The unseen is everything.

Iceberg Lake, Glacier National Park, Montana. Photo taken by Wadih Ghsoubi. Click on image for larger version.

"Today, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over the mountain's long, low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; today the unseen was everything, the unknown the only real fact of life."

The above quote from The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker: "There is no secular world." True. True.

Growing up.

All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it.)

Grownups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from those figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

I know a planet where there is a certain red faced gentleman. he has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: "I am busy with matters of consequence!" And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom.

The above is written by Antoine de Saint Exupery, in "The Little Prince". Image taken from the text.

I know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you. I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of.

Even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled wtih happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way - and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

The above is written by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Chapter VI of "Letters to a Young Poet". Image is a portrait of Rilke.

Solitude

"La Toilette" (1896), by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Though I value my time with friends and family, I need private space and ample opportunity to think through things on my own. I used to see this as a fault of mine, this inability to cope with reality while in the frequent presence of others, but now I suspect that it's a universal condition. I believe that each of us needs time alone, even removed from those we love the most. As Henri Nouwen wrote,

"Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self."

In the past, I've resorted to all manor of elaborate escape seeking solitude, from fleeing the hemisphere to spending time in a monastery. For the foreseeable future, however, that kind of exodus is impossible. Enter "the Man Cave".

For the last six months or more - and concluding today - I've been working on my Man Cave, formerly a one-bedroom apartment in the basement complete with bathroom and kitchen. The details of this seemingly endless campaign are too boring even for friends who care, but the tasks have included painting, electrical work, tiling, trim installation and threatening legal action against various suppliers and contractors.

I am reminded of a wonderful passage on the subject in the book, "The Winter of Our Discontent", by John Steinbeck:

"It has no name in my mind except the Place - no ritual or formula or anything. It's a spot in which to wonder about things. No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. Now, sitting in the Place, out of the wind, seeing under the guardian lights the tide creep in, black from the dark sky, I wondered whether all men have a Place, or need a Place, or want one and have none. Sometimes, I've seen a look in eyes, a frenzied animal look as of need for a quiet, secret place where soul-shivers can abate, where a man is one and can take stock of it."

So true.

What I've observed over the last several years is that contemporary American society does not readily tolerate a "professional" man's need for occasional solitude. At present, it is more acceptable for women to step away in order to rediscover or reinvent themselves (witness the huge success of the indulgently self-oriented book, "Eat, Pray, Love"), but men today who seek solitude as a source of strength and peace are considered apathetic, unfocused and unreliable. It remains the case that the extraordinary work of Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi (not to mention Hitler, and let's not) all included significant periods of isolation and quiet contemplation.

But I ramble. The best book on the subject that I can suggest - and I do - is "Solitude: A Return to the Self" by Anthony Storr.

Get away.

Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz

Elephants never forget.
Video found on the French website CUBE.

My favorite collection of short stories (which has nothing to do with elephants, but does have something to do with forgetting) is called, "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" by George Saunders. One of the more touching pieces from that book was originally printed in The New Yorker on October 5, 1992 (Tina Brown's first edition) and is called, "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz".

This is a story about a man whose job is the memory trade, and his relationship with an elderly shut-in named Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Take a few minutes to listen to the story as read by the author on NPR's This American Life. The story itself begins at the 17:48 mark. Listening is free.

Hermann Hesse

I've never made my peace with Hesse, though I've tried throughout several of his novels, from Demien, to Siddhartha, to The Steppenwolf. I don't agree with his belief that salvation is uncovered from within the self-realized individual, nor with the resulting disdain for religion, but I relate to his disgust at societal convention, and the general sense of separateness and isolation that modern life breeds.

It is Hesse's poetic style that impresses me the most. There are times when the reader feels more like he is holding a book of poetry than a novel. Here is a passage from The Steppenwolf, a book so powerful that one of my closest friends has a Steppenwolf tattoo on his upper arm:

"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure cry out, on which everything only whispers and tiptoes around. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible loathing and nausea. Then, in desperation, I have to escape into other regions, if possible on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide for a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, to seduce a little girl, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."

Only connect...

The first time I found a home in literature was when I read E. M. Forster's "Howard's End" in 1992. In this work, I discovered a link to eternal truths that I did not know existed. Here was a writer that could be all at once humorous ("... he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity"), cutting ("The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them"), practical ("Money is the fruit of self-denial") and profound ("Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him... Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us"). I was completely undone by the complex beauty of his poetic prose, and the essential clarity of his thought. It may have taken me three months or more to crawl through the 250 page novel - my original copy is overwhelmed by yellow highlights and margin notes - as I contemplated every single word, but the experience of reading this book was transformational. Here are two of the better known passages:

"... she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it, we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it, love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going... It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

"The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility."