LIKE A GARDEN LOOKED AT FROM A GATE

What is this nebulous thing we call "hope," and where do we find it?  Throughout history, many great writers and thinkers have chosen to view hope through the cold lens of logic.  Shakespeare suggested that hope exists only because "the miserable have no other medicine."  Nietzsche took it a step further, proclaiming that "hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments." 

I'm inclined, however, to side with those who see the positive side of hope, people like Norman Cousins who recognized that "hope is independent of the apparatus of logic."  Maybe Samuel Johnson came closest to expressing the truth when he observed that "hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords . . ."

So how do we find and keep hope?  Hints to the answer can be found in this poem by Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature: 

                                                        Hope

                                             by Czeslaw Milosz

                            Hope is with you when you believe

                            The earth is not a dream but living flesh,

                            That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,

                            That all things you have ever seen here

                            Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

                            You cannot enter.  But you're sure it's there.

                            Could we but look more clearly and wisely

                            We might discover somewhere in the garden

                            A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

                            Some people say we should not trust our eyes,

                            That there is nothing, just a seeming,

                            These are the ones who have no hope.

                            They think that the moment we turn away,

                            The world, behind our backs, ceases to exists,

                            As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

A SPLENDID SUNDAY WALK: RAVEN ROCK TRAIL

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

                                Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping 


After several bruising weeks of winter weather, the temperature has risen in recent days, the ice in higher elevations has melted, and the trails of the Blue Ridge mountains are once again beckoning the winter walker.  For those of us who have suffered from a bit of "cabin fever" lately, the prospect of spending more time outdoors is a welcome relief.

Early yesterday morning, I drove up to the piedmont area of the mountains and set out on the Raven Rock Trail, an interesting circuit hike that offers moderately challenging ascents and descents, as well as magnificent views of Lake Keowee. From the moment I entered the trailhead, I became a different person — no judgments, no analysis, no anxiety, no resentment — just pure, unadulterated peace and joy.  How liberating it is to be in the woods, far from the material world and the maddening crowds!

A few photos of my walk are set forth below, along with some observations about the importance of our connections with the natural world.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thoreau 

Keep close to Nature's heart . . . and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods.  Wash your spirit clean.

John Muir

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

George Washington Carver 

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.  And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest — the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways — and re-enter the woods.  For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence.  Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it.  Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in — to learn from it what it is.

Wendell Berry 

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things.  In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

John Fowles

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

John Muir 

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Keats 

                                           What would the world be, once bereft
                                           Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,
                                           O let them be left, wildness and wet;
                                           Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

                                                         Gerard Manley Hopkins

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Walt Whitman

And this our life, exempt from the public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running books, sermons in stone, and good in everything.

Shakespeare

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Thoreau 

REMEMBERING A DISTANT FRIEND

In my last posting, I told the story of two encounters that my college roommate, Anthony, and I had fifty years ago with the novelist William Faulkner.  Little did I know when I wrote that post that Anthony was in the last days of his battle with mantle cell lymphoma, a cancer that he had been fighting for more than a decade. A few days ago, I learned that just eight days after my post, Anthony finally succumbed to the disease and died in Buenos Aires, the city in which he had chosen to spend his final days.

Since learning of Anthony's death, I have felt the need to offer a small tribute to his life.  It's been a difficult task, however, because this was not one of those friendships that endured through thick and thin.  While our lives intersected for a few good years during our youth, we eventually followed very different paths and lifestyles, and, increasingly with each passing year, we had less and less in common.  One thing that remained, however, was a mutual love of language and the myriad ways in which words can be crafted and spoken to lift and sustain the human spirit.  Words, words, words — their beauty, their magic, and their undeniable power — a power that drove me to become a lawyer and Anthony to become an actor. 

Anthony's life was so complex that I would surely miss the mark if I tried to pay tribute to his life with my own words.  A far better tribute, I think, will emerge if I simply quote the words of three poetic works that were chiseled into Anthony's memory and psyche.  These words always spoke deeply to Anthony's soul, and at this particular moment, they speak deeply to mine.

                 How Calmly Does The Orange Branch

                               by Tennessee Williams

                   (From "Night of the Iguana," Act III)

                    How calmly does the orange branch

                    Observe the sky begin to blanch

                    Without a cry, without a prayer,

                    With no betrayal of despair.

                    Sometime while night obscures the tree

                    The zenith of its life will be

                    Gone past forever, and from thence

                    A second history will commence.

                    A chronicle no longer gold,

                    A bargaining with mist and mould,

                    And finally the broken stem

                    The plummeting to earth; and then

                    An intercourse not well designed

                    For beings of a golden kind

                    Whose native green must arch above

                    The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

                    And still the ripe fruit and the branch

                    Observe the sky begin to blanch

                    Without a cry, without a prayer,

                    With no betrayal of despair.

                    O Courage, could you not as well

                    Select a second place to dwell,

                    Not only in that golden tree

                    But in the frightened heart of me?

                          Explanations of Love

                                        by

                               Carl Sandburg

     There is a place where love begins and a place

     where love ends.

     There is a touch of two hands that foils all 

     dictionaries.

     There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethlehem open
     hearth

     furnace or a little green-fire acetylene torch.

     There are single careless bywords portentous as a 

      big bend in the Mississippi River.

     Hands, eyes, bywords—out of these love makes

     battlegrounds and workshops,

     There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming

      is a mystery.

  

     There is a warning love sends and the cost of it

      is never written till long afterward.

     There are explanations of love in all languages

     and not one found wiser than this:

     There is a place where love begins and a place

     where love ends—and love asks nothing.

        The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet
( an excerpt from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream")

         Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
         Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
         More than cool reason ever comprehends.
         The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

         Are of imagination all compact.

         One sees more devils that vast hell can hold;

         That is the madman.  The lover, all as frantic,

         Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

         The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

         Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

         And as imagination bodies forth

         The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

         Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

         A local habitation and a name.

         Such tricks hath strong imagination

         That if it would but apprehend some joy,

         It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

         Or in the night, imagining some fear,

         How easy is a bush supposed to bear!

Perhaps there is a lunatic, a lover, and a poet in each of us — our lunatic selves seeing more devils than hell can hold, our lover selves always in a state of frenzy, and our poet selves always turning our experiences into comprehensible shapes, shapes that, hopefully, will bear more joy than fear.  And if there is more fear than joy, perhaps we can always  summon Courage to come and dwell in our frightened hearts.

Whatever the case, Anthony, I thank you for those good and memorable days of youthful friendship, those days when we rowed oar-to-oar like mates of Ulysses, determined, in Tennyson's glorious words, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."  With your passing, I cannot help but recall those words that Horatio spoke on Hamlet's death:  May "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Credit:  Photo by Mohamed Amarochan, Wikimedia Commons.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH FAULKNER

William Faulkner
1897 - 1962

There is a scene in Woody Allen's recent film, Midnight in Paris, in which the protagonist reminds his fiancée of one of my favorite lines from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  Hearing that line again reminded me of a couple of brief, personal encounters I had with Faulkner in 1961, when I was a student at the University of Mississippi, better known perhaps as "Ole Miss."

Like most other students at the university, my roommate, Anthony, and I were reading Faulkner as part of our freshman curriculum.  Emboldened by our intellectual pursuits, we decided one day that we could better appreciate Faulkner's novels — perhaps even understand The Sound and the Fury — if we had a personal, face-to-face conversation with the writer, who lived in Oxford, just a couple of miles from the university campus.  We recognized, of course, that Faulkner was a man of considerable fame, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, and having published more than sixteen novels, but we remained undaunted in our quest.  If Faulkner had such great affection for all of those dreary characters he created in the fictional Yacknapatawpha County, Mississippi, he would surely welcome a couple of idealistic, albeit naive, students from the real deal — Stone County, a few hundred miles to the south.

Thus inspired, Anthony and I drove to Faulkner's home on Taylor Street one afternoon and entered the tree-lined driveway that led past a couple of barking bloodhounds to the house.  After knocking on the front door several times, all to no avail, we walked to the back of the house and mounted the back steps to the door of a screened-in sleeping porch.  Peering through the screen door, we saw an elderly man taking a nap on an old iron bed.  Immediately sensing that we were pressing out luck, we turned and attempted to scamper away with nothing more than a few giggles.  Alas, however, it was too late.  The man arose from the bed and demanded to know what we wanted.  Summoning what little courage I could find, I replied that my friend and I were just university students who were hoping to get a chance to talk with him about his work.  "I'm not Faulkner," he replied.  "Faulkner is in New York to see his agent and will not return until next week."

Armed as I was with a paperback copy of Faulkner's third novel, Sartoris, which boldly displayed a photo of Faulkner on the back cover, I knew for certain that this was Faulkner and that he was lying through his teeth, all in the hope of banishing the two students who had disturbed his afternoon nap.  In deference to the Nobel Prize winner, however, and with due respect for his menacing bloodhounds, Anthony and I apologized for our intrusion and politely asked the gentleman to please give Mr. Faulkner our best wishes.  We then promptly departed, plotting our next move as we drove away.

Having been rebuffed in our first attempt to have a serious conversation with Faulkner, Anthony and I decided that a more creative approach was required.  We needed to make better presentations of ourselves, perhaps by wearing suits, and, more importantly, we needed our next visit to be accompanied by dates with two lovely university coeds, whose charms would prove to be irresistible to the curmudgeonly author.  Happily, the approach worked flawlessly.  When we returned to Faulkner's house a few evenings later, he came to the front portico and spent a short amount of time with us as we made idle chat and I asked inane, pretentious questions.  At one point, I told Faulkner that I was reading Sartoris and wondered if the rumors were true that Colonel John Sartoris, the old patriarch of the novel, was modeled after the author's great-grandfather.  With a look of considerable disgust, tempered by patience, Faulkner stared at me for a moment and then brushed the question aside, strongly suggesting that we should confine our discussion to a matter of mutual interest, specifically, the comeliness of the two young ladies who had joined us.  Respectfully, though reluctantly, I complied.

I have never been a great fan of Faulkner's novels, with the possible exception of Light in August.  Had I been given another chance to meet the author, however, I would have asked  him a question that has puzzled me for years.  The question relates to two quotes, one the soliloquy from Macbeth that inspired the title of Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, and the other being from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  In Macbeth's soliloquy, Shakespeare wrote:

                    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
                    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
                    And then is heard no more: it is a tale
                    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
                    Signifying nothing.

This philosophy — beautifully written as it is — offers little solace to the questing heart.  In his Noble Prize acceptance speech, however, Faulkner suggests that we are not condemned to a fate of despair, that we may, indeed, find lasting meaning in our lives.  Listen!

I decline to accept the end of man.  It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.  The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

So this is the question I have always wanted to ask, Bill (as Faulkner was affectionately referred to around Oxford).  Did you finally conclude that Shakespeare was wrong?  Did you discover that our shadowed lives are more than tales told by idiots, more than mere sound and fury, and that our lives do, in fact, signify something, especially when the compassionate soul finds a way to speak, to lift the human heart, and to imbue man with courage, honor, and hope?  As you can see, Bill, there was so much we could have discussed on that humid summer evening some fifty years ago.  Ah, but why debate the past?  As you have always reminded me, Bill, the past is never really dead — indeed, it's not even really past.

e

Faulkner's House, "Rowan Oak,"

Now Maintained as a Museum 

By the University of Mississippi

Photo by Gary Bridgman

EVERYDAY MIRACLES

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and Skipper on Mimosa

Einstein once said that there are only two ways to live your life.  "One as though nothing is a miracle.  The other as though everything is a miracle."  Let it be said that I belong to the second group.  When I look in any direction, I am left in awe and wonder at the miracles of life.  They rise from the earth, they dance upon the wind, they sparkle in the night sky, they are anywhere and everywhere.  They are freely given, they are manifestations of grace, and they ask nothing of us in return, except perhaps that we find time to pay attention to their resplendent, life-affirming beauty.

During the past couple of days, I have tried to slow down and pay more attention to the miracles occurring moment to moment in my own backyard and places nearby.  What I have discovered is nothing less that miraculous — life unfolding in more colors and more varieties than one can ever quite imagine.  Enjoy!

Common Buckeye

"The world is full of wonders and miracles but man takes his little hand and covers his eyes and sees nothing."

Israel Baal Shem 

Blue Dasher Dragonfly on Arm 
of Chair Against Background of Blue Bucket

"To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle."

Walt Whitman 

Common Buckeye

"You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one.  Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own.  It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle."

Paul Coelho 

Sugar Tyme Crabapples

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common."

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Silver Spotted Skipper

"The visible mark of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of creation."

John Locke 

Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Female)

"People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle.  But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth.  Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes.  All is a miracle."

Thich Nhat Hanh 

Skipper

"Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand; life itself is the miracle of miracles."

George Bernard Shaw 

Great White Egret

"There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done once."

John Donne 

Skipper

"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every second."

Thoreau 

I still haven't identified this creature, which appears to be on its way to becoming a butterfly.  Any help would be most appreciated.

"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change."

Buddha

 Zebra Swallowtail
"The age of miracles is forever here."
Thomas Carlyle

 Silver Spotted Skippers

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

Albert Einstein 

Great Blue Heron

"Everything is a miracle.  It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar."

Picasso

 American Bumble Bee

"Thy life's a miracle.  Speak yet again."

Shakespeare,
King Lear

Common Buckeye

Have a wonderful day
and
expect miracles!

LISTENING TO POLONIUS

Shakespeare

The plays of Shakespeare can be successfully mined for wisdom on almost any subject -- the vicissitudes of history, the temptations of youth, the challenges of aging, the folly of ambition -- you name it. Often overlooked, however, is Shakespeare's simple advice on how to live a good life. Research "the good life" on your computer and you will be offered more than three million sites to visit. None, however, is likely to yield better advice on the subject than the counsel that Polonius gives his son, Laertes, in Hamlet:

  Give thy thoughts no tongue,

  Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.

  Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;

  Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

  Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;

  But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

  Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware                      
  Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

  Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.

  Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

  Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

  Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

  But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

  For the apparel oft proclaims the man . . .

  Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

  For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

  And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

  This above all: to thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

For three weeks each summer between ages six and sixteen, I attended a summer camp in which the campers were not permitted to enter the dining hall until they had recited in unison the last three lines of this advice about the need to be true to one's self. After a lifetime of reflection, I still consider this wisdom on personal integrity and authenticity to be the most important guidance offered by Polonius -- "above all," writes Shakespeare. With every passing year, however, I find myself increasingly drawn to the insightful observations of Polonius on friendship, especially the notion that we should grapple trusted friends to our souls "with hoops of steel."

I must confess that I have been somewhat remiss in providing the care and attention that is often required to maintain lasting friendships.  With our modern lives in a constant state of flux, punctuated by geographical moves, it is all to easy to lose touch with valued friends, rationalizing all the while that "we've moved on."  Conventional wisdom suggests that "distance makes the heart grow fonder," but I think the truth often lies elsewhere; we move or friends move, and while no one really intends to break ranks, we often fall into an "out of sight, out of mind" way of thinking.

I'm taking steps now to reverse that trend, starting tomorrow with a trip that I may not have considered just a few years ago; I am traveling well over a thousand miles to a reunion with classmates that I had for only two years of my life -- in the ninth and tenth grades of high school -- friends who, for the most part, I have neither seen nor spoken to for more than fifty years. Who knows? Maybe I will find a use for some of those hoops of steel that have been rusting away in the recesses of my mind.

Before departing, I want to offer a little toast of gratitude for those new friendships that I have been making in the blogging community:

To those who generously share your passions through prose, poetry, photographs, historical accounts, and inspirational quotes;  to those who call upon us daily to pay attention to something rare and wonderful in the universe; to those who invite us into different cultures with different traditions; to those who have the courage to talk openly about the difficult passages that cycle through all of our lives; and, finally, to those who not only write about their experiences, but who also find time to comment on the journeys of others --

I raise my glass to you in gratitude. I find your individual journeys to be both fascinating and inspirational, and I look forward to reading your postings when I return early next week.