But always in the background, though never much credited, is Merton as a serious student of literature and philosophy. Indeed, most of his friends are novelists, poets or other literary types, and he himself teaches literature and writes.
The chasm between his two halves is enormous, perhaps greater than even Merton realizes. In one paragraph he can rhapsodize about Mary, Our Lady, mother of God, seemingly lost in clouds of what the less spiritually inclined might write oft as much hocus-pocus. And then in the next paragraph, he’ll land solidly back on earth, every trace of religiosity extinguished, bringing to life some mundane human experience, often quite sardonically.
Take his depiction of radical chic, circa 1936, at a party held in a Park Avenue apartment of a Barnard College student and Young Communist League member. “There was a big grand piano on which someone played Beethoven while the Reds sat around on the floor. Later we had a sort of Boy Scout campfire group in the living room, singing heavy Communist songs, including that delicate anti-religious classic, ‘There’ll be a pie in the sky when you die.’”
Or consider how he describes English sentimentality as a “big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside ... games of cricket in the long summer afternoon ... and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.”
This is someone who, six years after joining the monastery, can admit: “Is there any man who has ever gone through a whole lifetime without dressing himself up, in his fancy, in the habit of a monk and enclosing himself in a cell where he sits magnificent in heroic austerity and solitude, while all the young ladies who hitherto were cool to his affections in the world come and beat on the gates of the monastery crying, ‘Come out, come out!’” Merton, it seems to me, acts more surprised than he has any right to be when he complains that the writer that is his other half “meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear.”
Still, he did it: At the age of 36, he became a monk. And he lived that way until his death, at the age of 59. Few readers will be so moved by Merton’s example that they’re ready to follow him into the cloister; most will not share his faith, much less his devotion. Still, there is much here for them, too. For while Merton climbs the mountains, he tells us much about the valley below in which the rest of us reside.
“We live in a society,” he writes, “whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.”
A degree of serenity awaits us, Merton’s life suggests, if we can but shut up long enough, cease our striving long enough, to listen and to see.
Death Be Not Proud
____________
By John Gunther
First published in 1949
“He had the most brilliant promise of any child I have ever known,” one of his doctors said after he died. He played the recorder, collected stamps, sailed and rode. He performed chemistry experiments, studied Einstein’s theory of relativity. He was genuinely kind and good; even as a teenager, he was protective of others’ feelings. He displayed high intelligence and lively wit. Once, asked what he wanted to eat when at last freed from the medically prescribed diet on which he’d been placed, he replied: “A glass of full milk, an artichoke with hollandaise sauce, spaghetti and meat balls and a chocolate ice-cream soda.”
His name was John Gunther, namesake of his father, the best-selling author of Inside Europe and its successors. He would have been70 at century’s end, but he died at age 17, of a brain tumor, in 1947. Death Be Not Proud—the title comes from a poem by John Donne—is his father’s memoir of the final 15 months of his life.
During that period, his parents sought treatment or cure in specialist after specialist. They tried surgery, X-rays, a peculiar mustard treatment, and a controversial low-salt, low-sugar, low-protein diet that for a while seemed to arrest the tumor. Sometimes, Johnny seemed to get better; once or twice, he improved so dramatically they were left jubilant at the prospect of cure. But always the tumor returned—though never, up until the day he died, did it undermine his intellect. Only the worsening left side of his body hinted at the eruption in the right occipital lobe of his brain.
His parents consulted 32 or 33 physicians by the time Johnny died. The author hints that this ran into a lot of money, and that he was in debt, but in the end Johnny benefited from almost limitless medical resources, including some of the foremost specialists in the United States and Canada. Access to medical care in this country, we’re reminded, is not now, and never has been democratic. Yet even the finest medical care is sometimes powerless to defy nature’s will.
Though a story of one boy’s illness and death, Death Be Not Proud also grants insight into a remarkable family inhabiting a rarefied world. There is, of course, the author himself, a globe-trotting figure who inhabits an elegant Park Avenue world of maids and fine restaurants in the years before New York became so difficult; who counts among his friends famous publishers and authors; whose report on the day’s activities is apt to include mention of a Book-of-the-Month Club sale.
Then there is Johnny, the dying prodigy, who comes alive not alone through the filter of his father’s perceptions but through his own letters to parents, teachers and friends, and through diary entries. If death is made more tragic in proportion to the nobility of the life it extinguishes, Johnny’s is a great tragedy.
Finally, there is Frances Gunther, the author’s divorced wife, who during Johnny’s illness moves from her house in the country to John’s Manhattan apartment, while John camps out at a nearby hotel. Even from John Gunther’s account it’s plain that mother and son shared a special relationship, that Johnny could talk to her as he probably couldn’t to his father, that for the two of them Jesus and Buddha, truth and goodness, lived.
In a brief final chapter, we encounter Frances in her own words, close up. If John Gunther is all journalistic restraint, Frances is all poetry, passion and lofty ideals. “I was trying to create of him a newer kind of human being: an aware person, without fear, and with love: a sound individual, adequate of life anywhere on earth, and loving life everywhere and always. We would talk about this as our experiment together.”
The experiment worked. Death Be Not Proud is not just the clinical record of the doctors’ failure to restore a sick boy to health. It is a report on a great experiment in which the stream of vibrant “data” that was Johnny’s personality and intellect sadly, prematurely, stopped.
Ecclesiastes
____________
From the Old Testament
The work of literature that is Ecclesiastes has blessed our culture with at least two book titles—Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. Quotation compendiums abound with its poetic riches. The words of a popular song from the 1960s, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” are taken directly from what is perhaps its most lyrical passage, beginning: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven ...”
“Koheleth,” its would-be author, is actually a transliteration from Hebrew of a word that in Greek became “Ecclesiastes,” and which means a preacher who addresses a public assembly. Though traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, who lived in the 10th century B.C., Ecclesiastes almost certainly dates from much later, perhaps as recently as 200 B.C.
Apparently admitted to full Scriptural standing only in 100 A.D. at the Synod of Jamnia, Ecclesiastes has been termed “the most heretical book of the third century B.C.” Heretical, perhaps, in that there’s so little explicitly religious about it. Indeed, some scholars see, in certain almost formulaic references to God, the hand of a pious post-Koheleth figure who sought to make it more explicitly God-fearing.
Ecclesiastes’ spiritual cont
ent would seem to bear as much kinship to the Eastern philosophical tradition, with its stress on the futility of worldly desires, as to orthodox Judaism or traditional Christianity. It worries more about this life than the next. Even as it emphasizes the inevitability of death, it extols the ordinary pleasures of daily living.
Indeed, it invests with a cloak of wisdom what many do quite naturally: “Enjoy life with the wife whom though lovest all the days of thy vanity; for that is thy portion in life, and in thy labour where though labourest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand attaineth to do by thy strength, that do; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, wither though goest.”
Its recurring admonition, “all is vanity and striving after wind,” is delivered with the relentlessness of a meditational mantra. Or perhaps, with the same power with which modern advertising drives home a single, simple message over and over again, embellished from time to time, but in the end always the same: Life is short. All our strivings are for nothing. Death awaits us all.
Pessimistic? In a sense. One’s hopes and dreams, one’s labors, one’s accumulations of knowledge or wealth—all amount to but a “striving after wind.”
Yet the idea is freeing, too. For in dashing prospects of some Grand Theme to life, Ecclesiastes enriches little themes—marriage, children, work. Eat, drink and be merry? Why you heard it first in Ecclesiastes: “So I commend mirth,” writes Koheleth, “that a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry, and that this should accompany him in his labour all the days of his life which God hath given him.”
So there’s something oddly comforting about the seemingly grim message of Ecclesiastes: While humankind’s daily struggle may count for nothing in the end,
The earth abideth forever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,
And hastest to his place where he ariseth,
The wind goeth toward the south,
And turneth unto the north;
It turneth about continually in its circuit.
...
That which hath been is that which shall be,
And that which hath being done is that which shall be done;
And there is nothing new under the heavens.
Churchgoers, and their non-Christian counterparts, often need little prompting to dip into their Old or New Testaments. But non-believers today—it was not so true in years past—will sometimes read everything in sight before turning to the Bible, choosing to spurn the conventional wisdom that sees in it much wisdom and beauty.
Ecclesiastes proves the conventional wisdom right. “It was a wise providence,” an interpreter has written of Koheleth, “that gave this man’s work a place in scripture.”
Lost Horizon
____________
By James Hilton
First published in 1933
Half a century ago, with publication of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, a new word began its absorption into the English language. Shangri-La, says the dictionary today, means “an imaginary, remote paradise on earth.” Hilton pictures a far-off world (yet here, on our planet), peopled with “aliens” endowed with mysterious powers (yet who look just like us). The effect is that of science fiction, only without the science.
Lost Horizon is set in the Far East, following one of the native revolts that periodically rocked Britain’s colonial empire. Four Westerners are being airlifted out of pillaged Baskul, India, when one of them, glimpsing the pilot, becomes suspicious. Later, he looks out the window and instead of seeing spread beneath him the airport at Peshawar, their destination, sees “an opaque mist, veiling an immense, sun-brown desolation.” Later comes the bared revolver, the unscheduled landing and refueling, renewed flight ...
Ultimately, they crash in a valley hidden high in Tibet, icy mountain peaks of unspeakable beauty rising around them. The pilot dies, and they are left, alone, huddled against howling winds. Soon they meet a group of stocky Tibetans in sheepskins bearing an elderly Chinese in a sedan chair, Chang, whose impeccable English is laced with Shakespeare. Chang and the Tibetans escort the four of them across the valley to the lamasery known as Shangri-La.
A benign theocracy of lamas, most of them versed in music, literature, and the arts, Shangri-La reveres moderation above all. “We rule with moderate strictness,” Chang tells them, “and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.”
Of the four Westerners the author brings to Shangri-La, three qualify as little more than stock characters. There’s Miss Brinklow, the missionary worker, single-minded in her faith and oozing disdain for “native” ways. And Barnard, a plain-talking American apparently on oil company business, his speech littered with “I reckons” and “gees.” And young, pink-cheeked Mallinson—blunt, impetuous, lacking in grace, impatient of Eastern impassivity.
The best developed of the four is Conway, a former Oxford don and now an officer in Britain’s consular service. One foot in the world of action and power, the other in that of quiet and contemplation, Conway has just helped negotiate the safe release of 80 Westerners from Baskul— an act exciting young Mallinson’s admiration. Yet now, in Shangri-La, the other side of Conway’s personality emerges. Relaxed about their predicament, he actually seems to enjoy his luxurious captivity. Mallinson is incensed. Why doesn’t Conway want to leave this crazy, godforsaken place?
For a reader buffeted by the storms of modern life, it hardly seems surprising. Sheltered from the wind and isolated from the cares of the world, Shangri-La looks down upon a verdant valley, up to towering, mountain peaks. Its library is stocked with the finest literature of both West and East. Its moderation-in-all-things ethic extends even to sex. The food is well prepared, Chang’s conversation always lively, the bathing facilities luxurious.
Indeed, presumably stuck there for only two months—when an expedition from the outside will presumably guide them back out—three of the four travelers sink comfortably into their new lives, reluctant to leave, ever. Mallinson, alone among them, does not. His nervous hankering to be gone from the place never diminishes. “There’s something dark and evil about it,” he says of Shangri-La.
And though that sentiment comes from the least attractive of the characters—one easy to write off as inflexible, immature, and mired in the trivialities of the world outside—the reader’s feelings about Shangri-La take a subtle turn. As do, for that matter, Conway’s, whose private conversations with the High Lama have revealed to him many of Shangri-La’s mysteries.
In all the subsequent action, that fleeting doubt is never erased. Is there something ugly and unnatural in life up here, away from the cares of the world? And is there something noble and good, after all, in Western striving? Those haunting questions make Lost Horizon more provocative by far than the one-dimensional Message novel it might otherwise have become.
The Bhagavad Gita
(“Song of God”)
________
Sanskrit poem probably written between 500 and 200 B.C.
For what is held up as Hinduism’s most sacred text, it begins inauspiciously enough. The warrior Arjuna stands upon the field of battle, on the even of the fighting. He is stricken with fear, disconsolate at the prospect of the many lives sure to be lost, many from his family. “Life goes from my limbs,” he wails, “and my mouth is sear and dry; a trembling overcomes my body, and my hair shudders in horror.”
Whereupon the deity Krishna asks: “Whence this lifeless dejection, Arjuna, in this hour, the hour of trial? Strong men know not despair, Arjuna, for this wins neither heaven nor earth. Fall not into degrading weakness, for this becomes not a man who is a man.”
Is this how the Bhagavad Gita reveals the great Krishna, god of the Hindus? As a macho god who, far from urging peace and reconciliation, encourages the coming slaughter?
Even Arjuna is bothered: “Why does thou enjoin upon me the ter
rible action of war? My mind is in confusion because in thy words I find contradictions.”
But Krishna is no god of war. Something else is going on here, something alien to western sensibilities. For Krishna is saying, It doesn’t matter. Do not hold out against the inevitable battle. Do not rail at events. Do not strive to overturn them. “Action is greater than inaction; perform therefore thy task in life.”
The battle will be terrible? Men will die? Arjuna may die? None of this matters, counsels Krishna. “Weapons cannot hurt the Spirit and fire can never burn him. Untouched is he by drenching waters, untouched is he by parching winds.” Life and death are but worldly preoccupations. The body does not count, the senses are an illusion. “From the world of the senses, Arjuna, comes heat and comes cold, and pleasure and pain. They come and they go; they are transient. Arise above them, strong soul.” Spirit is all.
Employing surprisingly linear, almost “scientific” logic, Krishna outlines just how worldly strivings lead to sorrow: “When a man dwells on the pleasures of sense, attraction for them arises in him. From attraction arises desire, the lust of possession, and this leads to passion, anger,” ultimately to confusion of mind, loss of reason, destruction.
For Krishna, the ascetic diet, the sexual orgy, working too hard or working not at all, all equally reflect disharmony. “A harmony in eating and resting, in sleeping and keeping awake; a perfection in whatever one does. This is the Yoga that gives peace from all pain.” Balance, evenness, calm.
The visible world around us, says Krishna, is illusion. Distinctions meaningful to us—light and darkness, beginnings and ends—all are but manifestations of the same One. “I am the cleverness of the gambler’s dice,” says Krishna. “I am the beauty of all things beautiful. I am victory and the struggle for victory. I am the goodness of those who are good.” All is but a single radiance. Victory and defeat. Life and death. Why strive for one or the other?
Vintage Reading Page 19