In his wonderful contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, Yo-Yo Ma tells children about how books helped him survive his own childhood, listing King Arthur among his three great heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his mooring as an immigrant in America, he reaped great consolation and inspiration from the tales of the legendary medieval leader — stories of “adventure, heroism, human frailty and accidental destiny” that emboldened him to believe in the power of the quest for holy grails and improbable dreams — dreams as improbable as a small boy with no homeland growing up to be the world’s greatest cellist.
And, indeed, buried inside the adventure-thrill of these Arthurian tales are treasure troves of wisdom on fortitude, courage, and the art of honorable living, nowhere richer than in the novels by T.H. White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964), one particular passage in which offers a meta-testament to the potency of reading in the character-formation of King Arthur himself.
In White’s 1958 Arthurian classic The Once and Future King (public library) — one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lifelong favorite books — the mystic-magician Merlyn, aware of the young not-yet-king Arthur’s destiny, endeavors to sculpt the boy’s moral fiber and to teach him what it means to be a strong, kindly leader through a series of lessons from the animal kingdom, transforming him by turns into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, and a badger. One day, the young Arthur comes to Merlyn in his ordinary human incarnation, sulking with an ordinary human disappointment — that small, merciless mallet for our fragility. Merlyn offers his advice on the mightiest antidote to disappointment and sorrow:
The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” Carl Jung wrote as he contemplated life and death. And the most astonishing part of it all is just how resourceful we can be in kindling that flame even amid the most oxygen-deprived and suffocating of circumstances — a kind of spiritual survival instinct the vitalizing beauty of which only the oppressed, the marginalized, and the otherwise banished from mainstream society have the painful privilege of knowing.
This painful privilege is what the great German writer and political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in Men in Dark Times (public library) — a 1968 collection of essays that have grown all the more timely and radiant in the half-century since. (The book’s title, it bears pointing with a mixture of lamentation and delight, comes from an era when a great woman was a “he” — a paradox of which Arendt herself, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and the first woman to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, was the epitome.)
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth… Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.
From our vantage point as Arendt’s posterity, one thing is certain — her own ideas about freedom and justice and human nature are more blazing than ever. Half a century before Rebecca Solnit’s lucid and luminous case for hope in the dark, Arendt writes:
The world lies between people, and this in-between … is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe.
Arendt argues that in dark times — times of injustice, when certain groups are oppressed by certain other groups and personal liberty is imperiled — something magical happens to this in-between space, “a special kind of humanity develops,” a fierce fellowship between and among the oppressed. More than a century after Kierkegaard contemplated the power of the minority, she writes:
Humanity manifests itself in such brotherhood most frequently in “dark times.” This kind of humanity actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world. Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups… This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others.
Arendt herself, in addition to being a female intellectual in a almost entirely male realm, belongs to one such pariah population — the group of Jews expelled from Germany by Hitler at an early age — and it is from this meeting point of the personal and the political that she adds:
The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it — starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world — that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness.
But out of this worldless in-betweenness, Arendt observes, something else is born — a new sort of kindred humanism, which can’t be replicated or manufactured under any other circumstances:
It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world (and which of course existed between them before the persecution, keeping them at a distance from one another) has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon… In its full development it can breed a kindliness and sheer goodness of which human beings are otherwise scarcely capable. Frequently it is also the source of a vitality, a joy in the simple fact of being alive, rather suggesting that life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured.
[…]
But … this kind of humanitarianism, whose purest form is a privilege of the pariah, is not transmissible and cannot be easily acquired by those who do not belong among the pariahs. Neither compassion nor actual sharing of suffering is enough.
There is something larger and more expansive at the heart of the matter, Arendt argues — “the question of selflessness, or rather the question of openness to others, which in fact is the precondition for ‘humanity’ in every sense of that word” — and this openness, in its highest form, is an openness to each other’s joy rather than only each other’s suffering:
It seems evident that sharing joy is absolutely superior in this respect to sharing suffering. Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say. What stands in the way of this gladness is envy, which in the sphere of humanity is the worst vice…
This sharing of gladness, Arendt notes with an eye to Aristotle’s ideas about friendship, is the glue for the most powerful of human bonds:
The ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it. Of course there is something to the maxim that only in misfortune do we find out who our true friends are; but those whom we regard as our true friends without such proof are usually those to whom we unhesitatingly reveal happiness and whom we count on to share our rejoicing.
[…]
Humanity is exemplified not in fraternity but in friendship.
Therein lies Arendt’s most salient, most beautiful point — it is in this act of connecting that we create the world:
The world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows… We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.
Few are those whose contribution to humanity — be it art, or music, or literature, or some other enchantment — fills the heart with uncontainable gratitude for their very existence. Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) — one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest of our time — is one such blessing of a writer. She, the patron saint of paying compassionate attention, has made a supreme art of bearing witness to our world — be it in her exquisite poems, or in the prose of that moving remembrance of her soul mate, or in her meditations on the craft of poetry itself.
In her immensely rewarding recent On Being conversation with Krista Tippett — triply magical because Oliver rarely gives interviews, and never ones this dimensional and revealing — she read several of her most beloved poems. While “Wild Geese” remains a favorite, I was especially taken with a four-part poem titled “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” found in Oliver’s sublime 2014 collection Blue Horses: Poems (public library). It is partly a bow to her recent triumph over cancer, and partly a score to the larger tango of life and death which we all, wittingly or not, are summoned to dance daily.
Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace.
THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.
The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.
This inflicts no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.
Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.
As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.
So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.
Soon it was only a trickle.
The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.
Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.
Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.
She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?
She should fill her own house with flowers.
Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.
Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.
The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.
The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.
That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.
Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.
I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:
Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.
More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.
The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.
People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.
This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.
But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.
The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.
No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.
Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.
Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.
A great mournful lament filled the valley.
Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…
What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.
What had hardened was becoming soft again.
People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.
As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.
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