Peripheral Visions

known separately but as part of a system of discriminations, yet such is our wealth that I can go home from the cathedral to leaf through catalogs that offer me clothing labeled “navy” and “periwinkle” and “azure.” In some languages, green is defined by blue on the one hand and yellow on the other, while in others it is part of a compound of all that is fresh and cool and moist, contrasted with the heat and desiccation that lie along the spectrum from yellow to red. Judging by the recurrent elegance of grammatical systems, the search for organization is the normal state of the human mind, asserting itself in classifications of colors as much as in theologies, so resting content with trivial pursuits may be a symptom of pathology. Still, the same capacity that is used to make sense of ambiguous cues can become rigid to exclude them as meaningless or unacceptable.
    Memory permits a cross-cultural journey into strange ways of life that were once our own. It has become common-place to speak of the discomfort that occurs on meeting members of another culture as “culture shock,” but the same experience can occur in rediscoveries of the self. True culture shock occurs when differences run deep and immersion is complete, so much so that ordinary assumptions are overthrown, when panic overcomes irritation. In severe culture shock, one may feel that one is going insane. Yet everyone has traveled to wondrous places, and most of us lack the words to tell the tale or even to remember it.
    Other worlds contain fabulous monsters. Deities. Parallel spheres of being. To understand another culture, one must include ghosts and spirits in an explanatory system, as well as the abstractions—pride, honor, sin—that appear as reasons for action. The great ideas of human history do not, after all, refer to anything visible to the eye. When we try to translate from one language to another and from one system of categories to another we discover that categories slip and slide, never matching perfectly. We make the same discovery in the encounter with children and lovers, with the living landscape and even with the layered self.

A Mutable Self
    A FTER I DECIDED to use the old rhyme about what a bride should have at her wedding, I looked it up and discovered among its multiple versions a third line I had never heard. “Something old, something new,…And a silver sixpence in her shoe.” What the tradition no doubt had in mind was prosperity for the new household, but the line reminds me of the times when I tucked a five-dollar bill into my shoe or my bra, “mad money” that would allow me to get home on my own if a date went sour.
    Today, even if they choose not to be employed after marriage or while their children are small, young women are well-advised to be able to support themselves and to maintain that capacity by use: getting out, working with others, being effective. Circulating. That silver sixpence evokes a cultural expectation for healthy development of boys that is becoming more important for girls: a sense of self that is autonomous, independent, self-confident.
    A silver sixpence is hard, round, stable. No fuzzy edges and little apparent change over time. It is a bad metaphor for the self but useful to show how the self is sometimes regarded, a thing rather than a process. Like the blue sky, the self is a matter of understanding and experience. Like money, it is a matter of convention. Think, then, of a sixpence in an inflationary economy, its value based only on agreement and steadily running down unless it is kept moving: earned and spent, invested and combined.
    American culture has gone further than most in valuing the autonomous self, downplaying the importance of relationship. It was once virtually unique, for instance, in the preference for having infants sleep alone. Through history, most human infants have slept in the same room, often in the same bed, with at least one adult, then slept with siblings as they grew older. In Manila you can see the carryover of this as people cluster together, pack themselves cheerfully into tiny spaces, and walk, men with men and women with women, holding hands, linked and enfolded, seeking contact. The Jesuit scholastics used to scandalize their American mentors by cheerfully sitting on each other’s laps. It was not easy for American Jesuits, moving like armored vessels, their compasses set in the individualistic spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, to train