No man can ever hope to attain to a perfect knowledge of the world, of the complexities of life, its miseries and mysteries. At best, a silent session by the fire may awaken deep consideration or surprise. We are born into an age as reckless and irresponsible as it is innovative and efficient, and have lost ourselves in the bargain. Just the other day I saw an old woman standing beside her possessions in the cold. She was homeless. She looked weak, frail, desperate. All the richness and variety of her life, all that had preceded her like so many uneven steps, had led her to this corner, this hour. What did she feel? What did she remember? Care to recall? And meantime all the noise of morning traffic, of a city awakening to routine, to uncertainty, aroused in full force. But that Thursday morning, stopped in traffic, she was the real to me, the other the fake. The day was very cold; the wind blew sharply across her face; her eyes seemed to say, “If only it would blow sharply across yours.”
Oftentimes I’ve been troubled by the thought that, beautiful as life is, its radiance is always tempered by hard realities. A sense of shame invades our awareness when we trifle amid the tragic. I have never been wholly at ease in the world. A simple excursion into society lays me waste. I do not comprehend it; I do not understand. Standing in line for coffee, for a sandwich, I have often felt miniscule and incompetent, indeed almost nameless and without past. I suspect I am not the only one. Heroic actions are as foreign to me as the politics of the day. I suspect I am not the only one. The seasons come and go; the sun rises, the sun sets; I do not seem to quicken with age.
And yet something has begun. I have felt it. If wisdom is the ability to perceive how things stand in relation to truth, still he is without it who does not act upon it. Not that I pretend to wisdom. If that were the case, these words would perhaps have remained unwritten. But the desire to do something with my life, to have been of some service, to inhabit regions other than the low, has grown acute. A pressing pain upon my essence when I watch the news. Hollow and empty are the words of men, poets and philosophers, when opposite the scene of a crime. Children cry, the soul cries louder. A mother bereaved smotes the soul. And we come to grief at whose command?
I sense something is desperately failing in mankind which was alive eighty, even forty years ago. Each generation succeeds the former to no purpose. There is much chatter nowadays about Progress, but I wonder towards what. It seems as if the summit towards which man is striving, on arriving, proves to be so many syringes and broken needles. Somedays, it is simply criminal to walk under the sun. Who are we, who boast such mechanics and industry, wealth and medicine, land and property, but cannot go the day without the pill, the drink, the smart phone? We are an immediate people; our vantage point is from the dollar. We are loath to look into each other’s eyes for too long. In the presence of something wholly unlike ourselves, we feel the terror of another’s existence. Perhaps because, to speak truthfully, we feel our own.
The English poet John Donne, in one of his sermons, famously observed, that no man is an island unto himself, that we are a part of the main, that any man’s death diminishes us, because we are involved in mankind. Kierkegaard, writing some two hundred years later, had this to say:
“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, is bound to be noticed.”
Why?
I find it interesting, in comparing these two statements by men of two different eras, backgrounds and customs, how much change, in a sense, the sensibility of man has undergone. Much has transpired in the way of western civilization from a time in which we were being admonished to relish keenly the safety and well-being of another, lest we should lose ourselves in the process, to these sudden dark inquisitions of the soul, the self, its higher claims, its priorities. The individual has set in, and with it, all that admits of Me, Me, and more Me. But keep company for an hour among the dispossessed, learn by what hard road came that severe aspect, and perhaps you will know yourself for the first time, as the Englishman put it, as “a part of the main”. You feel how much has been placed in your hands. You awaken as from a dream, and startled, begin to measure and perceive.
But just what that perception will reveal is hard to say. Nietzsche made the remark somewhere, “When you look into the Abyss, the Abyss looks into you,” perhaps meaning that no one is quite capable of taking it all in without suffering insult and injury where the heart is concerned, where the mind is concerned, where the self is concerned. (Nietzsche, let us recall, collapsed at the foot of a mistreated horse, his mind having finally given way). Life’s tumult soon separates the ideal from the idealist, and alerts him to realities other than his own. A closing of the eyes will not avert the fire; presently, its flames will lick you too. Very seldom have I felt it to be otherwise. The world is too painful to contemplate. The deep void I find in everything, in human contact, in relations, in daydreams, in everything under the sun and broad blue sky, is of a nature more aggressive and wretched than despair, is invasive, haunting, immense. And yet I sense life, real life, behind it all. I have never seen God face to face, but behold something of his wonder in the flight of birds. A breath of wind mollifies the raging interior. Children at play tender goodness to no end; their laughter is sweet and repairing. I forget myself in the pouring rain. Like Byron, I am such a strange mélange of good and evil. Unlike Byron, I have America to contend with. I do not mean this in a derogatory way. What I mean, however, is this: provided with ample freedom, boundless opportunities and robust promises, the will in my country has become infirm. Our forefathers were fashioned at the muzzle of the rifle; we, by television networks and executives. They kept watch by an open fire; we are grown blind for so much scintillation and light. Crises and substance do not become us; song and cheer is all we want.
But I would have more. I would acquaint myself with deprivation and solitude, if these promised more. And to examine the literature of mysticism, occidental as well as oriental, is to assure oneself that these do in fact promise to give us more. No one who has picked up the Upanishads, for example, or the Dark Night of the Soul, will have failed to stand at attention, as before something severe and grand, if only for a moment. But the moment passes, and we are once again left dumb and blind, stricken with the self, incoherent, babbling, indecisive. It was this same self, that Thursday morning in traffic, which registered the impression, the existence, of a homeless woman in Alexandria. She put an end to what must have otherwise been a nonsensical, totally forgettable morning. She was suffering, and as a result of her injuries, her wants and needs, I was cut to the quick. I wanted to help, to make it better. But I didn’t. Instead, I went about my affairs for the rest of the day, said hello, smiled, waved goodbye. Inside, however, I felt conflicted and sick. How could I enjoy anything at all, allow myself to laugh, to indulge in jokes and humor, aware as I now was of this person, and like her, many such others the world over, suffering, crying, bitter, despondent, angry, hopeless? I feel it now as I write. It hurts. Something is changing inside of me; but I feel like one who postpones the inevitable for another hour. Like St. Augustine, I would sleep and delay a little longer, than rouse. I’m afraid. I don’t know what it means for me, for my life, to feel these things. The best I have to offer, it seems, is inconsequential, so long as I continue to lead my life half-asleep.
I have driven by that corner many times since. I’ve not seen the woman again. Somewhere, perhaps, she stands alone, with a pensive face, downcast eyes, and a world rushing by her as before. It will not end with her, with me, I know. But God bless her, she has put an end to something.
