Vintage Reading

by Robert Kanigel

  Neither can scientists. But when they do, a wonderful moment arrives in the intellectual life of our species.

  IX

  The Realm of Spirit

  Holy and Human

  Gilgamesh — Babylonian epic

  Confessions — Saint Augustine

  The Golem — Gustav Meyrink

  The Razor’s Edge — W. Somerset Maugham

  The Seven Storey Mountain — Thomas Merton

  Death Be Not Proud — John Gunther

  Ecclesiastes — Old Testament

  Lost Horizon — James Hilton

  The Bhagavad Gita — Sanskrit poem

  Night — Elie Wiesel

  The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

  _________________________________

  Is there a God? Where is He when evil comes? Can the rational and logically reductive explain all that needs explaining, or do spiritual realms stand beside those of the intellect, revealing their own truths? What is the purpose of life? How ought we to live and die?

  It’s easy to dismiss such questions as beyond us, or else laugh them off as the stuff of Peanuts cartoons. But sometimes, in the soul’s dark night, we seek answers — and in these books, ancient and more recent, may perhaps find them.

  Gilgamesh

  ____________

  Babylonian epic poem dating to

  as early as third millennium B.C.

  Gilgamesh is king in Babylonia, a brutal tyrant who has squandered any respect or love his people ever had for him. Into his life comes Enkidu, a half animal-half human nursed into manhood by a prostitute.

  One day the king comes to town to select a temple virgin as his bed partner, only to find Enkidu blocking the way, acclaimed as new champion of the people.

  They fell like wolves

  At each other’s throats,

  Like bulls bellowing,

  And horses gasping for breath

  That have run all day

  Desperate for rest and water

  But mysteriously, amid their struggle, they pause, look into each other’s eyes, and see some irreducible part of themselves alive in the other.

  They become friends. Together they venture forth to kill Humbaba, powerful lord of the cedar forest. Each gives the other strength and will that, for the moment, the other may lack. In the end, the head of Humbaba is left swinging from a tree.

  The goddess Ishtar, whose marriage proposal Gilgamesh has spurned, turns bitterly to her father, demanding a heavenly bull wreak revenge on humankind in general and Gilgamesh in particular. But Enkidu, kills the bull, hurling its thigh bone back at the enraged Ishtar.

  The gods decree that one of them, Gilgamesh or Enkidu, must die, and Enkidu wakes from a dream realizing it must be he. Weakened by his wounds, he slips away ...

  Gilgamesh knew his friend was close to death.

  He tried to recollect aloud their life together

  That had been so brief, so empty of gestures

  They never felt they had to make. Tears filled his own eyes

  And here a story, at first blush a paean to the mindless violence and strutting of a barbarous age, seems transmuted, in the love between these two men, into something softer, gentler, more modern. Enkidu does die. Gilgamesh is left inconsolable, his grief so prolonged and sharp that no one who has felt cheated by similar loss can soon forget it.

  Gilgamesh wept bitterly for his friend.

  He felt himself now singled out for loss

  Apart from everyone else. The word Enkidu

  Roamed through every thought

  Like a hungry animal through empty lairs

  In search of food. The only nourishment

  He knew was grief, endless in its hidden source

  Yet never ending hunger.

  With Enkidu’s death, the tone of the story shifts once more, now becoming a kind of spiritual mystery. For Gilgamesh doesn’t passively accept the death of his friend. Rather, he sets out to overturn the verdict rendered by the gods, venturing off alone into the country of the dead, trying to restore Enkidu to life.

  This, then, is the story that comes down to us through text chiseled into stone tablets, unearthed in the last century from ruins in Nineveh, in Mesopotamia. (The verse transcribed above, by Herbert Mason, represents only one of many translations available, most of them much more literal.)

  Gilgamesh displays no stiff upper lip in the face of his friend’s death. Many a therapist of today might judge the intensity of his response “inappropriate;” might suggest that. after some due period of mourning, he pick up the pieces of his life, set grief aside. Those of more guarded emotions, meanwhile, might even judge the intensity of his response unseemly or undignified.

  And yet, for me, it is Gilgamesh’s response to the death of his friend that seems more authentic, more true to human nature, than the store-bought funeral etiquette of today that demands austere dignity in the face of loss too terrible to bear.

  Confessions

  ____________

  By Saint Augustine

  First appeared in 398 A.D.

  Is there reason for any but a Christian theologian to read these Confessions of Aurelius Augustinus, whom the Catholic Church later called a saint? Are they more than just a long, extended prayer fit for a distinguished place in the religious literature but otherwise never to be read?

  Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 A.D., son of a philandering, pagan father and pious Christian mother. Both strains run deep in him: The Confessions hold interest for modern, secular readers largely in the tension between the two warring elements of his nature.

  In his lusty, irrepressible youth, his father’s example plainly ruled him. “I liked to score a fine win at sport or to have my ears tickled by the makebelieve of the stage, which only made them itch the more. As time went on my eyes shone more and more with the same eager curiosity, because I wanted to see the shows and sports which grown-ups enjoyed.”

  Later, adult temptations proved equally irresistible. He succumbed frequently to the embrace of women. He may also have had at least one homosexual liaison; Augustine is not clear on the point, saying only that his relationship to a male friend “was sweeter to me than all the joys of life as I lived it then.” When his friend died, he grieved, even contemplated suicide: “I felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies, and life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with half a soul.”

  (Even after his conversion to Christianity when he was 33, he confesses, his appetites sometime overcame him: “There have been times when overeating has stolen upon your servant. By your mercy may you keep it far from me!”)

  But the same “unholy curiosity” that led Augustine toward the pleasures of this world also pushed him toward a search for Light and Truth. For years he was a devotee of a vegetarian cult called the Manichees, which pictured good and evil as forever at war, and left room only for a vestigial Christianity. He later grew sympathetic to the Skeptics, who held that one could be sure of nothing.

  The ascetic side of Augustine warred with the hedonistic. Modern psychiatrists might be quick to see them as but two sides of a single coin— an extremist personality at odds with itself. Nonetheless, this clash of temperaments launched a soul-searching that, through the Confessions, still impresses with its insight and sincerity.

  Swayed by intellectual and spiritual factors, but also plainly moved by the piety of his mother (who would later herself be canonized), Augustine was ultimately won over to the Church. The scene in the garden in which he finally breaks into anguished tears before his Lord is particularly moving. But even more so is the death of his mother: After she dies, Augustine writes, “I closed her eyes, and a great wave of sorrow surged into my heart ... It was because I was now bereft of all the comfort that I had had from her that my soul was wounded and my life seemed shattered, for her life and mine had been as one.”

  One need hardly embrace the Catholic faith to find the story of Augustine’s search for
higher truth uplifting—or, for that matter, to find the battle between his warring selves dramatic. For all of us with personal demons to exorcise or faced with a choice between the high road and the low, Augustine offers a lofty model.

  “The eye is attracted by beautiful objects, by gold and silver and all such things. There is great pleasure, too, in feeling something agreeable to the touch, and material things have various qualities to please each of the other senses.” Yet one follows the path of sin, Augustine tells God, “when one love[s] the things you have created instead of loving you.”

  The Golem

  ____________

  By Gustav Meyrink

  First published in 1915

  The stark terror of a Poe mystery and the existential torment of an early Ingmar Bergman film grafted onto a Isaac Bashevis Singer story: that, in crude outline, is The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink.

  “Once in every generation a spiritual disturbance zigzags, like a flash of lightning, right through the Ghetto, taking possession of the souls of the living to some end we know not of, and rising in the form of a wraith that appears to our senses in the guise of a human entity.” This, as Meyrink relates the legend through a minor character’s monologue, is the Golem, an early Jewish predecessor of Frankenstein’s monster. Every 33 years, according to folklore, it roams the crowded alleys of the Prague ghetto, leaving terror and confusion in its wake.

  Yet as befits a being first given human form, according to legend, by a 16th century rabbi, there is another, more spiritual side to the Golem. This slant-eyed creature, half human and half supernatural, confronts those it meets with the alien elements of their own personalities, provoking in them spiritual crisis. And that is the fate that befalls the protagonist of Meyrink’s bizarre tale, Athanasius Pernath.

  Pernath, we learn, is a gem cutter whose past mental breakdown has left him with a great empty hole in the center of his memory. Now, in the days of the Golem’s return to Prague, the aching mystery of his own past threatens his composure. He dreams obsessively of a stone that is like a lump of fat. The Golem gives him a book whose words come to life as he reads them: “From an invisible mouth words were streaming forth, turning into living entities, and winging straight towards me. They twirled and paraded like gaily dressed female slaves, only to sink on the floor or evaporate in iridescent mist.” Later, from the jail cell in which he is incarcerated for suspected murder, Pernath looks out to see a clock face without hands.

  The whole novel is like that, a succession of dreams, reveries and horrors punctuated by intervals of waking consciousness. Soon, the line between what’s real and what’s not blurs. The reader first struggles to maintain the distinction. But ultimately, he’s swept along on the tide of Meyrink’s imagination, and the line breaks down altogether. The sensation is freeing.

  To be sure, conventional plot elements coexist with the fantastic. A villainous junk dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, wishes to reveal an affair between one Dr. Savioli and a local countess. The sly, scheming Charousek, meanwhile, seeks revenge on Wassertrum. Hillel, knowledgeable of Kabbala, the body of mystic Jewish belief, gives Pernath spiritual sustenance. We encounter hidden letters, clandestine meetings, crowded evenings spent at Loisitschek’s, the local haunt for neighborhood lowlifes ...Most of these more realistic scenes are set in the dark rooms, lightless alleys and gloomy stairways and passages of the Prague ghetto. Yet they are like the clear light of day compared to Pernath’s encounters with the Golem and his own hidden past—truly, dark nights of the soul.

  At least by one translation from the German, Meyrink’s novel is sometimes choppy, its dialogue archaic, its pages cluttered with exclamation points and other typographical devices, its story unnecessarily twisted back on itself. Still, the ambience created is haunting. One senses a gifted amateur at work, a writer of extraordinary gifts who has yet to refine his craft. Indeed, The Golem was Meyrink’s first novel, and appeared when he was 47, after an already full life spent as banker, champion athlete, occultist, prison inmate (three months for embezzlement), and finally short story writer and editor.

  He died in 1932. A few years later The Golem and the other works of Gustav Meyrink were among the first to be burned by the Nazis.

  The Razor’s Edge

  ____________

  By W. Somerset Maugham

  First published in 1944

  The settings are exotic, the characters memorable, the story believable. But what most stays with you about W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge is the curious way in which the main character inhabits the distant periphery of the novel, not its center.

  Early on, Maugham’s lengthy and affectionate description of Elliott Templeton places this art dealer, rake, and connoisseur of decadence at stage center. Only imperceptibly does one realize that no, it’s not Elliott but Larry Darrell—“a pleasant-looking boy, neither handsome nor plain, rather shy and in no way remarkable”—who is the main character. We normally see Elliott up close, while Larry remains shadowy, and this inversion of foreground and background runs all through the novel, haunting it.

  The story takes place in the years after World War I. Larry, a veteran of aerial dogfights over Europe in which he was almost killed, has just returned to Chicago. He is a changed man. While his friends hurry back to promising careers, he seems bent on a mysterious personal quest. He won’t talk about his war experiences. He spends hour upon hour in the library reading, studying, thinking.

  At first it seems he may yet marry Isabel, the charming but willful daughter of Elliott Templeton’s sister. There’s only one hitch. He has no job, and shows no inclination to get one. Rather, he’s perfectly willing to live on his meager trust fund. He wants to “loaf,” he tells Isabel, by which he means to study, travel and experience the world. She declines his offer of marriage, and instead marries Gray Maturin, the solid, resolutely conventional, cliché-bound son of an investment broker.

  Years pass. The stock market crashes, sweeping away the Maturin fortune (though Gray manages to keep Isabel in Dior dresses). The action shifts to Paris and to the Riviera. Larry is rarely seen. At one point, he takes up with a childhood friend from Chicago, with whom he used to read poetry, but who has now descended to a life of drunkenness and wanton sensuality. Ultimately, he travels to India and meets a guru, Shri Ganesha.

  The narrator of these events is pictured as far removed from them. He learns what happens, often years later, only through long conversations with the principals. The reader, in turn, learns of them third-hand, and then only when the narrator sees fit to tell us. It is a curious device. But it works: the mystery deepens, the alpine mist enveloping Larry and his life thickens.

  In the book’s opening pages, the narrator apologizes for calling it a novel, insisting that all the events and characters are real. Indeed, the narrator bears the name of Maugham, who wrote a novel called The Moon and Sixpence, which the real Maugham did write. No doubt the biographers can say whether the author’s apology is just a literary device or, on the other hand, means that Larry, Isabel and Elliott really lived.

  But it hardly matters. Fiction or fact, The Razor’s Edge illuminates the conflict between the pull of the spirit and the pleasures of home, family, work and social life. Maugham sympathizes—a little too unambivalently for my taste—with Larry’s spiritual side. Indeed, in a whodunit-like twist, Isabel stoops to a contemptible and destructive act that casts all she represents of the earth-bound and the conventional in the blackest light.

  Eventually, Larry gives up his slim inheritance and plans to return to the United States, to bring some of the wisdom of the East to his spirit-starved homeland. This he will accomplish, he tells Maugham, by buying a taxi cab, which will give him both the mobility and livelihood he needs. In America, he explains, “it would be an equivalent to the staff and the begging-bowl of the wandering mendicant.”

  Since that conversation, the narrator tells us, he has heard nothing of Larry. But “I have never since taken a taxi, in New York, without glancin
g up on the chance that I might meet Larry’s gravely smiling, deep-set eyes.”

  Many readers of The Razor’s Edge will find themselves looking for him, too.

  The Seven Storey Mountain

  ____________

  By Thomas Merton

  First published in 1948

  In the final pages of The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk living in the Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, complains to God: “You have contradicted everything. You have left me in no-man’s land.” For while now at last committed to solitude and the contemplative life, he is still being urged by the abbot to write poems, books, even essays and magazine articles for the world down below.

  Son of an accomplished English painter and his American wife, a former student at Cambridge University and New York’s Columbia, well-trained in the ways of intellectual and literary life down in the world, Merton, it seems, has a double vocation. And his need to express his thoughts on paper interferes with his hard-won new life as a white-robed member of the order. “There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister,” he writes, leaving him in bondage to “contracts, reviews, page proofs and all the plans for books and articles that I am saddled with.”

  Though the conflict surfaces only late in the book, there are whispers of it all along. The Seven Storey Mountain is, first of all, a spiritual autobiography, full of Merton’s crises of faith and doubts about his true vocation, and finally his slow, winding journey up to Gethsemane. He recounts his early travels with his father in the monastery-studded French countryside, his days at boarding school and in the university, his adolescent insecurities, his flirtations with communism, his disillusionment with the clamorous world of striving and success, and his conversion to Catholicism.