Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity — one that comes alive in this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:
THE WHOLE OF IT by Hannah Fries
If you step back, you can see it all
on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children
grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins
like saffron filaments. Further still, and see
your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean,
tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great-
great grandchildren drawing their names
in the sand with sticks. The seas
rising and falling, ice scraping the earth,
and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs,
protected places. First light on the first day
of your life, and first light of first stars.
And in this way, every death, each apparent ending,
might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven
into one memory, so that always is
this tree, and the long days of falling in love
over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf,
and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.
The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.
It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme.
The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.
Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee “red-cheeked and glowing with life” and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that “keeps shining, like a candle in the fog.”
He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:
The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I’ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an “occasion for unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson’s lovely term, “active surrender.” We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is “not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop” but “active and thrumming, almost palpable” — and it comes to him redoubled:
Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.
[…]
Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
And then the world intrudes — his mother is felled by stroke, a fire consumes his home, a pandemic engulfs the globe. But what silence and solitude end up teaching him, end up teaching anyone who enters them, is that what seems like an assault on our best laid plans, an obstacle along the way of life, is the way itself: experiences that wake us up from “sleepwalking through life” and bring us closer not only to ourselves but to each other. Iyer writes:
In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them.
[…]
As the days mount in silence, I’m quickly freed of most of my preconceptions. A monk, I see, is not someone who wishes to live peacefully and alone; in truth, he exists in a communal web of obligations as unyielding as in any workplace, and continuing till his final breath.
In the fathoming of silence, he learns that “the best in us lies deeper than our words.” In the austerity of the monastic life, he learns that “luxury is defined by all you don’t need to long for,” that retreat “is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection.” He reflects:
One kind of asceticism comes in the letting go of certainties, and of any notion that you know more than life does.
There is but one possible action out of that realization: surrender, which he discovers it the only point of being there — “simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.”
In the end, we are reminded that to be in silence, to be in solitude, to be in surrender amid a fragile world is not defeatism but an act of courage and resistance, not escapism but the widest-eyed realism we have:
Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep… Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final.
[…]
I watch the golden light of early morning irradiate the hills, while valleys remain in deepest shadow. I turn to see the sun scintillant on the ocean in the distance, the sky so sharp and blue I can make out the ridges in the islands far beyond.
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it’s like to be the other person) with the will to be right. Our duels of self-righteousness can be fought over whose turn it is to take out the trash or who should govern the country, they can take place on the scale of the planet in the language of nuclear weapons or on the scale of the kitchen table in the code language of lovers, but they are always a betrayal of our deepest humanity — the capacity to understand, the longing to be understood, the knowledge that everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they’ve got and the cards they’ve been dealt.
The story begins as a bickering over whether a brush or a comb would better detangle the king’s beard and ends up, in the wildfire way of righteousness, as an argument about everything and a national sport.
Soon they argued all the time,
until no one could remember
when the arguing had started
or over what,
or by whom.
They argue with each other and with the flowers and the stones.
They grow so skilled at it — “they could argue forward and backward, right side up and upside down… in fog and sun and sleet and snow” — that the king and queen decide to hold a contest for their nation or arguers.
On the day of the contest, things take an unintended turn.
The story ends with a wink, but is at heart a warning: arguing is counterfeit problem-solving, an argument is a barricade against understanding, and self-righteousness is a fist you open to find your kindness crushed.
Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”
In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.
Doris Lessing
In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:
Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…
But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.
In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare (“It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.”), she adds:
We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.
She distills the essence of our task in troubled times:
The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil.
[…]
There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.
Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing’s time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in:
Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, trees, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, trees, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.
Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real “the possibility of a madman in a position of power,” she holds up a clarifying mirror:
We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, “Oh for God’s sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.” Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.
Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman’s hand on the button:
The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.
Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in “the pleasurable luxury of despair,” or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that “produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy” — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage:
Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission.
[…]
We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.
Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating “as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice,” she prophecies the age of Substack:
People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.
If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible.
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