Vintage Reading
Page 20
“He who feels neither excitement nor repulsion, who complains not and lusts not for things; who is beyond good and evil, and who has love—he is dear to me,” says Krishna.
Echoes can be heard here of, for example, the New Testament; but mostly all this stands wildly distant from the Western emphasis on achievement, expression, energy bent on changing the world—and out of which came Picasso, Einstein and Freud.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” urges Tennyson in “Ulysses.” Everything in the Bhagavad Gita argues to the contrary. To cease striving. To seek no more. To yield.
Can the two outlooks be reconciled?
Hardly. Our turbulent inner lives tell of the eternal war between them.
Night
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By Elie Wiesel
First published in 1958
That there should be such a genre as “Holocaust literature” is itself a tragedy. So terrible was the murder and madness of the Nazis, on so great a scale their destruction of European Jewry and others, so threatening to faith the enormity of their crimes, that thousands of scholars, journalists and holocaust survivors have struggled to make sense of it. One of the first to do so, in Night, was Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, and who saw most of the residents of his little Transylvanian town, Sighet, including his mother, father, and sister, murdered.
His story starts innocently enough, as a poor man with great, dreaming eyes teaches 13-year-old Wiesel cabbala, Judaism’s mystical tradition. “Then one day they expelled all the foreign Jews from Sighet.” His teacher was one of them. “What can we expect?” says a townsman. “It’s war ...” Nothing out of the ordinary.
Life returns to normal. It is 1942. Outside, in the air over Germany, on the outskirts of Stalingrad, war rages. But in Sighet, all is as it has been. “I continued to devote myself to my studies. By day, the Talmud, at night, the cabbala. My father was occupied with his business and the doings of the community. My grandfather had come to celebrate the New Year with us, so that he could attend the services of the famous rabbi of Borsche. My mother began to think that it was high time to find a suitable young man for Hilda.”
Suddenly, German soldiers appear. One officer takes up residence in the Kahn house, just across from Wiesel’s home. “They said he was a charming man—calm, likable, polite and sympathetic. Three days after he moved in he brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates.”
On the seventh day of Passover, the leaders of the Jewish community are arrested. “From that moment, everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun.”
The race toward death had begun.
More artful writers might have avoided such language. Show, don’t tell, says good writing practice. Don’t destroy hard-won immediacy with flights of melodrama. It’s not the only time we see such a superficial lack of literary polish.
Yet, peculiarly, what might otherwise be a defect here enhances the author’s credibility. It is as if Night had been not so much “composed” as plucked whole from a ravaged heart. His is no mere pretty rendering, Wiesel seems to tell us. The horrors he experienced fall beyond the rules and restraints of “art.” Giving vent to his grief, anger and despair comes first. He must throw in his lot with his town and his people, not with the worldwide community of literati.
The story unfolds ...
The order comes down that the Jews of Sighet must henceforth wear a yellow star.
Barbed wire goes up around the town, now a true ghetto. The houses forming its perimeter have any windows that face the street boarded shut.
The ghetto’s inhabitants learn they are to be deported. They wait.
Finally, they are herded into cattle cars so tightly that they can sit only by taking turns. All during the trip, a madwoman, broken by her separation from her husband and sons, consumed by visions of fire and flame, howls out her despair. Then, days later, as the train pulls up to the concentration camp gates, her vision comes true. “Suddenly, our doors opened ... In front of us flames. In the air, that smelling of burning flesh. It must have been midnight. We had arrived—at Birkenau, reception center for Auschwitz.”
A reel of black-and-white documentary from the Nuremberg trials converges on one young man’s life. At the end, having been moved to Buchenwald and liberated by the Americans, Wiesel views himself in a mirror for the first time since leaving Sighet. “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”
The Varieties of Religious Experience
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By William James
First published in 1902
This great classic is about what some people experience in quiet moments when God reaches out and touches them.
Do not, atheist or skeptic, thereby dismiss it as so much religious mumbojumbo. Do not, Sunday church-goer, presume that you’ll find your Lord’s divinity affirmed.
The Varieties of Religious Experience has nothing to say about churches, priests and solemn ritual. It is about personal religious experience as reported by some of the great spiritual figures of history, from Loyola and Martin Luther to St. Teresa and Walt Whitman.
Born-again Christians, cultists, ascetics from the Middle Ages who sleep on nails, all the way to those expressing the most sublime spiritual sensibilities—all these are the subject of James’s brilliant work. It dissects their experiences, maps how those destined for religious fulfillment find it.
And though steeped in the Western scientific tradition, it is apt to leave even skeptics convinced there’s something outside everyday experience every bit as real and true as the shattering of a glass or the smell of a rose.
Concludes James, in the final chapter, after 400 pages of impressive tentativeness: “The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discreet, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.”
James’s book is the product of a 20-lecture series he gave at the University of Edinburgh around the turn of the century. A philosopher and psychologist, the father of the school of philosophy known as pragmatism, and a giant of his time of the stature of Freud, James described his approach to his subject as psychological. He called his first lecture “Religion and Neurology,” and even sometimes applied the capital “S” to “Subjects” whose conversions and trances he described, in the style of a psychological report. Sometime he exhibits almost boyish enthusiasm as one of his subjects displays what strikes him as particularly “interesting” behavior.
These lectures argue forcibly that religion need not be valued only on the basis of the truths it presumes to reveal, but in its impact on believers; that, quite aside from the truth of its teachings, religion has value in the personal experiences it bestows.
The monk comes away moved by his vision of God, and comforted by his knowledge of Him. The alcoholic, feeling a higher Presence beside him, gives up his whiskey and devotes his life to more productive ends. Dare science, or a too-small spirit, negate or deny these? The experiences themselves, says James, are facts—as hard and crisp and real as the wind blowing across your cheek.
For James, displaying a suppleness of mind that leaves him untroubled by seeming opposites, the scientific and the spiritual stand side by side. In a chapter called “The Reality of the Unseen,” he advances the kind of argument heard more often these days from the hard sciences— that any theory is but a model, a creation of the mind, a pretty picture that only inadequately describes a portion of the Universe, and that the Universe exists quite apart from man’s efforts to describe it. If we believe something, James says, it is real to us. The “articulately verbalized philosophy” we build around it is “bu
t its showy translation into formulas ...Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”
Whenever it is James himself who speaks, the book seems to fairly shine. Which, owing to many pages of personal testimony about various religious experiences, is not always. Displaying just that striking consistency the author is at pains to highlight, these sometimes grow wearisome. So when James reappears with some impeccably formulated interpretation of all we’ve read, we greet him eagerly.
What a delight to hear him speak! In no book I’ve recently read has the visual phenomenon we call “brilliance” felt so acutely alive in words. I offer no brief examples of this, because it is not a brilliance that reveals itself in snippets of felicitous expression but rather what emerges in whole, lengthy paragraphs that read like multifaceted diamonds, sparkling in the sun. They do not inspire the reader, or move him, so much as leave him breathless at the working of a great mind.
You feel that James sits beside you in a room, with just you alone, anticipating your objections, speaking to your doubts, sharing your excitement—finally grasping your hand for an intellectual and spiritual voyage that leaves you gasping with the sheer pleasure of “Ah, yes, yes, of course.”
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to many. First, to my various editors at the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun, where most of these essays first appeared, especially to Gwinn Owens, who shepherded them into print over the longest span of years, and to Mike Bowler; as well as to the late Art Seidenbaum of the Los Angeles Times.
To the whole crew at Bancroft Press who helped bring this book into being, in particular publisher Bruce Bortz who saw in these essays, gathered together, something like the book I saw in them; special thanks to Bancroft’s Sarah Azizi for her invaluable, consistently intelligent editorial help.
To Vicky Bijur, for her fortitude and good sense.
To my son David, for his help from the outset, especially with Kim, G. H. Hardy, and Isadora Duncan.
And to Judy, my wife of sixteen years, whom I met just about the time I conceived of “Vintage Reading”; it was a very good year.
Most of all, thanks to my mother, Beatrice Kanigel, whose own love of literature spilled over onto me and made me first want to read books, and then to write them.