hermit's thatch

Umberto Eco points out that there are two model libraries. The first is found in the sixteenth-century classic novel Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, wherein the ideal library contains all the books necessary for understanding the universe. In contrast, Jorge Luis Borges — in his short story “Library of Babel” — presents us with an “infinite” library of unfathomable size, its content impossible to read and comprehend because it is alway growing and incomplete. The latter is a nightmare, a labrynith of countless rooms and corridors, while Don Quixote’s library is doubtless small and cozy, its contents easy to find and peruse.

Of course, the library is a metaphor for the universe and for our comprehension — or apprehension — of reality. Is not our world and the explosion of information and the complexity of scenarios for life and suffering and death not unlike Borges’ library? But is not our deepest wish and desire to reside in that eremetic hut of Quixote’s library? Is the universe numbing, baffling, fearful, and do we go about contriving a universe that suits our temperament? Or is the universe comprehensible and single-pointed, understandable or at least appreciable with a calm mind and quiet reflection? Or is it, well, a little more complex than either scenario? For the true solitary, these are the pressing questions.

The universe accomodates but does not consume. It scintillates but does not glare. It undulates but does not inundate. If the books in this library are many and infinite, they are so many cells or atoms or patterns of energy, ultimately responding to a grand field that relates all content together. The mind of God cannot be reduced to a cell (the biological variety), nor be circumscribed to fit our logic. That is only because our logic is so puny.

We cherish a small, clean room — “cell” to use the pun — bright but not glaringly so, comfortable but provocative of reflection. We cherish it not because we would renounce all knowledge or reduce it to one book (like the caliph of legend). We are spectators of diversity and appreciate the animation of beings and the interconnectedness of all things. We know the universe not directly but, as Thomas Aquinas might have put it, through its effects. It is as if we read the books in Quixote’s library or even a few in Borges’ but never know who the author is, nor do we think that we must read more than whatever resonates with our soul. Nor does it matter how much or how little we read because we are all of us the author, and all of us the reader. We echo the hermit’s sentiment: “My hut a universe!”

In an essay for Tricycle (Spring 2005) entitled “The Power of Solitude,” author Reggie Ray discusses the efficacy of retreats. He describes not only the lack of familiarity with the practice today but also the fact that

not only has the typical Western person spent little or no time alone, but many of us have an underlying fear of solitude. Possibly driving some of the midsunderstanding of retreat is a deep-seated fear of being alone without distraction, without entertainment, without “work,” without other people around to constantly confirm our sense of self.

Ray notes that Westerners live in a “very extroverted society,” and driven by consumerism and the feeling that unless we are producing in an external and material way, our worth as people is in doubt.

As an example of the long-range efficacy of retreat, Ray cites his own shortcoming in his first retreat in his late twenties. Rather than tranquility and solitude, he discovered that he had “the most agitated, chaotic, neurotic mind” that he could have imagined, and after a week quit in despair. But afterwards, Ray realized a clarity and openness that he had never experienced before. And every year, therefore, he has continued to do a retreat.

A poem by eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hao-jan speaks of “depths of quiet” that suggest more than silence or equanimity. Meng was a hermit, and like most hermits, the visit to or by a kindred spirit could be satisfying but also disturbing. Returning from a visit to an old friend stirs in Meng Hao-jan a sense of loneliness that disrupts the continuity of his cherished and taken-for-granted “depths of quiet.” Instead, Meng aches for friendship “morning after morning,” so that he must now consciously distract himself with the same routines that he once merged unconsciously into his daily life.

The poem reveals the pathos of solitude and the complexity of the hermit psychology. Contrary to stereotype, the poem suggests that eremitical life is not a series of peak experiences but time and emotion eked out and spread out as if on a table for the soul to contemplate without adornment. The hermit is not invincibly cold-hearted or aloof. After all, some hermits have been married or lived in lavrae near their fellow human beings. The last line of the poem reads:

I should know by now —
sufficient to be nurturing isolate depths of quiet,
to be home again,
my old garden gate closed.

In his book Unattended Sorrow, author Stephen Levine reflects on the role of silence as a form of healing. His entire book is intended to address grief and pain, so silence has a role in this larger process by diffusing sorrow rather than concentrating it in thoughts and sounds, external or of one’s own. Perhaps silence is not to be taken out of the context of Levine’s other recommendations and reflections — about connectedness, about mindfulness, about loving-kindness. But silence is such a powerful tool for discovering a stillness and a contentedness that is the goal in dealing with suffering and sorrow. As the author puts it, in silence

we come to know ourselves and the world around us at a whole new level. All the truths are welcomed and invited within the heart of silence. We sit with the saints and the suicidal in the Sacred Cave of the heart, enveloped in the silence from which all that heals is born.

A few incidentals about this spring …

1. Birds are singing in the deep starless night, not brief warbles but grand and lengthy songs, whether at midnight or 3 a.m. or on through morning.
2. The annual scattering of sunflowers from bird seed fosters more robust flowers than any gardener’s hand could ensure. When the flowers grow large enough, an intrepid squirrel rushes at them, toppling them with a snap at the middle of the stem and a bite of the flower head, to be taken to the shade of a nearby tree and enjoyed fresh.
3. The great bed of rosemary plants flourishes tall and fragrant but a bear urinated on one tall bit and it (the plant) died, turning brown and dry. One could suspect the bear not only because the adjacent plants were unaffected (hence not a plant disease) but because one night the bear had stepped through the rosemary in an attempt to reach birdfeeders hanging from the roof eaves. (The bear gave up but made a mess of the wooden feeders, though quickly repaired.) The bear, which was nursing three cubs, has since moved on.
4. Molly, the Hermitary dog, suffered an acute inflamation that, over the course of several weeks, had her unable to stand or walk (walking being her favorite thing to do, after listening to music, watching or lounging in the outdoors, and sleeping). A dose of drugs has reversed the problem, and hopefully all will be well for this ten year old “octogenarian.”

The greatest challenge to one who wants to live in simplicity is to be able to do so fully and not as a psychological excursion cushioned by an economic safety net. People who have grown up in poverty tend to lack the psychological willingness — having gotten out of poverty — to throw away their new-found sense of security and stability. They are not risk-takers unless they are entrepreneurs or still abuse themselves in some way. They are not atttracted to simplicity because it reminds them of their childhood misery. What so many call adventure and risk-taking is hollow when we learn that the adventurers and risk-takers can always go back to family or trust fund to rescue themselves from that precariousness of having no money or place to live. At the heart of too many advocates of simplicity is a kind of “playing at.”

So how does a person brought up in reasonable stability take on simplicity without being hypocritical? It must begin with what the classic hermit knows: with effacing the self and desire, so that the products and contrivances of the popular culture do not trap the self in a material web. Simplicity is wariness of and ultimately disengagement from consumption and the commercial world. Simplicity carves out a psychological dimension that is removed from the artificial world and placed squarely within the natural world, as much as this can be. In an urban environment, simplicity has a personal touch, perhaps an intellectual or creative cast, or an engagement with objects and people that comes from an authentic core of selflessness. It is not the psychological baggage or refinement of manners that should impress, but the humility and self-effacement that must mark a person seeking simplicity.

Silence is generally feared in Western circles, especially among friends or colleagues. Silence is defined exclusively in social terms, and, of course, silence will not be considered helpful in such settings. In social settings, one is expected to participate, to contribute to the brain-storming, the evaluating, the planning, the negotiating.

In the Western world, consensus conflicts with authority. Authority is not consider authenticity or wisdom but power. So consensus, on the other hand, is seen as “empowering” everyone — ignoring the inevitable power dynamics of groups and the fact that consensus seldom means more than acquiescence to power. Silence refuses the premises of social relations; it refuses the premise that authority and consensus are necessary poles.

In the East, at least historically, silence was seen as a wellspring of wisdom, like a deep reservoir of strength. Decisions were entrusted to those who could hold silence as much as to any talkers. Words were means of procrastinating over action and decision, not means of reaching consensus or of presenting apologias for authority. If the thing was right, then it should be done. Experience, not reason, was sufficient for the deeper things. Silence, not discussion, was the context for knowing what to do.

In his book In Silence: Why We Pray, author Donald Spoto notes that the only legitimate form of prayer in the Western scriptural tradition (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is, minimally, the prayer of abandonment. Only thusly can the notion of projecting human desires on God and claiming God’s sanctions for our personal and cultural demands — especially the hollow claims that God is on one’s side — be firmly and completly laid to rest. Abandonment means no presumptions of God’s will. It means affirmation of mystery, that catch-word for what it is we perceive but do not know. In this sense, abandonment of ego (of both the culture and of the self) is affirmation of mystery, which is the beginning of wisdom.

In the concept of a prayer of abandonment, wherein no demands are made and one abandons oneself to providence, we throw off not certitude but contingent attitudes and objects. We rely only on what is universal and not subject to contingency, even if we are not able to articulate this. We abandon false and presumptuous attitudes and claims to this or that possession or condition, knowing that we will discover in the simplicity of abandonment a revealing of all that truly matters.

A friend of Hermitary wonders if the entries here on atheism too narrowly identify atheism with modern Western thought, science, and technology, when atheism has been a factor in many other cultures having little to do with science. Our focus has been on modern atheism, which is based on premises that a Socrates or Lucretius did not hold as either philosophical necessity or cultural compulsion. Modern atheism is, as Robert Thurman puts it in his Infinite Life, “nihilistic materialism,” which even the Buddha — mistakenly called an atheist by many Western religionists — rejected as an error.

Classical skepticism was not so much a militant belief against Zeus or Caesar but a mild shrug at folly, discernible in Stoics and Epicurians, still observable in the constructs of Descartes or the reflectiveness of Spinoza. But mildness is not a characteristic of modern atheism, with its teeming metropoli and its death camps, its nuclear and bio-chemical weapons, its raising of a Babel-like world culture. As our correspondent rightly points out, however, it should be emphasized that atheism has not been alone in creating these horrors. Christianity and its scriptural siblings have supported and extended these horrors, and some of the more articulate defenders of war and destruction are emphatically religious in that convenient identity, spinning off new justifications for distinctly modern and ungodly contrivances. Thus many Christians and their coreligionists have embraced science and technology (after sanitizing its moral ambiguities) and all the horrors that science and technology are capable of. And not merely the horrors but the drab and oppressive ways of modern culture so inimical to holistic life.

A skepticism of culture itself is what is in order, not merely of its epiphenomena, and this is where modern atheism fails. Instead it has enthusiastically embraced culture as a field of contention for struggle and triumph, or if unable to capture culture — like capturing the state — it has dissipated itself in nihilistic materialism. Where classical skeptics remained doubtful of social change and functioned more like solitaries in their personal lives, the cultures of atheism have been secular versions of the suppressive cultures they hate, mirrors of what they rival. Who, then, is Dr. Jekyll, whom Mr. Hyde? Neither one escapes complicity. Both sit disquietly in the seat of judgment, for are they not one person after all?

Disbelief in culture — even mere disillusion, like that of the hermit — is the beginniing of an affirmation of values. The potential of evolving an ethos may not involve a metaphysical component at all. In fact, it is here, in this state between what has historically been called theism and atheism, that the diversity of peoples and cultures can begin to find something in common.

In George Bernard Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion, the character Livinia is about to suffer martyrdom, and the Roman captain asks her whether she isn’t, after all, going to die for nothing. Lavinia, the Christian, does not respond with a stock answer of heroic bravado and passion, but with an answer full of quiet faith in her path, though not in this or that dogma. She is not dying for her dreams, she says, nor for wonder stories. Then for what? she is asked. “I don’t know,” she responds. “If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I’m going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.”

Faith does not assume that we “know” God, or have mastered the ways of God. On the contrary, this would make God “too small.” However we define God is inadequate, of course, but we must live for this path to God, just as we must die for it.