In A Serious Man, Rabbi Scott, the junior rabbi, tells Larry that what he needs is a fresh perspective, such as "a person who isn't familiar with these autos and such" would have if that person looked at the parking lot outside. This scene ends with Rabbi Scott turning around to look again at the parking lot outside his window, saying with great admiration and wonder, "Things aren't so bad, just look at that parking lot!"
I have looked at parking lots with a fresh perspective myself, long ago. I was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which like most universities, has vast spaces covered with asphalt for the purpose of parking cars. My fresh perspective was to think about what would happen if the force of gravity were to stop attracting those cars just on that parking lot, which was one of the faculty lots close to the classroom buildings. I imagined the cars just floating off, rising slowly from their marked-off rectangular spaces, bumping into one another softly as they rose. It was just one of those physics-related thoughts. I still have them, but not as often. Here's one, also about gravity: Pick up something near you, preferably something heavy, and move it up and down a little bit. What's really happening?
What's really happening is a matter of perception, and this is the word Larry uses in his stoned conversation with Mrs. Samsky about what Rabbi Scott had told him. The rabbi said perspective, Larry says perception. As in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, about his experience with hallucinatory drugs (well, just mescalin as far as I recall). Two different things, perspective and perception.
The ideas behind the words "relative" and "subjective" are also different. I consider some things that people often refer to as relative to be more properly classified as subjective. The experience of pain, for instance. It is certainly subjective, but can it also be called relative? That "One to Ten" scale that a nurse might ask you to use to quantify the pain you're feeling for instance--that's a subjective sort of measurement, although bringing in the "scale" attempts to quantify it and make it relative.
I thought about the experience of pain after my snakebite on September 8. The bite didn't hurt. It felt like nothing I've ever felt, but it was more like a slight poke with a stick--that was one of the instantaneous thoughts I had when it happened. So, because the bite didn't hurt, I wasn't angry at the snake, and I probably hurt it worse than it hurt me, since the reason it bit me was that I stepped on it. When I looked down it was kind of writhing in the leaves that had kept me from seeing it on the trail. After seeing it was a small copperhead, I left the snake alone, and left.
When people asked me why I didn't kill the snake, one of the things I said was that its bite hadn't hurt. If it had hurt a lot, for instance, I would have been angry--hurt is surely a prime cause of anger--and might have wanted to beat the innocent snake to death with a stick (innocent, because it was my fault that I stepped on it). And this is the thing about pain and anger I was thinking about: how I don't understand other people's anger because I don't understand where their pain is coming from. Something I might do that wouldn't cause me pain if it was done to me might cause another person pain, and it would be a mystery to me where that person's anger had come from.
I have looked at parking lots with a fresh perspective myself, long ago. I was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which like most universities, has vast spaces covered with asphalt for the purpose of parking cars. My fresh perspective was to think about what would happen if the force of gravity were to stop attracting those cars just on that parking lot, which was one of the faculty lots close to the classroom buildings. I imagined the cars just floating off, rising slowly from their marked-off rectangular spaces, bumping into one another softly as they rose. It was just one of those physics-related thoughts. I still have them, but not as often. Here's one, also about gravity: Pick up something near you, preferably something heavy, and move it up and down a little bit. What's really happening?
What's really happening is a matter of perception, and this is the word Larry uses in his stoned conversation with Mrs. Samsky about what Rabbi Scott had told him. The rabbi said perspective, Larry says perception. As in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, about his experience with hallucinatory drugs (well, just mescalin as far as I recall). Two different things, perspective and perception.
The ideas behind the words "relative" and "subjective" are also different. I consider some things that people often refer to as relative to be more properly classified as subjective. The experience of pain, for instance. It is certainly subjective, but can it also be called relative? That "One to Ten" scale that a nurse might ask you to use to quantify the pain you're feeling for instance--that's a subjective sort of measurement, although bringing in the "scale" attempts to quantify it and make it relative.
I thought about the experience of pain after my snakebite on September 8. The bite didn't hurt. It felt like nothing I've ever felt, but it was more like a slight poke with a stick--that was one of the instantaneous thoughts I had when it happened. So, because the bite didn't hurt, I wasn't angry at the snake, and I probably hurt it worse than it hurt me, since the reason it bit me was that I stepped on it. When I looked down it was kind of writhing in the leaves that had kept me from seeing it on the trail. After seeing it was a small copperhead, I left the snake alone, and left.
When people asked me why I didn't kill the snake, one of the things I said was that its bite hadn't hurt. If it had hurt a lot, for instance, I would have been angry--hurt is surely a prime cause of anger--and might have wanted to beat the innocent snake to death with a stick (innocent, because it was my fault that I stepped on it). And this is the thing about pain and anger I was thinking about: how I don't understand other people's anger because I don't understand where their pain is coming from. Something I might do that wouldn't cause me pain if it was done to me might cause another person pain, and it would be a mystery to me where that person's anger had come from.
