Using and Receiving

There are two ways to stand before a made thing, and they are not two degrees of one attention but two different activities. To use a thing is to take it as a starting-point for your own response — the feelings, memories, and ambitions you bring to it — so that the object becomes a vehicle and your own inner life the cargo. To receive it is to set your own preoccupations aside, attend to what is actually there, and let the thing work on you. C. S. Lewis drew the distinction for literature in An Experiment in Criticism; it holds equally for a dress, a room, a piece of music, or a face.

"The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way." The order matters: the clearing-away comes first, and only then the looking.

The easy mistake is to think the user active and the receiver passive — that one brings something to the work and the other merely sits before it. The reverse is nearer the truth. Using runs on your own engine; it asks nothing you did not already possess. Receiving asks you to hold your own responses in suspense long enough to follow an order you did not invent. That is the harder discipline, and it is the same one the wiki calls Attention: the receiver "seems passive at first because he is making sure of his orders."

The distinction has a practical edge: bad work can be used but cannot be received. A weak picture, a sentimental tune, a room got up for effect gives something on first acquaintance and less on every acquaintance after — what it offered was the response it suggested, not anything in the thing itself, and a suggestion is soon spent. Good work runs the other way: it survives attention, and rewards the tenth encounter more than the first. "There is a sense in which bad work never is nor can be enjoyed by anyone" — only used.

The commonest form of using is to make the thing a mirror. One dresses to be confirmed, furnishes to be envied, listens for the feeling already wanted; the garment, the room, the music are asked only to return the self enlarged. Lewis's name for the appetite is castle-building — the waking dream in which one is always the hero — and its mark is the demand that everything be plausibly about oneself. Goethe gave the disappointment its motto: "Zum Eckel find' ich immer nur mich" — "I always find only myself, to my disgust." Receiving is the way out of that small room; it admits us to experiences other than our own.

Dress. Selection is an act of receiving before it is an act of choice: one cannot dress the woman one actually is while using the glass to flatter the woman one imagines. The garment bought to be seen in is used; the garment chosen because it is right is received.

Interiors. A room used is a room arranged to impress a visitor who has not yet arrived. A room received is one attended to as it is — its light, its proportion, what it wants and what it refuses — before a single object is set down.

Music. To follow a musical argument is the plainest case of receiving: the ear lays aside the mood it came in with and consents to be led. To play the same music under one's own reverie is to hear nothing of what was made.

Beauty. The beautiful thing asks to be received — to stop you, and to determine your response rather than take its colour from your mood. To use beauty is to spend it on oneself; to receive it is to be enlarged by something that was there before you and owes you nothing.

Using and receiving name, at the level of the single encounter, what Attention names as a faculty and Judgement names as its exercise. The whole work of taste is the slow conversion of one into the other — learning to let the dress, the room, the music, the beautiful thing be more than an occasion for oneself.