Topical Guide 639
Mark Dorset
Patience: As a Strategy
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 35:
I was a masterly crawler, and proud of it. […] I had a new knack for patience. I was so good at being patient that I amazed myself. I learned the trick from my encyclopedia ramblings; my secret consisted mainly of letting my mind wander while I waited for an opening, rambling from thought to thought as a way of keeping myself from growing impatient and making a mistake that would reveal me. If I waited, my time would come. So I would lie in wait and think, deliberately think. A word might get me going, or a memory, but every time I’d find myself wandering from one thought to another. […]
When you look at yourself—or anything—that closely, you are looking at tiny bits, each of which yields only a tinier bit of information. You absorb it, consider it, and move on to the next tiny bit. You may have to take some time at the surface to catch your breath, change your leaky batteries, rewind your spring, but you’ll be back. You are an explorer of the minuscule, and the picture you begin to form is busy and bumpy, not at all the smooth and regular impression you got from a greater distance, or at a lower magnification.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”:
The two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my faith? What am I? [At this point he might also have asked, “Where do I stop?” but dod not. —MD] What but a thought of serenity and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky? Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we retain the belief that this petty web we weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with veins of the blue, and that the moments will characterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience, and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to reflect that, though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our indigence, nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any kind.
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