After reading "Song of Myself" in its entirety, this section really stood out to me. Upon rereading it a few times it was these two lines that seemed to sum up the ideas that made the page so significant to me. What Whitman is saying within these lines is that his understanding of who God is and God's place in life is everything and nothing at the same time; God is so significant that he sees him in "each hour of the twenty-four", in the faces of all the people around him, and in every occurrence of each day. However, in seeing God in everything, no matter how significant, he becomes ordinary and thus insignificant to some degree. The point that Whitman is making is that in many ways, putting so much importance and meaning in the symbol of God, like many other things, takes away from the ideas that God represents. In other words, to focus on the iconic symbol of God is irrelevant and instead Whitman is asking the reader to delve deeper and find curiosity in the mankind that is represented through such a symbol. I also thought that this idea had a lot of relevance to the poem as a whole. Whitman reiterates throughout the poem the need to feel and touch, to "unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!", and to be "...the caresser of life wherever moving..." He is telling the reader to let go and allow oneself to breath in life so that you can find "A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books." What I took from all of this was the contentment that can be achieved in finding beauty and significance in the ordinary experience of life instead of looking for it in things that are unattainable. Whitman's focus on being engaged in the sensual experience of life reminds me a lot of a book entitled Into the Light of Things which also happens to be written by George Leonard, a humanities professor at SFSU.
"We open our eyes and ears seeing life each day as excellent as it is. This realization no longer needs art." -John Cage
