The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  “Since I have made bold to mention politics, sir,” he continued, “then I cannot refrain from dredging the truth up before you as it must appear to any man who has eyes in his head: it is a blind man who does not see that communism is the social polity of the future. These are mournful tidings, sir, in the first place because of how many prophets will surely be stoned before it is accomplished, and in the second place because of how many stupid old wives’ tales will be spread in order to put it to shame. The Church in its role as a worldly institution most resembles a monarchy, and holds that monarchy has its foundation in the will of God, among other things because Christ considered it just to pay taxes to Caesar. The Church has been an untiring advocate of knightly riffraff and tribes of berserks, the so-called noble classes that in the old days sprang up like mushrooms on manure heaps after every war, convinced themselves that they owned the Earth and looked upon themselves as some sort of supermen whom the masses ought to bear upon golden chairs. It certainly was deft of the Church to take sides with the nobility in order to secure itself souls. But now it has had to watch as the will of God concerning monarchy and the nobility has gone the same way as the twenty-four royal dynasties of Egypt. First the bourgeoisie devoured the will of God, and then the plutocracy devoured the bourgeoisie. Society in our time is subservient to the despotism of adventurists! Society in our time is camouflaged anarchy: every hand is raised against the next; everyone fights and hates everyone else, and it’s sheer coincidence that grants the victory! Coincidence creates kings like Rothschild and Stinnes, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Morgan, Field and Astor; but human reason and human virtue are trampled down beneath the feet of dogs and men.

  “Reality is what has happened and we must look it straight in the eye. No matter what the will of God might be according to the theological sciences, God has let everything happen as it has. It is too late to speak for kings nowadays, when the noblemen have become dancers in coffeehouses, streetcar attendants, and shoeshine boys. Anarchy joins in a game of blindman’s bluff with a gullible public under the mask of parliamentary democracy, which is an illusion, freedom of speech, which is cant, and philanthropy, which is venality. In other words, the time has come for human reason to stand up on its own two feet and change the course of the game.

  “Human reason, sir, is the most vicious power under the sun. When human reason takes to its feet, it shovels the masses like cast-iron rods into enormous crucibles and lights an engulfing fire beneath; then it forges from them a sharp-edged weapon, which it whets quite diligently, sir, because it will not cease from killing until the blood drips from the bleeding trunks of the last enemies of mankind. This is what has been done in Russia, and is what will be done throughout the world. In each and every country wise men are sharpening their weapons for the decisive battle, and the weapons are the masses; the battle is the revolution.

  “When I read in the world newspapers about the fear of communism as a reactionary response propagated by members of the Catholic Church, it seems to me that between the lines one can read the pope’s fear concerning whether the Church will stand or fall because of the backwardness or imperfection of the social order; in other words, the fear that Christ will break his promise, which the Church is constantly shouting, that he will keep watch over it until the end of the world. Am I in the wrong, sir? Or does the Church fear that its teachings concerning charity will become invalid in communist society? If so, why did your father, Benedict of Nursia, found a communist society? When Christian monks founded a society in Paraguay it was communist, not unlike what is happening in Russia now. In your rule the greatest care is taken to ensure that the individual is not a passive witness to an imperfect social order; each individual stands in a legally binding position to the whole; everyone is given work according to his own abilities; every single individual is a limb on the societal body, he exists for the sake of the community, the community for his sake; if anyone becomes sick he is nursed without a word; those whom old age bends are allowed to live their days without care or worry; no one is allowed to suffer need; all receive their daily bread, but nothing beyond that. The abbot is not superior to the brothers except in his gift for organization and his abilities as a leader, which he has received from God, in addition to the cross upon his chest, as a sign of the one in whose name he governs. Very fine, sir: in this collective state of yours, Christian love of one’s neighbor and God’s Ten Commandments are put into practice in a simple manner, not with lotteries, collections, and vaudeville shows, nor with cobbled rags to be distributed to the poor at Christmas, but rather with simple government, organization founded on human reason. And it is the same kind of government, the same kind of system, founded on the same kind of human reason, that is described in Marxist doctrine: cooperation in place of endless war, collective ownership of the Earth’s endowments in place of matches of tug-of-war over them, the legally binding position of the individual in relation to the whole, in place of armed despotism in which the most brazen adventurist tyrannizes the masses; in other words, Benedict of Nursia in place of Alexander Borgia.

  “Doesn’t the Church have two thousand years of experience of this: that in a social order in which people are denied everything except for the fight for the necessities of life, the doctrine of love for mankind is nothing other than seed strewn about for the birds of the air? Will it not learn any lessons from current events? Does it turn a deaf ear to the Great World War, which speaks the clearest language about the sterility of the doctrine of confraternity in a society founded on conflict between men? Does it not see that it has been playing the fiddle for two thousand years while Rome has been burning? Or does it intend to wait for the Christian world to rewrite the Lord’s Prayer for the Devil with an even more appalling war than the Great World War?”

  32.

  At home Steinn was accustomed to needing only five minutes to win over those who listened to him, and he would have found nothing more natural here than for the monk to rise to his feet, throw off his cowl, renounce the one true faith, and shout: “Eviva la bandiera rossa!”28 But this did not happen. This man must have been living in a hideout of firmly rational thought. He smiled the entire time that Steinn rambled on.

  “I find it a true pleasure to listen to you speak,” he replied finally. “I admire your elocution. And I sincerely rejoice to meet a strong young soul who not only finds himself compelled to take a stand and reproach men for their errors, but also to carry a clean slate.”

  And although the monk did not take any steps to expound the excellence of the true faith or make excuses for Christian culture to this elated Scandinavian, it was far from it that he considered him worthless: instead he looked him over long and carefully, while Steinn let his blazing eyes rest on the man who slept under the continental edition of the Daily Mail.

  Why didn’t the monk answer? Why didn’t he try to defend Christianity? Does he think that it’s sufficient proof of the pope’s infallibility to let all of the criticism rush past his ears like wind and pay me some empty compliments? Steinn thought it reasonable that a Benedictine monk should be ready and willing to haggle about his faith no less than someone sitting in a café in Reykjavík.

  But the monk seemed not to give any thought to approaching the field where Steinn had wanted to force their conversation into pitched battle, and instead finally asked, courteously, and yet perhaps not entirely unsarcastically:

  “Would it be too importunate if your fellow traveler, whom you might never see again, were to be so bold as to reveal that he is slightly curious to know what such a brilliant thinker has in mind to do?”

  Steinn looked straight at the man and answered without hesitation:

  “I am in search of perfection, like you. And I will not stop until I find it. I have no waking interest in anything but perfection. This is why my face is savage when I turn it toward others. You think that I am a communist? No, sir, I am a much greater revolutionary than that. The communist movement is worthless, per se. The communist
movement is only an inside-out capitalist movement, per se. I despise those who think that mankind would be happy if the masses were to take over the Kremlin, Buckingham Palace, or the Vatican, or were to get honey to eat instead of horse fat. On the other hand, it is a person with cataracts who does not see that the communist system is the social order of the future.

  “But in my eyes everything is worthless but God. I find him so remarkable that I have decided to write fifty poems about him in English. It is another matter whether he exists. My soul is like Kashmir, the valley of roses; I have been given glorious talents, and what’s more, the calling to put them to use. I have a friend in England, a professor at an Indian university, a man who is able to appreciate my talent, and I am now on my way to him to learn the English language thoroughly. He will be staying at home in England for three years. I intend to use the British Empire as a receiving set. Would you like to hear the headings? I have them all written here in my notebook. The world has never suspected that such poems could be slumbering in the harp of any poet. I plan to spend the next three years in seclusion.”

  The monk finally smiled in such a way that Steinn thought he understood everything.

  “And you have no hesitations about subjecting yourself to such a long period of self-denial for fifty poems?” he asked.

  “It’s not for the fifty poems, but for the sake of perfection, for the sake of God,” corrected Steinn.

  “Eh bien,” said the monk.

  “No, sir. I have no hesitations. My powers know no bounds. ‘The weakest power of my soul is more far-reaching than Heaven and earth,’ says Master Eckehart. I don’t feel that any ordeal is beyond my strength. My will is strong. Nothing between Heaven and Earth can ever subdue it. What I have firmly resolved shall be accomplished. Three years from now you will see the world shouting from the rooftops the things that I whisper in your ears tonight.”

  Now, finally, after Steinn had brought his political chatter to a close and had started to speak of his soul, the face of the canon gleamed with understanding. And the more unexpectedly that his prevarication had struck Steinn before, the more unprepared Steinn was now for the monk’s lack of perplexity, as he made his first affirmative remarks: “You intend,” he said, “to compose fifty perfect poems for God. Très bien. But has it never occurred to you, who have such a strong brain, that in fact it might not be your poems that God asks of you? Has it never occurred to you that perhaps God is served as little whether you give him either perfect poems or nothing at all? Has it never occurred to you that in fact it might not be your gifts that God demands, no matter how precious they might be?”

  This time it was Steinn Elliði who was tongue-tied, and he looked at the monk for a moment with questioning eyes. Is he trying to confuse me? he thought, and felt it worst that he did not know how to score a point against the monk; he was, however, on his guard not to endanger his own perspective under the weight of dialectic, preferring to allow the monk to explain his own view before they went any further. It was as if he suspected the cloaked man of having the ability to best his opponents with their own tricks.

  “If God is not served with perfect works, then I admit that I would be curious to hear you clarify the idea of God. What does this God of yours demand?”

  “With our external works, opera externa,” said the monk, “it is quite easy for us to become famous on rooftops, even overthrow entire states and subdue kingdoms. But of what avail is that? We will never subdue God’s kingdom with external works. One Lord’s Prayer, prayed at night while everyone is asleep, is a greater event than the revolution in Russia, even if no one will hear about it until Doomsday. If you had any notion as to what one sigh means for those who seek God in the night, the most famous, magnificent deed would become as worthless chaff in your eyes. The truth is not the external, but rather the internal. If you do not trust God to watch over the welfare of the world without you, then it would be healthy for you to remember that he created the world with all of its solar systems without you. Your poems and achievements may be incredible. ‘Your gifts are worth nothing to me,’ says the Lord. ‘I only ask for you yourself.’ It must be wonderful to hear one’s name praised from the rooftops, but ‘Quantum unusquisque est in oculis tuis, domine, tantum est et non amplius,’ says Bonaventura, which he learned from the humble man from Assisi: ‘What you are in the eyes of God, that you are and no more.’”

  Whether Jesuit disputational tricks or appeals to mysticism were being employed here, this unmilitant man knew the art of fixing his argument precisely, in sentences that were difficult to work one’s way around, and he also knew the power of letting his glance, mild, calm, and steady, accompany his words unyieldingly. And Steinn was becoming more and more convinced that the man was not a lamb, but an eagle; again he found himself at a loss for words.

  “I have never thought such a merciless thought as the one that you have planted in my mind, sir,” he said, “that perhaps art itself is one of the devil’s traps. Or what else could you possibly mean? Art, however, demands a sacrifice, sir! It demands self-denial no less than monasticism, and perhaps even more toil, more sleepless nights, more constant moments of despair. A true artist sacrifices everything for his gifts of grace; he renounces life’s fortune, even peace of mind; he renounces all human joy and celebrates only the fact that he is able to take on his shoulders all of the burdens that are bound to mankind, and he lies down like a camel to let himself be loaded with them.”

  It was almost as if Steinn’s voice contained a hint of a plea for mercy. But the monk was still too secure to dispute with him. And Steinn felt more and more that everything he had said, and even what he still had to say, would only come across as vain prattle in the ears of the stranger.

  “Once I knew a young man who had planned to follow the same path as you,” began the monk again. “He was also seeking the true reality. And he would not let anyone dissuade him. A young man demands the right to secure for himself, at a high price, the experience of life that he is in fact offered for free in the admonitions of his elders. The Way is all there is for a man, and those who are not on The Way are seeking The Way. Everyone chases his own dream: one to Brazil to play the violin, another to London to compose beautiful poems. No one can escape his fate. And yet The Way leads neither through Brazil nor through the British Empire. But do not forsake this one thing, and think about it when the time comes when you feel that the solar system will burst asunder and the Earth shatter under your feet: one thing has higher value than anything else, and that is la vie spirituelle, the working of grace on a man’s inner being.”

  Steinn looked silently at the monk’s smile and listened to his bright, pure voice, without being able to determine from his words whether he was a lunatic or a sage.

  “It would be my true pleasure to be able to meet you sometime later in life,” said the monk finally. “And should the time come when you find yourself compelled to discuss essential matters with a humble servant of the most holy Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, then you know where such an insignificant person can be found.”

  Steinn thanked his fellow traveler for his amity, found of course no impulse within him to consider such a visit as things stood now, but asked if he might send the canon a letter at his later convenience; in fact there were still quite a few things left that he wished to say to the Church.

  They said nothing more to each other; only the night spoke; the stars flew like sparks outside the window. But the monk’s words continued to echo in Steinn’s ears, although sleep fettered his tongue: God does not ask for your gifts, but rather for you. They were as indelible as unintelligible runes carved on a young tree. More than anything else, Steinn was overcome by a feeling approximating shame. He felt as if he had gotten more than he bargained for. He had behaved like an actor in a burlesque show before this unassuming man of the cloth. The monk was like a powerful oak tree, planted a thousand years ago, its roots deep in the Earth – but I am like a rootless, gripless walking stick that
some vagrant stuck in the grass yesterday to the disgrace of God, he thought. He felt that he was becoming smaller and smaller in the silence; he knew nothing, was nothing. In the same way, the monk grew larger; his silence was more powerful than his words, deeper. Perhaps he was inspired by the deepest verity of being, was perhaps more than a man, his humanity a revelation of a nobler world. He was perhaps a two-thousand-year-old master and the mouthpiece of the highest spirit, perhaps Krishna. Steinn Elliði was King Arjuna. And the train sped westward through France, like an immense insect from Earth’s primeval days.

  When Steinn woke in the morning in the Gare de Lyon in Paris he was alone in the cabin; the English couple had risen from death and the monk had vanished completely. But in his breast pocket he found a name-card with these words: Fr. Alban, moine bénédictin.29 Sept Fontaines. Belgique.

  33.

  Sussex, summer 1924. Highly esteemed sir. My deepest thanks for the edifying discussion we had in the train that autumn night in 1921. I make no secret of the fact that your personality has made a deep impression on me. I have not been able to forget you. Of course, I did not understand you completely and have long since forgotten what you said, but the more that time passes the stronger suspicion I have that there was wisdom in it. I have often thought about writing to you, sometimes even to come visit you. When we spoke together, I thought that I was on the right path. It is characteristic of those who are completely lost, that though they go in empty circles and arrive ten times at the same place, it is almost impossible to convince them that all they’ve done is go in circles. They even think that rivers run uphill. After I had composed twenty-eight poems I was finally able to see that I had gone in twenty-eight circles. I discovered that I was not on any path at all. I had sailed a fresh fair wind out into the blue. I have a great number of opinions as to what is right and what wrong, but unfortunately I must admit that I do not know what is right and what is wrong. The main point, says Maurice Barrès, is to be convinced that there exist only points of view, manières de voir, that they all contradict each other, but that we can with a little effort acquire them all regarding the same thing. But in spite of everything, I lack nothing so much as the dexterity to have all of the world’s opinions concerning the same thing at once. All of my manières de voir continuously miss the point, and all of my misfortune arises from this. There is not a shred of tranquility within me. I am a roaring lion in the desert. I am the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew: