Always remember: what the nature of the whole is, what my own nature is, the relation of the one to the other, what kind of part I am of what kind of whole; and that no one can hinder me from saying and doing, at all times, what is in accordance with the nature of which I am a part.
Ask a person what they are for and watch them reach for their résumé, their relationships, their usefulness to someone. Almost no one answers from the inside — and that turns out to be the whole problem.
Take away the fear of other people’s verdicts and you are left in a quiet room with a question you were too frightened, for years, to hear. If their opinion is not what I am for, then what am I for? The courtroom had at least been answering that question every day. It told me I existed to be approved. Lose the courtroom and you lose its answer in the same motion.
The practice that did the actual freeing was already mine, and the relief I wrote about last time was downstream of it. Marcus put it into one line in the second book of his notebook.
Read quickly, it sounds like metaphysics. Read slowly, it is a set of instructions, and the order of them is the entire point. Four questions, then a promise. What is the whole. What am I. How do the two relate — and then the same question again, asked harder: what kind of part am I, of what kind of whole. The repetition is not slack writing. The relation is the hinge the whole line turns on, the one step everyone wants to skip, so he makes you take it twice. The promise comes last, and only to whoever has actually stood at all four: that no one can stop you from acting in keeping with the answer.
I have to use the word nature, and I know what the word can do to a modern reader. It arrives reeking of the pulpit, or of the old lecture about what men and women are supposedly built for, and most of us have trained ourselves to step back from both. So here is all I mean by it. When I say the nature of a thing, I mean what I mean when I say an eye is for seeing. An eye that refuses the light has not escaped its nature; it has only stopped working. The nature is the function — what a thing is for, given the kind of thing it is. Whether you call the whole God, or the universe, or simply the sum of everything that happens to be the case, the practice does not move an inch. You can run it as a believer or as the most committed materialist alive. It asks the same four questions of you either way.
So I ran them. The nature of the whole, as far as I can make out from inside it, is one enormous, ongoing, mostly indifferent system — changing long before I arrived and continuing long after, in which every part is the cause of some other part. My own nature is that I am one of those parts: a brief, thinking, social fragment of the thing, and the rare kind of fragment that can turn around and ask what kind of fragment it is. The relation between the two is the relation of a wave to water — and that one image answers both of the middle questions at once: how I relate to the whole, and what kind of part I am of it. I am a shape the whole is briefly taking, in the one spot where I happen to be standing. Not separate from the water. Not the whole of it. Just the form it has here, for now.
Setting myself down as one part among the rest — that is the move Marcus elsewhere called looking at things from above. And the order matters: you do not rise to the wide view and then find your place in it. Placing yourself honestly, to scale, is the wide view. You picture the real size of the system, the length of its run, the sheer number of its parts, and you set yourself down somewhere inside that picture that does not flatter you. Nobody warns you about what happens next: it shrinks you, and the shrinking is the mercy.
The room I had been so afraid of shrinks along with me. The people in it shrink. The verdict I had built a life around turns out to be a few syllables passing between two shapes in the water, neither able to see itself clearly, concerning a third shape who could not stop shaking at the sound. From the floor of the courtroom that verdict was the size of the sky. From above it is the size it always was, which is very nearly nothing, which is the correct size.
Standing at the right scale, the last clause of the line does its own work. No one can hinder you from acting according to your nature. It has the sound of something you nod at and move past — a line a wise man delivers while the rest of us agree out loud and take in none of it. Sit with it long enough to actually digest it and it turns tangible. The world can still do nearly anything to me; what it cannot do is decide what I am for. That is the whole of what the line claims. Other people held power over the verdict only because I had filed my purpose with them for keeping. I had made my reason for existing something they could issue or revoke. Move it back to where it lives — into acting well, rather than into being well-reviewed — and there is nothing left in my hands for them to take. They can still withhold the praise. The praise was never the assignment. The assignment, in my own case, is whatever the eye’s equivalent turns out to be for a creature like me: to see what is in front of me without flinching, to act justly, to be of some use to the other parts while I am briefly one of them.
None of this arrives all at once, and none of it stays once it has arrived. The four questions are not a proof you complete a single time and then own forever. They are a climb you make again and again, because the floor of the courtroom is the default altitude, and the mind settles back down to it the instant you stop ascending. Some mornings I reach the top before the coffee is gone and the room is already the right size. Other mornings I am flat on the courtroom floor, shaking at syllables, starting the climb from the bottom. The cascade is real. It is simply not automatic. It is something closer to a thing you tend than a thing you finish.
What I have arrived at, for now, is nearly embarrassing in its plainness. I am a small part of a large thing; the part has a function; the function needs no audience to be real. Water does not poll the other waves on whether it has permission to be water. The question never belonged to the room in the first place. I spent years afraid of people who could not see themselves. Learning to see them clearly helped. But what freed me was stepping back far enough to take in all of us at once — the whole, and my own small, honest place inside it — and finding that the only verdict ever mine to mind was the one I had been free to render the entire time.