In English class we studied a poem by Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird.” The poem asks “what to make of a diminished thing.” That diminished thing, said the teacher, was human experience in the modern world. Oh dear. Modern aesthetics. We must learn from this poem “in singing not to sing.” To my undergraduate self I thought, “But what if I like to sing?” And then my philosophy professor assigned us Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, in which Edwards argues for “the arbitrary constitution of the universe,” illustrating his point with a gorgeous footnote about moonlight that even then began to dispel the dreary determinisms I was learning elsewhere. Improbable as that may sound to those who have not read the footnote.

At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty. I do not mean to suggest, and I underline this, that there was any sort of plot against religion, since religion in many instances abetted these tendencies and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension. Who among us wishes the songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber? People today—television—video games—diminished things. This is always the pretext.

Need is the beginning of truthfulness: the need that recognizes that I cannot talk myself into language now any more than when I was a child, that I cannot see my own face, look into my own eyes or my own soul. What I cannot do for myself is to offer the gift of difference, the only real gift since it is the only thing not planned and package by my ego. I can’t give myself what is given in a new friend, a lover, a song heard for the first time, the claim of a sufferer upon my attention and compassion, the words my daughter has learned for the first time on her second birthday. And this is a need I may only come to see when I have lost or damaged the difference of another: I am bored by my friend; I have analyzed the music; I can explain why children starve in Africa; my daughter has grown up. It is my face and my fancies and my words that are stuck over the once-startling, the once-alien surface of the world, and I know I shall not be enlarged like that again.

Working with Terry has changed my life. I’m a different parent, I’m a different husband, and I’m a different friend. I see nature in a different way since I started working with Terry. I have much more respect for things that I wasn’t aware of as much. He is one of the most important teachers in my life. And I’m a much better cinematographer in helping directors in a much more comprehensive way.

Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.

Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.