ENGLISH FINAL EXAM

Frederick Buechner’s definition of “Art” Buechner, Frederick. Whistling in the Dark. 1988. Reprint ed. HarperOne, 1993. 15-17

An old silent pond.

Into the pond a frog jumps.

Splash! Silence again.’

It is perhaps the best known of all Japanese haiku. No subject could be more humdrum. No

language could be more pedestrian. Basho, the poet, makes no comment on what he is

describing. He implies no meaning, message, or metaphor. He simply invites our attention to no

more and no less than just this: the old pond its watery stillness, the kerplunk of the frog, the

gradual return of the stillness.

In effect he is putting a frame around the moment, and what the frame does is enable us to see

not just something about the moment but the moment itself in all its ineffable ordinariness and

particularity. The chances are that if we had been passing by when the frog jumped, we wouldn’t

have noticed a thing or, noticing it, wouldn’t have given it a second thought. That is the nature

and purpose of frames. The frame does not change the moment, but it changes our way of

perceiving the moment. It makes us NOTICE the moment, and that is what Basho wants above

all else. It is what literature in general wants above all else too.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to

pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy

on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and

all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells

therein.

The painter does the same thing, of course. Rembrandt puts a frame around an old woman’s face.

It is seamed with wrinkles. The upper lip is sunken in, the skin waxy and pale. It is not a

remarkable face. You would not look twice at the old woman if you found her sitting across the

aisle from you on a bus. But it is a face so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably

just as Cézanne makes you see a bowl of apples or Andrew Wyeth a muslin curtain blowing in at

an open window. It is a face unlike any other face in the world. All the faces in the world are in

this one old face.

Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as

second follows second. Listen! Says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky. Listen to this time that I have

framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time. Listen to the way the

silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and to the silences themselves. Listen

to the scrape of bow against gut, the rap of stick against drumhead, the rush of breath through

reed and wood. The sounds of the earth are like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of

music are also like the sounds of the earth, which is of course where music comes from. Listen to

the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creak of your chair, the water

running in the kitchen sink. Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own

silences.

Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and

listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious

business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day

on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art

is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-

Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. Listen

to social injustice, says Amos; to head-in-the-sand religiosity, says Jeremiah; to international

treacheries and power-plays, says Isaiah; because it is precisely through them that God speaks

his word of judgment and command.

And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love

our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look,

and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors,

before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes,

that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their

faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson wrote that ‘Consider the lilies of the field’ was the only

commandment she never broke. She could have done a lot worse. Consider the lilies. It is the

sine qua non1 of art and religion both.

1 [a condition] without which it could not be