Percy + Jaspers connections, Rilke + childhood

While reading Karl Jaspers I couldn't help but constantly think of ideas in Percy's book, and I really wish that I would have read these excerpts before writing my paper.

"The known world is the alien world, I am detached from it. What my intellect can know and what I can experience empirically repulses me as such, and I am irrelevant to it. Subject to overpowering causality in the realm of reality and to logical compulsion in the realm of validity, I am not sheltered in either. I hear no kindred langauge, and the more determined I am to comprehend the world, the more homeless will it make me feel; as the Other, as nothing but the world, it holds no comfort. Unfeeling, neither merciful nor unmerciful, subject to laws or foundering in coincidence, it is unaware of itself. I cannot grasp it, for it faces me impersonally, explicable in particulars but never intelligible as a whole." - Jaspers

Percy almost takes the words right out of the mouth of Jaspers many times throughout his book when addressing of the modern stance of scientific objectivism.

"Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos...further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly" (12-3).
"The self...[is] a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection" (44).
"The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry" (254).

I've really connected with these aspects of the existentialists' thoughts, and I think it's because I never really thought about the objective scientific stance as problematic for the self. Although I've never believed that everything can be explained through reason, I've spent lots of time trying to "reason" my faith, especially in terms of finding hard, rational arguments for the existence of God and the historical-critical accuracy of the resurrection of Jesus. I honestly think that I have a complete loss of appreciation for "mystery" and "wonder." But this atleast is making me aware of this fact, and I don't know how I can regain this appreciation but sometime I hope it will click within me.

There was a passage in the Rilke poetry that was quite stirring and made me think about this lack of wonder within me.

"Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times
impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.
Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted
with what alone endures; and we would stand there
in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy,
at a point which, from the earliest beginning,
had been established for a pure event."

This just made me stop for a bit and think about childhood, mine and that of others (mostly my young cousins). It's amazing to think about what one is like during childhood. Everything is new and full of wonder, nothing is monotonous. I can throw my cousin up into the air and upon returning to my arms she'll say "Again!" and I'll do it once more and "Again!" and this can repeat everlastingly for her, relentlessly for me. As we grow up it's obvious that we lose this sense of wonder with the world, and I think all of this rationalizing about ourselves and about God that we grow up constantly doing swallows up every drop of wonder within us, so that marvelling at God and his works is a past action fleeting ever further away from my being at this point in time. I remember listening to mp3's of Ravi Zacharias speaking about meaning in life, and how wonder is a huge part of it, but I'd skip these full messages in search for more arguments about objective morality and the kalaam cosmological argument. It's not that I now think these arguments don't mean anything, because they can be powerful in speaking to minds like mine, but I never balanced between these arguments and ones that praise the mystery and awe of God.