Edward Livingston and Daniel Smith meet. They shake hands. —It is never said—ordinarily anyway—“Edward Livingston and Daniel Smith shook hands. They met.” The reason is, the shaking of hands is a sign of a possible more inside togetherness than just meeting.
When two things meet they are thought of as coming together, but there is not an inside joining. We would not say two blocks of wood joined. We’d say they touched, or met. And we would not say two cars touching each other in a garage are meeting, for the cars not being in motion, they are just touching, or being together.
A constant process of existence is things meeting. Rain meets a meadow; as soon as it goes into the earth, it is more than meeting. A cow meets a wall. A vine meets a window. Two pebbles meet. A leaf meets a pane of glass. A hand meets a ceiling. —At meeting, the things are together; but the insides of the things have not met.
So, it is said: Dick met June. He liked her. They met again. They met frequently. They came to know each other more and more. These constant meetings led to a deep friendship. A year after they were introduced, Dick thought: “June is mine”; June thought: “Dick is mine.”
Meeting implies togetherness through motion. After meeting, the question is, what kind of togetherness will be? A raindrop meets a lake. As it meets the surface of the lake, it is just meeting the lake. The meeting is a most swift moment—no more. From then on, the raindrop becomes indistinguishably the lake’s. However, there was the moment of just meeting.
A leaf meets a roof top. The leaf, because there is not much wind, remains on the roof top for many hours. After a while, a strong wind comes, and the meeting of leaf and roof top ends in the departure of a somewhat shriveled leaf. The togetherness has not gone very far.
We meet a book, the language of which we do not know; and this language, the Polish, we do not see as necessary to know. We make out “Warsaw” on the title page. We become that much one with the book. We have taken to ourselves nothing more. Our meeting with the book has ended in a slight togetherness with one thing in the book—the place it was printed. As much as the book went into us, and we went into the book, there was more than meeting.
In everything, there is inside and outside, inwardness and outwardness. The inside of a thing is that which goes towards itself as unique, what it is, as such; the outside is that which goes towards what is other than the thing, what the thing has to do with.
If our hand touches a bandbox, and we do not open it, our hand has met the bandbox. If our hand reaches into the bandbox, is affected by the inside of the bandbox, there has been a deeper, larger, togetherness.
What goes for the bandbox, goes for a person. We meet Henry Darnell, and say just “How do you do.” If we remember, we may say, “I met Henry Darnell.” We feel a certain way about this meeting. It is an outside feeling. But if we talk to Henry Darnell, and it isn’t just about the British Empire or Yellowstone Park, but about him and his feelings—we feel we have more than met Henry Darnell. We have joined with him; we know him. Essentially, what takes place when we put our hand within a bandbox and we put our mind within Henry Darnell, is alike. We have gone past outside, and reached inside.
Words like join, know, amalgamate, penetrate, merge, identify, enter—are related to the word meet. These words are representations of more “intimate” possibilities after meeting. Meeting completed is identification. When a person says, “I don’t know her. I just met her,” the essential meaning of “met” is pointed to. If this girl has a mother who is excessively devoted to her, the word “identified” can, with some propriety, be thought of: vide mothers who wear the same clothes as their daughters.
The idea of meeting is important because all motion—and this includes all thought—is a meeting and a separation. As I write this, my pen meets the paper. As I see it going along the paper, my pen, in motion, is with the paper. If my pen were to make a hole in the paper, the pen could be said to be of the paper.
In knowing, there is also meeting, with a possible continuation. For example, Jerry Sands, at the age of six, looking at a learned medical work, met the word integument. For years after, he did not meet it again. The word integument, therefore, did not become of Jerry Sands.
Jerry also, at the age of six, met the word pursuit. This word Jerry met again and again. As Jerry kept on meeting the word, there came to be more than meeting; there was the joining of Jerry and the word pursuit.
Everything we know now, we once only met. Once there was only an outside touching. For knowing, like action of all kinds, is an interaction of surface and depth, outside and inside, superficial and profound. It all comes from the fact that the world is inside and outside; and this insideness and outsideness is related to the including and excluding aspect of existence I have talked of earlier.
Writing also is a matter of meeting. An inaccurate adjective just “touches” or meets the noun it is with.
Meeting a problem or situation is showing the willingness to see it and be affected by it. To meet a situation is like “facing” it; and facing a thing means, quite obviously, presenting an “outside” to it. This can best be seen in the sentence: “I met the dilemma, as it were, face to face.” Here two “outsides” are squarely towards each other. There is a recognition of the existence of something. And armies meet in battle. The engagement is, logically, a later phase.
Further, the idea of meeting is to be found in the phrase “to meet squarely.” It is not “to meet cubically” or “inwardly”—it is to meet front to front.
It is because the word meet, in its outsideness, carries with it courage—that the word meet has come to have a quality of stoutheartedness. “To meet a difficulty” is not only seeing it from the outside, but also seeing it frontally, squarely. And we must remember that meeting does mean seeing, and if we see the outside of a thing clearly, we know there is an inside to see or consider, too.
Therefore, “to meet” has in it the willingness to consider otherness without withdrawing. The otherness is to be increased.
Since there is a willingness to see in the idea of meeting, “to meet” has come to mean, also, to agree. “Our minds met on this subject” can mean, in a certain context, that two minds fought; but usually it means two minds agreed. “To meet their demands” has in it a quality of belligerence, but also, and most often, of yielding, seeing, considering. So has the phrase “to meet an argument.”
The reason the word meet is so important is that in its whole meaning, fighting a thing and agreeing with it merge; outsideness tends to become withinness; and seeing a surface boldly comes to mean consideration of inwardness, depth, complexity, possibility.
The notion of surface is most important. The surface of a thing, considered as a whole, is neither the thing nor what surrounds it, but is both. Surface, as I shall show later, is like light. Surface expresses here and there, matter and form, a thing itself and its meaning. And the word meeting, seen fully, shows that the welcoming of surface and outsideness squarely or courageously, is a desire to change surface or outsideness into dimension, withinness, wholeness. This is what our eye does; this is what imagination and reason do. That surface be seen as depth is what the construction of the world kindly demands we do.