if I ignore or despise the nature of man, the end for which we have been born, of where we come from and to where we are going? — Francesco Petrarch. De Sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia.
The wise man is he who, with a broad base of knowledge, is capable of grasping, synthesizing, and getting to the heart of things. He goes deeper into history, art, and culture in a quest for Man.
To go to the roots of culture means to launch oneself on a journey into the dark and fascinating depths of the human soul. To deepen in culture, cutting across these layers of history, drives one to these essential questions about man and about the world, which can be answered only in part. Works of culture, José Luis González Quirós affirms, are attempts at expressing the meaning of life, creations which contribute new insights, new lights, testimonies of what we can feel and contemplate. Because of this, he assures that “culture shows us to be fragments of a complex and delicate tapestry which, even if it cannot be entirely described to perfection, can be personally glimpsed by he who applies himself to the task;” in other words, by he who is long-sighted.
Thus the long-sighted man, pondering before many different works, would find in them the same thoughts, the same yearnings, perhaps the same doubts, echoed across time and across the arts. One will feel, for instance, a certain fascination before images which resound with the heartbeat of a Pietà. In contemplating carefully the work of Michelangelo, we discover that from the marble, faint whispers arise — whispers that add to the technical perfection of the sculpture a multitude of questions that touch the soul. And we find echoes of the same questions in other works of art that seek to repeat these voices, adhering to the same cultural roots. When the Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda won the World Press Photo in 2012, his picture of a veiled mother weeping over the body of her son told a thousand other stories, speaking of more than just the consequences of the Arab riots.
The woman who cares for her suffering son, suffering for the evil which floods the world, resounds outside and above time; it is an image that is atemporal. And even if one would not be able place the photo within the Yemen conflict, the long-sighted man would establish immediate references — references that resemble those provoked by the firm Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) by Rossellini. Here we do not have a mother who weeps for her son wounded by injustice, but a father fraught with consternation before the death of an innocent, in a world that trembles before the sin which it freely allowed to enter.
But an echo that is perhaps even more enduring is awakened in a story represented and sung a thousand times over in opera theatres: Verdi’s Rigoletto. Some say it is a story of revenge; but revenge is no more than the thread through which filter questions more profound, themes more universal. In the arms of a raving father, the redeeming daughter allows her last breath to escape her, dying freely to save another: the sinner whom she loves. And Rigoletto mistakes the very evil that has come from his hands with a curse: the restless revenge which leaves in its wake a path of pain, and stains the hands of the protagonist with blood beloved to him.
A mother, cradling the lifeless body of her beloved son, observes his face with a calm and peaceful gaze. This is the son who dies freely for the sinners he loves, not by the hand of a self-inflicted curse, but by a mysterious evil — and so the freedom of the world is won. The young and beautiful mother of Michelangelo does not scream, does not rage nor rebel against this painful mystery. And yet her observant gaze holds questions, questions which are awakened in the observant spectator. And perhaps because of this, the Madonna of living marble has captured the attention and fascination of the long-sighted, over hundreds of years. These questions which pierce centuries are perhaps unfathomable, and far more profound than those awakened by works that only touch on mere fragments of them.
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This article was originally published in Spanish on Cult-Roots.
This article was translated from Spanish by Pia K. Garcia.
