A “Knowledge” That Holds My World Together

My sweet friend Teri recently called me “freaking brilliant” on Facebook. Her generous comment sent me into deep reflection — not from false modesty, but because I don’t think brilliance is quite the right word for whatever it is I bring. I fuss over this because I don’t want to leave this life without having fully known who I am, to the best of my ability. (And admitting to myself what I might still grow into:)

I read deeply and prodigiously, well beyond my immediate capacity to absorb everything. I have a decent vocabulary. I connect things. I express myself. I hold convictions with some courage while remaining genuinely open to being wrong (sometimes indulging in both good and stupid arguments).

And every day — even if only over the body of a mouse or chipmunk my cats have caught on their catio— I grieve something.

At 71, my heart has grown embarrassingly tender. I have to restrain myself from adopting animals I can’t adequately care for, because my four aging pets already require more of me than I sometimes feel I have.

These days there’s a tendency to rebuke the “weak” in favor of an emotional guardedness I want no part of, having lived enough of that in my youth. Tenderness isn’t a flaw I have failed to correct. It is, I’ve come to believe, a form of perception.

We’ve built a civilization that prizes intelligence — the kind that can be tested, vetted, argued, proved or disproved, but mostly generates income. This isn’t nothing; we need resources.

But I want to suggest that what holds the world together, what actually confers a lifeline to most human beings in their hardest moments, is something different. I am calling it full sentience — the capacity not just to think about life but to remain genuinely, vulnerably, sometimes inconveniently alive to it.

Here is what I mean: sentience isn't brilliance. It's the ordinary, unglamorous, world-holding capacity to feel the weight of things — a dead mouse, a friend's silence, your own aging hands — and to let that weight matter.

Intelligence solves puzzles; sentience remembers why the solution matters. Intelligence builds the golden crown; sentience is the mercy that "becomes the throned monarch better than his crown."

Shakespeare understood this. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia's great speech on mercy doesn't argue for mercy on logical grounds. She says it "droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath." It cannot be compelled. It is "twice blest" — it blesses the one who gives and the one who receives.

When Portia says it "becomes the throned monarch better than his crown,” she means it’s the greater power, even if it is not the visible one.

This is the distinction I am reaching for. Intelligence is the crown — visible, measurable, conferring status. Full sentience is the mercy: unbidden, unchartable, and in the end, more necessary.

What a paradox, but I think one of my mentors, Dr. Peter Koestenbaum, would be proud to know I learned that.

I can’t help but mention that the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent his career demonstrating that people whose emotional centers are damaged — while their logical faculties remain intact — make catastrophically bad decisions. The existence of Donald Trump and his confederacy have fed my own basest inclinations to publicly humiliate them when I know full well what his appeal is, has been through time - and to whom.

So, if I ever get to a express a few last words upon my eventual leave-taking, I hope they go something like this (realizing without the lecture part):

Feeling is not the enemy of knowing. It is part of how we know.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) called emotions "upheavals of thought," arguing that they are themselves a form of intelligence, not interference with it. Iain McGilchrist has written at length about how Western culture has pathologically elevated the analytic mind over the attending, relational one — the mind that holds rather than grasps.

Simone Weil wrote about a quality of attention she considered the highest human capacity: an openness that neither forces nor filters, that simply receives what is there. My habit of reading beyond my comprehension — sitting with books I don't fully understand, letting them work on me slowly — is, I think, a practice of that kind of attention. Not performing knowledge I don't have, but tolerating not-yet-knowing. Staying porous.

I’m not saying intelligence doesn't matter. I am arguing against intelligence alone — intelligence severed from felt life, from moral imagination, from the willingness to be moved by a dead mouse on a Tuesday morning. That severance is genuinely dangerous. It produces people who can reason brilliantly toward terrible ends, and institutions that optimize efficiently for the wrong things.

Full sentience is what keeps the aperture open. It is what makes mercy possible — not as a concept, but as a practice, dropping like rain on the specific person in front of you who needs it.

I don't know if this makes me brilliant, or for that matter if I even make sense to most.

I suspect and truly hope it makes me something more ordinary and more necessary than that: someone who has not learned to stop feeling the weight of things.

That, I'll take.