Desire

Desire follows no path in the sky. It obeys neither planetary motion nor sidereal time. It flashes like an aurora on a schedule known only to the heart.

I de dager var kjempene på jorden

Again from Recess Appointment, chapter 3 of Iridescence:

I de dager var kjempene på jorden. The land of one's childhood, no matter its physical location, marks the same place on every person's emotional map. In those days there were giants in the earth, and the sons of God came unto the daughters of men. And in turn those daughters bore children who became mighty men of old, men of renown. . . . There the warriors stood taller, whether they swung bats or wore plastic armor beneath their jerseys. The preachers spoke with greater authority, sometimes of heaven but mostly of hell. And above all the daughters of men have no greater beauty than those you first meet in that never-forgotten land. So struck will you be by your discovery, your terrible and thrilling discovery that you want one and all of them at once and forever, that you will spend the balance of your days searching for one to compare with the girls you recall from the founding of the kingdom of giants.

Editor's notes:

1. The phrase I de dager var kjempene på jorden comes from the 1930 Norwegian Bokmål translation of Genesis 6:4.


2. The image shown is that of Milam Park, Clarkston, Georgia.

Manifold destiny

From Recess Appointment, chapter 3 of Iridescence:

No reach back into ancient natural history can resist the temptation of the near emotional future. You will believe in that orgiastic future no matter how badly the recent personal past distorts your view of current global reality. It eluded you then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow you will run faster, stretch out your arms further. And if you are lucky enough to have noticed the trompe-l'œil of your own creation, you will realize this truth: No amount of traversing the ancient and the modern, the personal and the global, will separate fear from desire. At any scale the topology of anxiety and longing dictates an invariable outcome. Such is the manifold destiny of the searching soul. Equal and opposite emotions, one and inseparable, comprise a single surface in the Klein bottle of the human heart in conflict with itself.

Memory and redshift

No less than their sensory counterparts, the waves of personal remembrance obey Doppler's law. The mind in motion never quite perceives what passes before the mind at rest. Emotional recall obeys the forces that bend the peal of a passing bell and warp the color of distant stars. Race toward the past if you will; yesterday recedes faster than your memory can recall. As you reel backward, redshift stretches memory beyond your field of perception, till truth dissipates in spasms of invisible heat. Race instead toward the future, and impatient anticipation crashes against the the invariant pace at which tomorrow arrives. Against that blackness you will see no more than purple tendrils not quite taking full form, the fleeting projections of things yet to come.

The rainbow as refracted truth

By arc or by whole, the rainbow reveals refracted truth. Nearby rain and distant mist have equal power to vaporize visible light into bands of color. A single sheet of water, slicing through sunlight, projects the full spectrum against the sky's inverted bowl. If you are lucky enough to be standing far enough from the point where solar brilliance meets suspended water, you will see sunlight scattered into a full ring of color.

Like metaphorical truth, visible light rarely reveals its constituent parts so regularly and so predictably. Depart ever so modestly from the axis on which truth or light turns, and your eyes will no longer honor one focus. And if you should look instead at an object propelled through the sky, gravity's rainbow will no longer appear to you in closed form. It will rise — and fall — according to a trajectory that will never connect the beginning of truth with its end.

And this is to say nothing of the most treacherous trick of the light, the double deception that awaits time's pilgrim. Race toward the past if you will; yesterday recedes faster than your memory can recall. As you reel backward, redshift stretches memory beyond your field of perception, till truth dissolves in waves filled with heat rather than light. Race instead toward the future, and impatient anticipation crashes against the invariant pace at which tomorrow arrives. Against that blackness you will see no more than purple tendrils not quite taking full form, the fleeting projections of things yet to materialize.

Pivotal events therefore mark the sections of our lives, slicing at particular points of time through the whole of the truth and leaving us no more enlightened than the objects we trace across our field of vision at speeds well below that of light. Catch them, and you will be rewarded momentarily by the mirage of control. Miss them altogether, and you will rue forever the path that both of you, protagonist and projectile, must follow.

Ex libro lapidum historia mundi

Mazon Creek lagerstätte
All geology represents the present-tense freeze-frame of the earth's history, condensed conveniently in the chemistry of rocks and soils. Though the course of any single organism's life is infinitesimally minute by comparison with the history of the earth, only one species in the earth's parade of life — ours — has managed to crack the code. It is as though some geological variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents observation over a more meaningful time span. Any organism attaining the power to unlock the earth's secrets also acquires, by that very stroke, the power to destroy the earth itself.

The true wonders in this world do not hide. Rather, they wait in plain sight, obscured not so much by ice or vegetation as by the shades we draw across our eyes. Most of geologic history belongs in this category of true wonders. Terrestrial history accretes at rates too slow for any mortal observer to notice. But it leaves records in the form of rocks and soils and layers.

On extremely rare occasions, the chroniclers of geologic time pause to pick one fragment of one organism — a leaf, a wing, a shell, a bone — and enshrine it in some durable medium. The imprints of Carboniferous ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, insects in amber, the barely perceptible bas-relief of a mollusk, cliffs colored by coccolithophorid shells, even the hydrocarbon relics of ancient plant life that humans so casually burn and polymerize — all these bear mute testimony to worlds long past.

As with sediment, so with sentiment: Our efforts at self-understanding have no chance of overcoming the mindless buzz of being and doing. We cannot understand feelings of the moment, with deep emotional footprints and even with lasting practical consequences, until we stop acting upon those feelings and seize the opportunity to look backward, in the serenity of solitude.

Editor's note: Cross-posted from Jurisdynamics.

The body of an American

Editor's note: This item was originally published in The Cardinal Lawyer on Veterans' Day 2007. It is a timeless message, though, and for that reason I am posting it here despite being a week late for Veterans' Day 2008.

There is perhaps no finer tribute to American veterans than John Dos Passos's "The Body of an American," the concluding chapter of 1919, part two of the U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36):

Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch last-authorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheAmericanexpeditionaryforceineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia

In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of

enie menie minie moe plenty of other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe

and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe? . . .

how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?

. . . and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead . . .

The day withal was too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs and prayer, muffled drums and soft music were the instrumentalities today of national approbation.

John Doe was born (thudding din of blood of love into the shuddering soar of a man and a woman alone indeed together lurching into and ninemonths sick drowse waking into scared agony and the pain and blood and mess of birth). John Doe was born

and raised in Brooklyn, in Memphis, near the lakefront in Cleveland, Ohio, in the stench of the stockyards in Chi, on Beacon Hill, in an old brick house in Alexandria Virginia, on Telegraph Hill, in a halftimbered Tudor cottage in Portland the city of roses,

in the Lying-In Hospital old Morgan endowed on Stuyvesant Square,

across the railroad tracks, out near the country club, in a shack cabin tenement apartmenthouse exclusive residential suburb;

scion of one of the best families in the social register, won first prize in the baby parade at Coronado Beach, was marbles champion of the Little Rock grammarschools, crack basketballplayer at the Booneville High, quarterback at the State Reformatory, having saved the sheriff’s kid from drowning in the Little Missouri River was invited to Washington to be photographed shaking hands with the President on the White House steps; —

Read the rest of this post . . . .* * * * *

though this was a time of mourning, such an assemblage necessarily has about it a touch of color. In the boxes are seen the court uniforms of foreign diplomats, the gold braid of our own and foreign fleets and armies, the black of the conventional morning dress of American statesmen, the varicolored furs and outdoor wrapping garments of mothers and sisters come to mourn, the drab and blue of soldiers and sailors, the glitter of musical instruments and the white and black of a vested choir

— busboy harveststiff hogcaller boyscout champeen cornshucker of Western Kansas bellhop at the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs office boy callboy fruiter telephone lineman longshoreman lumberjack plumber’s helper,

worked for an exterminating company in Union City, filled pipes in an opium joint in Trenton, N.J.

Y.M.C.A. secretary, express agent, truckdriver, fordmechanic, sold books in Denver Colorado: Madam would you be willing to help a young man work his way through college?

President Harding, with a reverence seemingly more significant because of his high temporal station, concluded his speech:

We are met today to pay the impersonal tribute;

the name of him whose body lies before us took flight with his imperishable soul . . .

as a typical soldier of this representative democracy he fought and died believing in the indisputable justice of his country’s cause . . .

by raising his right hand and asking the thousands with the sound of his voice to join in the prayer:

Our Father which art in heaven hallowed by thy name . . .

* * * * *

John Doe’s

heart pumped blood:

alive thudding silence of blood in your ears

down in the clearing in the Oregon forest where the punkins were punkincolor pouring into the blood through the eyes and the fallcolored trees and the bronze hoopers were hopping through the dry grass, where tiny striped snails hung on the underside of the blades and the flies hummed, wasps droned, bumble-bees buzzed, and the woods smelt of wine and mushrooms and apples, homey smell of fall pouring into the blood,

and I dropped the tin hat and the sweaty pack and lay flat with the dogday sun licking my throat and adamsapple and the tight skin over the breastbone.

The shell had his number on it.

* * * * *

The blood ran into the ground.

The service record dropped out of the filing cabinet when the quartermaster sergeant got blotto that time they had to pack up and leave the billets in a hurry.

The identification tag was in the bottom of the Marne.

The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of blue-bottle flies.

and the incorruptible skeleton,

and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki

they took to Chalons-sur-Marne

and laid it out neat in a pine coffin

and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship

and buried in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheatre in the Arlington National Cemetery

and draped the Old Glory over it

and the bugler played taps

and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn

and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God’s Country it was go have the bugler play taps and the three volleys made their ears ring.

Where his chest ought to have been they pinned

the Congressional Medal, the D.S.C., the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, the Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania, the Czechoslovak war cross, the Virtuti Militari of the Poles, a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish, Jr., of New York, . . . . All the Washingtonians brought flowers.

Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.


Editor's note: The photos of the burial of the Unknown Soldier appear on ArlingtonCemetery.Net.

O lost!

Long grow the days, and long lie the shadows. The year's second half is upon us. With fractal precision, life's second half has likewise begun. Or so I hope and fear, all at once. In words written under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod and familiar to the readers of this forum:

• Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Some two dozen weeks after I originally wrote O lost!, some of the emotional urgency has indeed dissipated. Perhaps it is merely a function of light and warmth; if so, the cycle will turn by and by, and soon enough I shall again walk among the shadows. But if perchance by the light of fireflies I have lain soft and supped in languor, may the Lord not let die in my heart the memory of loneliness and bitter cold.

---

O lost!
[Originally published on Jurisdynamics, January 28, 2008]
It is the darkest hour in the deepest night of the coldest season, and through the shadows I reach for twin sources of literary inspiration linked by the most tenuous of connections. O lost!


First I look across time and the river to a Southern writer not yet forgotten, the master behind the South's greatest autobiographical protagonist, Eugene Gant:

When will they come again? When will they come again?

The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more. The women weeping at the gate have gone and will not come again. And pain and pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.

What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, for death and the dust will die. And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).

And thence I look forward to Lost, even though I linger still in the twilight between seasons three and four. Lost is filled with characters who articulate diverse brands of faith, with wildly variable degrees of sincerity and credibility, but none speaks more powerfully than Mr. Eko, whose path to the priesthood took him through a simultaneous baptism, confirmation, and ordination in a shower of heroin. Though Mr. Eko slew many men, the last three with a machete while wearing a clerical collar he had not yet earned, he was holy beyond contemplation, let alone expression.

This was Mr. Eko's final confession:

I have nothing to confess because I have not sinned. Everything I have done, I have to done in order to survive. When I was a boy, I killed a man in order to save my brother. I am proud of what I have done. I have done the best I could with the life I was given.

I have done my best. I confess nothing, except this report as true as it is heartfelt: Lost, I too walk between the twin shadows of despair and defiance.

Carson McCullers, Wunderkind

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. — Carson McCullers

« Crossposted at Jurisdynamics »
To many of my fellow residents of Danzig U.S.A., I often say that my best preparation for becoming law school dean at the University of Louisville was to reread the works of Carson McCullers (1917-67). Plagued by atrocious health and a tempestuous love life, McCullers wrote her best-known work before she turned 30. Her harshest critics consign her to "minor" status and dismiss her work as "Southern Gothic." Her staunchest defenders argue that her literary legacy of "speak[ing] for the physically and psychologically deformed, the unprotected persons in an often indifferent world, is rich enough to earn her a permanent reputation as a great artist." Flannery O'Connor notwithstanding, I think it fair to call her the finest writer Georgia has ever produced.

Read the rest of this post . . . .An anthology containing The Ballad of the Sad Café reminded me of Carson McCullers's genius. The richest phrases from these stories are jewels that burn the skin at the slightest touch:

• The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain. (The Ballad of the Sad Café)


• With inner desperation he pressed the child close — as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time. (The Sojourner)


• By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love. (A Domestic Dilemma)

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Carson McCullers (1940)

I want to write like Carson McCullers. I wish I could channel her. To the extent I have traversed some of the geographic and emotional space that Carson McCullers called home, perhaps I shall.

Along the tortuous and mostly frustrating path toward personal and professional satisfaction, I've gotten waylaid from time to time. Quite a bit, to tell the truth, and more than I would wish on anyone I liked. Perhaps the worst of these detours was law school.

That said, if my professional life has achieved anything of value (to others if not to myself), it is this: Though you studied law, your life might not be an evil bankrupt waste. In a very real sense, my goal of channeling the literary spirit of Carson McCullers may yet redeem this small corner of my life.

Wunderkind that she was, in real literary life as in the autobiographical short story by that name, Carson McCullers established her reputation with her first novel: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). In his celebrated review of this book, Richard Wright said that Heart was "not so much a novel as a projected mood, a state of mind poetically objectified in words, an attitude externalized in naturalistic detail." Inner Landscape, 103 New Republic 195 (Aug. 1940). "Whether you will want to read the book," he wrote, "depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality."

What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest. That is a skill associated not with youth, but with experience. The inspiration for the title of her first novel, The Lonely Hunter, a poem written by William Sharp under the pen name Fiona MacLeod, expresses a distinctly middle-aged sentiment:

• Green branches, green branches, I see you beckon; I follow!
• Sweet is the place you guard, there in the rowan-tree hollow.
• There he lies in the darkness, under the frail white flowers,
• Heedless at last, in the silence, of these sweet midsummer hours.


• But sweeter, it may be, the moss whereon he is sleeping now,
• And sweeter the fragrant flowers that may crown his moon-white brow:
• And sweeter the shady place deep in an Eden hollow
• Wherein he dreams I am with him — and, dreaming, whispers, "Follow!"


• Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
• What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
• Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.


• Green is that hill and lonely, set far in a shadowy place;
• White is the hunter's quarry, a lost-loved human face:
• O hunting heart, shall you find it, with arrow of failing breath,
• Led o'er a green hill lonely by the shadowy hound of Death?


• Green branches, green branches, you sing of a sorrow olden,
• But now it is midsummer weather, earth-young, sun-ripe, golden:
• Here I stand and I wait, here in the rowan-tree hollow,
• But never a green leaf whispers, "Follow, oh, Follow, Follow!"


• O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
• O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.
• Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Here in the heart of summer, life is sweet to me still. The harvest is yet to come; I might find in motion what I lost in space.

Of late I have devoted considerable time to pondering and to watching the classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. One scene in that movie invariably reminds me of the exuberance of youth. When I stop thinking of this scene as an emblem of "juniority," I shall be dead, or at least fit to die. George Bailey tells his future wife, Mary, "Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful . . . . I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that."

I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. Like my literary hero, Carson McCullers, I'm going to tell stories full of pain and longing. I know better than to imagine that telling such stories could ever keep feelings of pain and longing at bay, for it is the essence of the human condition to love through faith rather than reassurance, and more often than not to wait in vain for the transformed echo of love songs one has sung. Between hunts on the lonely hill called life, I shall find solace in giving voice to sorrow and Sehnsucht.

Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek

Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek

The Prussian State Library

Along Unter den Linden in Berlin, some distance east of Brandenburger Tor but considerably west of Alexanderplatz and Fernsehturm, stands the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. In the distant but hardly forgotten past this beautiful building bore a more assertive name: Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek. The Prussian State Library.

Unter den Linden is lined with beautiful buildings, and many of them speak more overtly to the ebb and flow of modern German history. It takes a grotesquely lazy tourist to overlook the stunning reconstruction of the Reichstag, for instance. Touring the publicly accessible portion of the old parliament building, restored to its proper place as the seat of national government, helps even a casual visitor understand how a united, democratic Germany fulfills through living architecture the twin promises that the Reichstag has made: Dem Deutschen Völke and Der Bevölkerung. To the German People and To the Population.

For those who approach Germany from the admittedly peculiar cultural prism of the American South, however, die Preußische Staatsbibliothek represents an obligatory visit in its own right. All Berlin, to the socially progressive Southerner, represents what our own "Heimat" should become. Reunited Berlin, once and rightful capital of Germany, after conquest, occupation, partition, disarmament, and global humiliation scarcely commensurate for Germany's crimes against humanity. If only Atlanta, Columbia, Birmingham, Nashville, and Richmond could be comparably redeemed from their own history. And there in the heart of Berlin, mere yards from the din of Unter den Linden, the courtyard of the old Prussian State Library beckons. This was the same ivy-covered oasis that greeted visitors and employees of the Library and its cousin, Die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (the Prussian Academy of Sciences).

Within the courtyard, a single inscription will stand out: MCMXIII. 1913. The year before it all began unraveling and Germany found itself on an often hellish journey of seventy-five years. No American Southerner can behold that inscription and fail to think, "What if?" What if my own homeland, at its historical precipice comparable to MCMXIII in Germany, had only known and had exercised its last clear chance to set things right? What if I had only known? What would we, what could we have done differently?

The last words Willie Stark utters, as he lies mortally wounded by his assassin's bullets, are as perfect in the courtyard of the Preußische Staatsbibliothek as they are in All the King's Men: "It might have been all different Jack. . . . You've got to believe that. You got to. You got to believe that. . . . And it might even been different yet. If it hadn't happened, it might — have been different — even yet."

Jack Burden, for his part, knows all too well that "the world is a great snowball rolling downhill and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and nonhappening."

Because I live in Danzig U.S.A. in order to work toward its betterment (despite fearing at a deep level that the region truly is irredeemable), because I am a Southerner again by choice after having had opportunities to leave and to stay away for good, and because I too know how it feels to look back at that one moment and wonder, "Wenn nur . . . if only . . . ," I go out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. Und mittlerweile wartet die Preußische Staatsbibliothek auf mich.

Thomas Merton's Louisville epiphany

Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) put the intersection of Fourth and Walnut Streets (now Fourth and Muhammad Ali Boulevard) on the literary map of twentieth century America. His "Fourth and Walnut" epiphany is arguably the most famous piece of writing associated with Louisville.

There are in fact two versions of Merton's Fourth and Walnut epiphany. He wrote the first in his private journal on March 19, 1958, the day after his fateful visit to Louisville and the seventeenth anniversary of his taking the vows of the Trappist order. The second version appeared in his 1966 book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Excerpts from the two versions appear below:

1. From Thomas Merton's private journal, March 19, 1958:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream — the dream of separateness, of the “special” vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me is a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race — and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are — as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth.

It is not a question of proving to myself that I either dislike or like the women one sees on the street. The fact of having a vow of chastity does not oblige one to argument on this point — no special question arises. I am keenly conscious, not of their beauty (I hardly think I saw anyone really beautiful by special standards) but of their humanity, their woman-ness. But what incomprehensible beauty is there, what secret beauty that would perhaps be inaccessible to me if I were not dedicated to a different way of life. It [is] as though by chastity I had come to be married to what is most pure in all the women of the world and to taste and sense the secret beauty of their girl’s hearts as they walked in the sunlight — each one secret and good and lovely in the sight of God — never touched by anyone, nor by me, nor by anyone, as good as and even more beautiful than the light itself. For the woman-ness that is in each of them is a once original and inexhaustibly fruitful bringing the image of God into the world. In this each one is Wisdom and Sophia and Our Lady — (my delights are to be with the children of men!).


2. From Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.

Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.