Mountain Top & Persons

Amy Grant's "Mountain Top" song


from Paul Tournier’s The Meaning of Persons

‘I admire your patience’, he tells me, ‘listening to all this, when much of it must seem to you pointless.’
The remark astonishes me. To call it patience is to suppose an effort on my part, whereas the truth is that it is far more interesting to understand one man thoroughly than to examine a hundred superficially. . .
He felt that he was understood. More than that: he felt also that he was understanding himself better. . . We become fully conscious only of what we are able to express to someone else. . .
Psychological theories explain only mechanisms of the mind. Similarly, the study of all the physiological mechanisms of the body can never of itself lead us to a knowledge of the person. . .
Through information I can understand a case; only through communion shall I be able to understand a person. Men expect of us that we should understand them as cases; but they also want to be understood as persons.
There are two routes to be followed in the knowledge of man: one is objective and scientific, the other is subjective and intuitive . . .One proceeds by logical analysis and precise assessment; the other by a total understanding. One is an endless progression; the other is a sudden and complete discovery.
Although the two methods – that of intellectual information and that of spiritual communion – are thus mutually supporting, it is not easy to synthesize them. Our minds do not seem readily able to comprehend man at once as an ensemble of phenomena and as a person. If we concentrate on the phenomena, the person escapes us; if we see the person, the phenomena become blurred.


from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (opening sentence):

Holden Caulfield: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”