Austen on seeing nothing

In Volume II, chapter IX of Emma, Emma and Harriet Smith got shopping Highbury. When simple, pliable Harriet takes too long over her muslin purchase, Emma gets bored:

Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole’s carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

This is a striking moment to me, because Austen includes few such slice-of-life moments in her novels. And yet here we have the ordinary goings-on in the village of Highbury. I can easily imagine this scene painted by George Caleb Bingham, who was five years old when Emma was published or, if he could rein in his instincts for meanness and satire, Hogarth.

So there’s the surprising social realist note to the passage, and the affectionate homeliness of the scene, but it was the last line that struck me:

“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

I read that three times and my wife and I stopped to talk about it. I had struggled earlier in the day to express some of what I worry about as a generation raised on constant technological stimulation ages. What will those lulled by constant noise do with the long final silences of their lives? What will those with no attention span do with endless inactivity? Will they have anything of their own to fill that time?

Here Austen sums up the best alternative: a mind sufficiently self-furnished to be comfortable in “boredom,” a mind capable not only of encountering but of embracing and enjoying “nothing.”

Because Emma is not really bored watching her neighbors in Highbury, and what they are doing is not really nothing. Per Chesterton, “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.” My fear is that modern technology and our culture of content consumption and ceaseless stimulation will render many minds void even of the ability to be interested. And what happens then?

I have recently grown uncomfortable even with my own habit of listening to podcasts on my commute. Ages ago I used this time to think. I got ideas and worked on them later. Now I fill it with other people’s talk—good talk, talk I engage with and learn from, but still other people’s talk. I’ve begun to suspect that more silences would be good for my mind and imagination.

Emma famously starts with a list of the heroine’s strengths—“handsome, clever, and rich.” She can’t really take credit for these things, and she also has significant flaws. Part of the point of the novel is her growth in maturity and virtue, which brings her character into alignment with her natural gifts. And I think she owes no small part of that growth to the formation of her mind—not book-smart, as Mr Knightley points out early on, but sharpened and receptive, even when “at ease.”