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"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish....Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it."
-Herman Hesse
Well, it finally happened. A Friday rolled around and I discovered that I hadn't written anything. And I have about an hour this morning when I can write anything. So I'm going to do something a little different this week, and type up some passages that others have written that I especially like. We'll see how it goes.
"Living the good life for us was practicing harmony with the earth and all the lives on it. It was frugal living, self-subsistent, self-sustaining. It was earning our way by the sweat of our brows, beholden to no employer or job. It was growing our own food, building our own buildings, cutting our own wood, and providing for our own livelihood. We need and used little money. If we couldn't pay for a thing we made it ourselves or did without.
"Our idea was to take care of our physical needs, housing, food, fuel, and clothing so that we could read, write, study, teach, or make music without dependence on the outside world, and to do this together."
This passage says perfectly what I would like to tell people about my imagined life. If someone wants to know what I want to do with my life, just read that.
"This can be the great tragedy of old age, that looking back with inverted romantic eye, it may see only the suffering of mankind. It is hard to praise life when life abandons us; and if we speak well of it even then it is because we hope that we shall find it again, of fairer form, in some realm of disembodied and deathless souls.
"These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty city spires, or simple chapels in the hills, -- they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? - is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know. But as long as men suffer these steeples will remain.
"And yet what if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled and youth would find no room on the earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the excision of the superfluous. Through love we pass our vitality on to a new form of us before the old form dies; through parentage we bridge the chasm of the generations, and elude the enmity of death. Here, even in the river's flood, children are born; here, solitary in a tree, and surrounded by raging waters, a mother nurses her babe. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.
"So wisdom may come as the gift of age, and seeing things in place, and every part in its relation to the whole, may reach that perspective in which understanding pardons all. If it is one test of philosophy to give life a meaning that shall frustrate death, wisdom will show that corruption comes only to the part, that life itself is deathless while we die.
"Three thousand years ago a man thought that man might fly; and so he built himself wings, and Icarus his son, trusting them and trying to fly, fell into the sea. Undaunted, life carried on the dream. Thirty generations passed, and Leonardo da Vinci, spirit made flesh, scratched across his drawings (drawings so beautiful that one catches one's breath with pain in seeing them) plans and calculations for a flying machine; and left in his notes a little phrase that, once heard, rings like a bell in the memory - 'There shall be wings.' Leonardo failed and died; but life carried on the dream. Generations passed, and men said man would never fly, for it was not the will of God. And then man flew. Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, attaining, longing.
"Here is an old man on the bed of death, harassed with helpless friends and wailing relatives. What a terrible sight it is - this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh, this toothless mouth in a bloodless face, this tongue that cannot speak, these eyes that cannot see! To this pass youth has come, after all its hopes and trials; to this pass middle age, after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health and strength and joyous rivalry; this arm once struck great blows and fought for victory in virile games. To this pass knowledge, science wisdom: for seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart through suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his throat. Death wins.
"Outside on the green boughs birds twitter, and Chantecler sings his hymn to the sun. Light streams across the fields; buds open and stalks confidently lift their heads; the sap mounts in the trees. Here are children: what is it that makes them so joyous, running madly over the dew-wet grass, laughing, calling, pursuing, eluding, panting for breath, inexhaustible? What energy, what spirit and happiness! What do they care about death? They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with children, with parental care that will make their offspring finer than themselves. There in the garden's twilight lovers pass, thinking themselves unseen; their quiet words mingle with the murmur of insects calling to their mates; the ancient hunger speaks through eager and through lowered eyes, and a noble madness courses through clasped hands and touching lips. Life wins."
Now that is a passage that best describes my philosophy of life, in its wide scope. Life is what is important, not us, not death. Just that living goes on, and we do what we can to make life better, and make life continue.
Siddhartha is a story of a man who reaches enlightenment. In this part of the book, Siddhartha, although enlightened, is pained over the appearance of his son. Because his son hates him, and refuses to live with Siddhartha, instead running off to town.
"'You can see into my heart,' said Siddhartha sadly. 'I have often thought about it. But how will my son, who is so hard-hearted, go on in this world? Will he not consider himself superior, will he not lose himself in pleasure and power, will he not repeat all his father's mistakes, will he not perhaps be quite lost in Samsara?'
"The ferryman smiled again. He touched Siddhartha's arm gently and said: 'Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you really then think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.'
"Never had Vasudeva talked so much. Siddhartha thanked him in a friendly fashion, went troubled to his hut, but could not sleep. Vasudeva had not told him anything that he had not already thought and known himself. But stronger than his knowledge was his love for the boy, his devotion, his fear of losing him. Had he ever lost his heart to anybody so completely, had he ever loved anybody so much, so blindly, so painfully, so hopelessly and yet so happily?...
"One day, when the wound was smarting terribly, Siddhartha rowed across the river, consumed by longing, and got out of the boat with the purpose of going to the town to seek his son. The river flowed softly and gently; it was in the dry season but its voice rang out strangely. It was laughing, it was distinctly laughing! The river was laughing clearly and merrily at the old ferryman. Siddhartha stood still; he bent over the water in order to hear better. He saw his face reflected in the quietly moving water, and there was something in his reflection that reminded him of something he had forgotten and when he reflected on it, he remembered. His face resembled that of another person, whom he had once known and loved and even feared. It resembled the face of his father, the Brahmin. He remembered how once, as a youth, he had compelled his father to let him go and join the ascetics, how he had taken leave of him, how he had gone and never returned. Had not his father also suffered the same pain that he was now suffering for his son? Had not his father died long ago, alone, without having seen his son again? Did he not expect the same fate? Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid thing, this repetition, this course of events in a fateful circle?
"The river laughed. Yes, that was how it was. Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone."
Slaughterhouse-Five is not a book I can explain to you. All you need to know for this section is that Billy, the main character, occasionally comes 'unstuck' in time, and travels to the past or future, or moves the wrong direction in time.
"Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
"The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
"The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."
hink Kurt Vonnegut and I share a fond joy in this dream. We both probably don't believe anything like this could ever happen, but secretly we imagine what the world would be like if we all conspired to produce a perfect world.
The End