THE CONFIDENT VOICE
Saturday 25th February 2023
PICO IYER Worldwide travel writer his stories have taken him to the snowy mountains of Japan and a
film festival in Pyongyang, North Korea. Author of The Art of Stillness is also a champion of the art of ‘going
nowhere,’ a contemplative state of mind that makes a flight to Bhutan as calming as an afternoon in your
garden. British essayist and novelist known chiefly for his travel writing and author of numerous books on
crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul.
Gilbert James Illustration for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyām. (1900)
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“After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a
world of unceasing conflict — and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate
the differences. And the natural place to embark upon such an inquiry — should we discard
the notion of heaven entirely? — seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word
for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it.
Days, sometimes weeks, in silence had given me a taste of what lies on the far side of our
thoughts. Who we become — cease to become — when we put all ideas and theories
behind us. There seemed to be cacophony even below the stillness. The golden pampas
grass in front of me, the dry hills beyond, the fleecy clouds stealing up the hillside — not
what I had thought about them — were the truth”.
Buddha stares at me impassively. Onto the quiet faces in the sun I could project anything I
needed. Our one task is to make friends with reality; imagine them whispering “suffering and
death”. The unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what’s around
you. In one celebrated story, Buddha had come upon a group of picnickers who were
enraged because they’d just been robbed. “Which, he asked, is more important? To find the
robbers or to find yourself?
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“I’d long been drawn to graveyards in the places where cultures cross, headstones put every
kind of division in its place.
Few of the buried had probably seen what was coming. Our lives can only be half known
insofar as their final act, which seems to put all that has come before in place, is always
hidden, and we seldom wish to think of it. We can step out of the play with no glance back
yet even as we try to make some sense of life, things are shifting, falling away from us on
every side. The older I get, the more I begin to feel that almost everything that had
happened to me, good or bad, seemed to have come out of nowhere”.
As Leonard Cohen, (faithful to the Old Testament) put it in one of his final songs, ‘we’re none
of us deserving the cruelty or the grace.”
The thought that we must die, I might have heard those two hundred thousand graves
saying - is the reason we must live well”.
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David Thoreau 1817–1862 American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher best known
for his master work ‘Walden’, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, essay ‘Civil
Disobedience’ arguing for disobedience to an unjust state. His lasting contributions are writings on natural
history and philosophy, in which he anticipated ecology and environmental history, two sources of modernday environmentalism A lifelong abolitionist, his lectures attacked the fugitive slave law, praising the writings
of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later
influenced political thoughts and actions of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Thoreau wrote: I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. 'That government is best
which governs not at all. When men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will
have.
“It is 1843. The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, blown with feathery softness
against the windows, and sighs like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong
night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl sits in a hollow
tree in the depth of the swamp, rabbit, squirrel, and fox have all been housed. The watchdog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has
slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door
has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only
sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — telling us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer
and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand.
But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending,
as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields”.
We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as
cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim
and private light, which enhances the warm cheer within.
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There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold
can chill…. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter’s day, when the meadow
mice come out and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly
from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams
on our backs as we tread some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and
bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.
This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the coldest day, and on the
bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is
kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, has the complement of the seasons, and in
winter, summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects
migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.
Alessandro Sanna illustration from ‘The Rive’r.
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In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues,
where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in
the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate.
In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under
drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke
cheerfully ascends.
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you
would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out
some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when
I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every
house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those
wards as I can stand. I recover some sanity which I had lost almost the instant I venture
outdoors “.
Princesse Camcam illustration for ‘Fox’s Garden’
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The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much
men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading
through the woods and fields and conversing with the snow. I thus from time to time break
off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs,
grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence
I devote myself to the infinite again.
There is nothing so curative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I
meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably
dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the
least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!!
But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly
related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case,
is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous
and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.
I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this
requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out
to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified.
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October 20 1857, shortly after my fortieth birthday :
“I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road,
barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind
on his bare feet. When he reached me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his
shoes in the other, filled with gnarled apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with
me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold
weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken
and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he hadn’t
anything to carry them in, he put ’em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry
fruit in. How many he got in up to the toes, I don’t know. I noticed, too, that his pockets
were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as
were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out scouting this gusty
afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. It pleased me to see this
cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the
evening of his days. A childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields carrying it
home in the October evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter’s store. He was happy to
be Nature’s pensioner birdlike picking his harvest. Rather his robin than your fat turkey, his
shoes full of apples than your barrel loads; far sweeter telling a finer tale.
This old man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand church’s sacraments and memento mori’s.
Better than a prayerful mood. It proves to me old age is tolerable, as happy, as infancy. Had
he had been a young man, he would probably have thrown away his apples and put on his
shoes when he saw me coming, for shame. But in old age he has learned to live, make few
apologies - just as in infancy”.
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Annie Dillard (1945) American author, narrative prose fiction and non-fiction, poetry, essays,
prose, and literary criticism, two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the
1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
“Past winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed
tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleetingly
blazing touch. Orion vaulted spread across the sky, pagan and lunatic, shoulder and knee on
fire, his sword three suns at the ready —prepared for what?
I stood at my bay window on which in summer a waxy-looking grasshopper breathed with a
puff, and I thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent, and longing wrapped
around my throat like a scarf. Is this mystery? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib
cage; when I stirred, it tolled, long syllable pulsing ripples in my lungs and down the sap
inside bones, and I couldn’t make it out; an unvoiced vowel like a sigh or a note, couldn’t
catch the consonant that might shape it into meaning, I had to turn away from the window
and step outside.
Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned enticement, perhaps the cruellest joke of all. A wind
arose, quickening; invading the nostrils, vibrating my body. I stirred and lifted my head. No,
I’ve gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax. Beauty is real.
I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it”.
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Carson Ellis illustration from Du Iz Tak? story of the cycle of life and eternal cycle of growth and decay
Watching a maple leaf twirl to the ground in its final flight - Another year falling away,
unrolled, dropping like a tattered flag. “The last act is bloody,” said Pascal, “however brave
be all the rest of the play; at the end they throw a little earth upon your head, and it’s all over
forever.” Somewhere, everywhere, there appears a gap.
The gap is the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly sparse and clean
that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unblindfolded. The
gaps are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy
narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of their mystery.
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeeze
into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe.
This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon.
Spend the afternoon.
You can’t take it with you “.
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There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh, your needs are guaranteed; your needs are
absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words:
knock; seek; ask. (But you must read the fine print)
“Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it, it will catch
you up, carry you aloft, and you’ll come back, for you always come back, transformed in a
way you may not have bargained for. Did you think, before you were caught, that you
needed, say, life?
Did you think you would keep your life, or anything else you love?
You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned
that the promise holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it
occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone,
I think that the dying pray at the last, not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest would thank
his host at the door. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible
earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be
done about it, but ignore it, or see.
And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the
monk on the road who knows clearly how vulnerable he is takes no comfort among deathforgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live
coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part”.
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a connotation of infinity
a connotation of infinity
sharpens the temporal splendour of this night
when souls which have forgot frivolity
in lowliness, noting the fatal flight
of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream
down eager avenues of lifelessness
consider for how much themselves shall gleam,
in the poised radiance of perpetualness.
When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought
is like a woman amorous to be known;
and man, whose here is alway worse than naught,
feels the tremendous yonder for his own—
on such a night the sea through her blind miles
of crumbling silence seriously smiles
EE CUMMINGS
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