All about epiphanies
Welcome to this week’s Friday thread! In place of an essay, I’ll offer a few questions to continue conversations begun earlier in the week. I’ll drop in and out of the discussion throughout the next few days, and I hope you’ll feel free to contribute as you have time.
The first question is the one that drove my research initially and that seems to have defined some of Willa Cather’s characters. Where do your epiphanies come from? And how do you know? Did my discussion of strategies for optimizing the conditions for epiphany ring true with your experience? Some of those strategies are: reducing sensory inputs, changing environments when you feel stuck, and seeking expansive surroundings.
The comments on Tuesday’s essay took us in all kinds of promising directions. Here are a few questions left unresolved.
The neuroscientists I cite in Tuesday’s post define epiphany as “sudden insight,” often in the context of resolving a cognitive problem, such as a word puzzle. For Willa Cather’s characters, epiphanies are spontaneous awakenings, typically for artists who have been struggling with an identity conflict or a larger existential problem. Kevin and Mary suggested that James Joyce’s short stories offer another model that is less associated with problem solving than with sudden revelations at a story’s end. What are some other forms of epiphany?
Are epiphanies always joyful? If not, what might be some examples of negative epiphanies?
How might we distinguish between legitimate epiphanies and what some neuroscientists call “pseudo-insight,” moments that feel like breakthroughs but that either lack staying power or that do not truly solve a problem? Is the legitimacy of an epiphany always in the eye of the beholder, or are there objective ways of measuring the authenticity of a cognitive breakthrough? I’m wondering here about the elaborate delusions that John Nash experiences in A Beautiful Mind as a result of schizophrenia and other forms of paranoid or conspiratorial thinking that might feel, to the individual, like epiphanies but that are actually illusory.
Finally, is it possible to have a failed epiphany? I’ll offer an example below that many readers of Lucy Gayheart have judged to be a flawed or incomplete revelation. In this scene, Lucy Gayheart is riding home with her friend Harry Gordon after ice skating. Perhaps you can add similar examples from literature or film?
The sleigh was such a tiny moving spot on that still white country settling into shadow and silence. Suddenly Lucy started and struggled under the tight blankets. In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart.
The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.
I'm bipolar. And in unmedicated, I'd write a dozen poems in the middle of the night. And every once in a while, I'd write a good one. So as a manic poetic epiphany? Good. But bad for me as a person. I'm serious about my meds and therapy now. There are no middle of the night epiphanies now. I won't allow myself to write even if I happen to be awake at that time.
The example of the failed epiphany is curious and makes for a great word-to-word read. Would you think of it as a sort of Icarus moment? The lines "what she had gone so far to snatch" and "It was too bright" have that sense of moving too far forward, too far overhead.
Another instance of epiphanies in fiction: "Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector, whcih has examples of positive, negative, and anti- epiphanies. But, since the novel is so internal, its epiphanies are usually self-created. For instance, when Joana (the protagonist) moves closer to "the source itself" during an affair, when she speaks an unknown phrase: "as mild and sweet as daybreak in a wood, inspiration was born....Eyes closed, surrendered, she softly spoke words born in that instant, never before heard by anyone, still tender from their creation—fragile new shoots."