Hilton Head, South Carolina, 2011
For Alexander there was no Far East,
because he thought the Asian continent
ended with India.
Free Cathay at least
did not contribute to his discontent.
But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more serene.
To him it seemed that he’d but played
With a few shells and pebbles on the shore
Of that profundity he had not made.
- Richard Wilbur
“We walk past thousands of people we see every week, not necessarily seeing any of them. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine told me of something that happened when she took a train from Connecticut to New York. As the conductor – a large and imposing man – approached, she realized she had left her purse at home. When he got to her seat and asked for her ticket, she, with much embarrassment, explained the situation and braced herself for the worst. But the conductor sat down in the seat opposite and said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Then, for the remainder of the journey, they talked. They shared photos of their families, they exchanged jokes, and they spoke of the one who meant most to them. When the conductor finally got up to continue his rounds, my friend began to apologize again, but the conductor stopped her mid-sentence and smiled, ‘Please don’t pay it any thought; you know, it’s just really nice to be seen by someone.’
This might initially seem like a strange thing to say as the conductor was seen by thousands of people every day. But only in instrumental terms, only as the extension of a function he performed. In this brief conversation with my friend, he felt he had actually been seen as a unique individual, and that was a gift to him.
This is what love does. It does not make itself visible, but, like light, makes other visible to us. In a very precise sense, then, love’s presence cannot be described as existing, but rather is that which calls others into existence; for to exist literally means to stand forth from the background, to be brought forth. As we have mentioned, love does not stand forth, and vie for our attention but rather brings other forth. When we love, our beloved is brought out of the vast, undulating sea of others. Just as the Torah speaks of God calling forth beings from the formless ferment of being, so love calls our beloved out from the endless ocean of undifferentiated objects.”
Peter Rollins, Insurrection
In My Reading Life, Pat Conroy pays tribute to his high school English teacher who, in addition to being an important mentor, ended up becoming a very close friend. In their final phone conversation, as Gene Norris was dying with cancer, he said to Pat:
“Tell me a story,”he commanded, and I did.
Those were the last words he ever spoke to me, and they formed an exquisite, unimprovable epitaph for a man whose life was rich in the guidance of children not his own. He taught them a language that was fragrant with beauty, treacherous with loss, comfortable with madness and despair, and a catchword for love itself. His students mourned Gene all over the world, wherever they found themselves. All were ecstatic to be part of the dance.
One student who was part of the dance of Gene Norris’ life was a young lady who showed up at the reception that followed Norris’ funeral. Conroy writes,
“As I walked along a side street, a beautiful young woman called out to me, ‘Mr. Conroy?’
I turned and this pretty woman kissed me and said, “You don’t know me, but we met when I was three years old. You were the May king and my sister was the May queen.’”
“Ah! Your sister is the lovely Gloria Burns,” I said. “But why are you here? Did you know Mr. Norris? You’re too young to have been a student of his.”
“My first year at Robert Smalls,” she said, “I was such a mess. In trouble. Boys. Drugs. That kind of thing. They sent me to Mr. Norris.”
“He was good, wasn’t he?”
“Mr. Norris told me to come to his office every day at lunch. We could talk and get to know each other. I went there for the next two years. Two years. Yet he didn’t even know me.”
“You got the best of Gene,” I said.
“He saved my life. He literally saved my life.”
“Come on in,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I’ll introduce you to a couple of hundred people who’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Mr. Norris acted like I was the most important girl in the world,” she said.
“You were. That was Gene’s secret. All of us were.”
A few months ago, I was given a book of poems written by Wistawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996. Here is one I like, especially the concluding lines: “and whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done”. The poem, “Life-While-You-Wait”, recognizes the improvisational character of our lives.
Life While-You-Wait
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.
I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it’s mine, I can’t exchange it.
I have to guess on the spot
Just what this play’s all about.
Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can’t conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for hammy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me even more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.
Words and impulses you can’t take back,
Stars you’ll never get counted,
Your character like a raincoat you button on the run -
The pitful results of all this unexpectedness.
If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
Or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
Since I couldn’t even clear my throat offstage).
You’d be wrong to think that it’s just a slapdash quiz
Taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I’m standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there’s no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
Will become forever what I’ve done.
We all have received untold gifts from people who are now dead and the many who are still alive. In My Reading Life, Pat Conroy pays tribute to Thomas Wolfe and his novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe helped Conroy to honor the particularity of one’s time and place.
“Boys like me – you know the ones – we’re the boys from the families no one knows, from schools that few have heard of, from towns defined by their own anonymity, from regions unpraised and unknown, from histories without stories or records or echoes or honor. Thomas Wolfe taught me that if looked hard enough at the life I was living, the history of the world would play itself out before me within earshot of my mother’s stove.”
While prepping for my trip to Ireland last summer, I came across a book by the late John O’ Donahue. Entitled Anam Cara: a Book of Celtic Wisdom, the book considers the nature of friendship (anam cara translates as “soul friend”) and some of the gifts bequeathed to us by the Celtic tradition. The author describes what I would call the WYSIWYG way of wisdom: what you see is what you get. With echoes of Jesus (“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light”) and St. Augustine “(“our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye by which God may be seen”), O’ Donahue describes how our pattern of seeing the world around us shapes how we relate to the world around us. Think of it as an eye examination of the spiritual life, where our eyesight is tested against the 20/20 line of the great wisdom tradition and corrective lenses are offered to help us see more clearly whom we should be and the way we should go.
To the fearful eye, all is threatening.
To the greedy eye, everything can be possessed.
To the judgmental eye, everything is closed in definitive frames.
To the resentful eye, everything is begrudged.
To the indifferent eye, nothing calls or awakens.
To the inferior eye, everything else is greater.
To the loving eye, everything is real.
Recently a friend gave me an excellent read by Pat Conroy, My Reading Life. The book is a celebration of literature, language and the magic of storytelling. Conroy talks about the significance of some important books in his life, including Gone With the Wind, Look Homeward, Angel and War and Peace. He pays tribute to some influential people in his life, mentioning his mother,Frances, a mentor named Gene Norris and a bookstore owner named Cliff Graubart.
Conroy tells of being a student at The Citadel and taking an English class with Colonel Harrison. He writes of the day when Colonel Harrison read Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” This early excerpt describes the power of the spoken word and of fiction to transform a life. It reminds me of something Yann Martel once said: “the great thing about books is that they give you more lives.”
Here’s the selection:
“With the softest of voices, he read to his class the poet’s moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Halfway through his recitation, he confessed to us that he always wept whenever he read that particular poem. He apologized to the class for his lack of professionalism. He wiped his glass and, with tears streaming down his face, he dismissed the class and headed toward his office. The grandson of a Confederate office had been moved to tears by a poem commemorating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. For me that day will last forever. I had no idea that poetry could bring a grown man to his knees until Colonel Harrison proved it. It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger boy, class clown, commander of artillery, altar boy, lace maker, exiled king, peacemaker, or moon goddess. I had witnessed with my own eyes that a poem made a colonel cry. Though it was not part of a lesson plan, it imparted a truth that left me spellbound. Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers. From the beginning I’ve searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own trouble passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.”
An excerpt from Kent Nerburn’s book, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder.
—
One time he looked at me and nodded. “Your eyes are different, Nerburn,” he said. “You are looking farther.” He didn’t elaborate or say another word, but that phrase, with all its cryptic meaning, buoyed me like nothing else he had ever said.
When we were on the hill, I would pass my time thinking of my family, or wondering about God or any number of topics that fill the mind when confronted with vast, empty spaces. Never having been much for examining flora or fauna, I found little of interest in the profusion of tiny flowers and plant life that seemed to occupy so much of Dan’s attention. For me, this was a land of poetry – sparse, singular, with lyricism written on the wind.
One day Dan startled me with a full sentence, “You’re getting better with silence,” he said.
“I am?”
“I watch you.”
“I know.”
“You’re learning. I can tell because of your silence.”
I sensed that he had something to say. Dan did not make small talk when he was on the hill.
“We Indians know about silence,” he said. “We aren’t afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.”
I nodded in agreement.
“Our elders were schooled in the ways of silence, and they passed that along to us. Watch, listen, and then act, they told us. This is the way to live.
“Watch the animals to see how they care for their young. Watch the elders to see how they behave. Watch the white man to see what he wants. Always watch first, with a still heart and mind, then you will learn. When you have watched enough, then you can act.”
There was silence.
“That’s quite a bit different from our way,” I volunteered, hoping to prod him into further conversation.
“Yes,” he said. “With you it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the kids who talk the most in school. At your parties everyone is trying to talk. In your work you are always having meetings where everyone interrupts everyone else and everyone talks five, ten, or a hundred times. You say it is working out a problem. To us it just sounds like a bunch of people saying anything that comes into their heads and then trying to make what they say come around to something that makes sense.”
Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder
from Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder by Kent Nerburn.
As a child of the woodlands, I had never had much of a sense of the plains and the prairies. But now, as the days passed, the hypnotic power of the land had overtaken me. I felt like a man on an island sea. The billowing, waving prairie grasses were symphonic in their ebbs and swells; the marching cadences of the passing clouds transfixed the eye. Sound was magnified, as if echoing against some vast, celestial vault. Thunder would roll in from beyond the horizon; the buzzing of insects would seem to be inside your head. It was equal parts peace and dread – a land of dreams and phantasms.
A journal of reflections on things seen and unseen, wimsical and wise, ordinary and odd, magical and mundane
