Disturbances in the Field [antikvár]

The object cannot really be separated from the field. The object is in fact nothing else than the systematically adjusted set of modifications of the field. ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, The Coticepts of Nature Prologue: The Field, 1980 George remarked that he has trouble working with patients who complain of overbearing mothers. His mother died when he was four. He was brought up by men. To have a mother, even a suffocating one, is to him enviable. Luxurious. He said, "It's difficult to respond appropriately because of disturbances in the field." I was struck by that phrase. While George went on about how private history persists like static in current encounters, I brooded over it, the way a plane caught in fog hovers longingly over a blurred landing strip. "Could you say that again, what you just said?" I asked. "What, you mean 'reluctant to live in the present reality'?" "No, no, before that. About the field." "Oh. Disturbances in the field." "Ah!" Incomprehensible but tantalizing, the words excited me. It was the sort of excitement you might feel when a veil is about to be lifted—the excitement preceding revelation. And revelation—of order, meaning, purpose, what have you—was what I had always hunted. I was nearly forty-two and still seeking to understand. Not that anything very drastic had happened to me to spur my quest, nothing apart from the ordinary failures and miseries life passes around from time to time like a tray of bonbons, just so we know we have not been overlooked. I tended to exaggerate even those disturbances—to imagine that a child's cough would never end and he would languish his life away on some magic mountain, or to assume, years ago, that Con Edison's turning off the lights for nonpayment hinted at a much more profound darkness descending on us. I was not a stoic, though in