hermit's thatch

In his recent book The Homing Instinct: Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration, biologist Bernd Heinrich explores the capacity of animals to define “home,” either in the fascinating treks of birds, butterflies, moths, turtles, whales, and salmon that may travel thousands of miles from their birthplace homes to live out a season or a lifetime, then to return to the exact place of birth, whether by magnetic or solar navigation or other still mysterious to science mechanism.

As compellingly interesting is Heinrich’s discussion of animal homes themselves. While the descriptions are entertaining and informative, an important and notable fact is that homes are typical of social animals, while solitary animals typically seek makeshift shelter. Thus, eusocial animals, those with the most complex stratification of labor such as termites, bees, and naked mole rats, construct the most complex of homes. The chief characteristic of these homes is not merely shelter for rearing progeny safely. Indeed, in such complex society, reproduction is restricted to one female (“queen” among the insects). Eusociality = gregariousness, although the degree of voluntarism is not knowable. However social, such as birds, which diligently build nests and defend homes or home grounds entire lifetimes, the eusocial species construct large communal multi-dwelling structures to accommodate colonies, not just families. Heinrich sees a suggestive if imperfect analogy with (human) monastic orders.

But humans were lower then even birds in the hierarchy of home-construction and the evolution of this function. Where birds and lower mammals (rabbits, beavers, rodents) construct nests, warrens, and burrows, later mammals opportunistically used makeshift or found structures. Thus, the larger mammals like lions, hyenas, bears and the like, and simian evolutionary ancestors of humans, did not construct homes at all — nor did the earliest humans.

However, human newborns are decidedly altricial. They are born helpless and remain effectively dependent for years, unlike other species, including most mammals. The need for male humans to seek out food, leaving females alone and physically vulnerable, demanded the requirement of shelter, and earliest human groupings presumably used caves before constructing makeshift structures equivalent to huts and evolving into multiple occupancy structures. In all this home construction, however, humans had been forced by sheer necessity to innovate shelter, and not necessarily skillfully. They had advanced from cave-dwelling to inverted nests to group structures not unlike those of weaver birds.

Once safely ensconced in a safe home, humans could specialize and multitask. With the exception of the occasional natural disaster like plague or famine, or societal disasters like war, humans launched the course of infinite growth and acquisitiveness that is the chief characteristic of the species in society.

Curiously complementing this discussion is Kazi K. Ashraf’s book The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in Ancient India, which shows that the concept of home as the primordial bastion of reproduction and survival evolved into the bastion of family life and safeguarding of material well-being. However, this foundational structure of society was challenged in ancient India by the late Vedic era ascetic movements rejecting the primacy of the role of the home. With this rejection — to parallel Heinrich’s discussion — is rejection of reproduction and subordination to the group survival instinct. In short, the hermit, or hermit-ascetic, represents the rejection of the concept of home, a radical metaphysical and psychological mindset but not novel in the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

The hermit’s reversion to primitiveness and makeshift shelter is akin to solitary animals, for as Heinrich demonstrates, nest-building and home-creation is the product of reproductive behavior, in turn the expression of the survival instinct. The hermit of this era reverts to dwelling in caves, in huts, under trees — not unlike solitary (versus gregarious, let alone eusocial) animals.

Divergent disciplines — biology, architecture, sociology — suggest the depths that an anthropology of solitude and eremitism needs. Ancient India provides an excellent model because the IndoEuropeans who swept eastward from Europe, to be known as Aryans in India, established a religion of sky gods and animal sacrifice not unlike other nomadic peoples, such as the Hebrews. Fire was at the heart of the Aryan ritual, deriving in part from the necessity of sacrifice, but ultimately expressive of a deity form. Scripture (in this case the Rig Veda) became the intellectual expression of that peoples’ religion and the source of social codes and stratification. Here, too, are analogies with the founding religion of the Western world, with scriptures, social codes, and a priesthood equivalent of Brahmins.

Finally, the lateVedic era, of the Upanishads and the rise of eremitism and asceticism culminating in multiple contemporary ascetic groups (especially Hindu sadhus, Jains, and Buddhists), represents what Gavin Flood has called the “internalization of tradition.” The fire of the external ritual became the spiritual fire within, what the historical Jesus intended in teaching that the kingdom of God is within the self. In this train of thought, the kingdom of God is not with the temple-worshipers. It is not unlike the view of the Indian hermit-ascetics who argued that the kingdom of God was not in the Brahmin’s temples.

All the implications for what we consider home and society, versus solitude, dwellings, simplicity, and disengagement, are resting at the core of a deep anthropology of eremitism.

Blindness is the absence of sight, due to genetics, circumstance, or accident. But for centuries blindness has been used more widely as a metaphor for a stubborn person whose ideas and ethics are not in accord with one’s own. For example, the Gospel of Matthew speaks of “blind guides” and “blind fools,” a disparaging use of the notion of blindness that employs the isolated physical handicap of those who are innocent. (At the same time, the gospels show Jesus healing a number of blind people, with the notion of their being restored to wholeness, both physical and spiritual).

More complexly, the ancient Greek tradition conjured a different experience of blindness and its meaning, in part a deeper metaphor but a literal one as well. The universal figure was Tiresias, a prophet who was blinded by the gods according to various traditions, essentially punished for his frankness. Not merely frankness but clairvoyance characterizes Tiresias, though it is presented as simple depth, observation, and vigilance in wiser versions. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the blind Tiresias continues his prophetic role. Oedipus demands of Tiresias to know who has murdered the previous king Laius. Tiresias knows but demurs, for his knowledge is a terrible truth and worse future. He thus angers the temperamental Oedipus. When Tiresias finally tells him that it was he, Oedipus, who unwittingly committed the evil deed, Oedipus blinds himself in self-punishment.

Here, the blind prophet Tiresias is the only person in a world of sighted people who can perceive the truth and proclaim it unflinchingly. From this presentation — not quite an archetype — evolved the counter-notion concerning blindness that the blind can achieve a deeper insight, a deeper sense of meaning than the sighted, who are forever consumed (visually) in the worldly.

The notion of blindness has a social ambiguity that wavers between a debased notion of physical handicap or a refined notion of intelligence, creativity and insight. Many major authors have been blind, or as in the case of Homer, were deemed blind as a way of accentuating their keenness of mind, character portrayal, and insight. The English poet John Milton (1608-74), who became blind in mid-life, composed a short poem reflecting on his condition:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

[Shortly after posting this item, a long-time friend of Hermitary pointed out a relevant piece of literature illustrating the theme of blindness and wisdom, “The Astronomer” by Kahlil Gibran, which with much thanks is reproduced here:

In the shadow of the temple my friend and I saw a blind man sitting alone. And my friend said, “Behold the
wisest man of our land.”

Then I left my friend and approached the blind man and greeted him. And we conversed.

After a while I said, “Forgive my question, but since when hast thou been blind?”

“From my birth,” he answered.

Said I, “And what path of wisdom followest thou?”

Said he, “I am an astronomer.”

Then he placed his hand upon his breast, saying, “I watch all these suns and moons and stars.”

]

Of the many writers who have been blind or nearly so — James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Jose Saramago, the classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo — a favorite (but not because of his blindness) is Jorge Luis Borges, who has said of his condition in a 1971 New York Times interview:

I knew I would go blind, because my father, my paternal grandmother, my great-grandfather, they had all gone blind. … When I lost my sight I was rather worried over it, and in my dreams I was always reading. Then somehow I never could read because a word became twice or thrice as long as it was, or rather instead of one line there would be other lines springing like branches out of it. Now I no longer dream of reading, because I know that’s beyond me. …

Sometimes I see a closed book and then I say, “I could read this particular book,” but at the same time even inside my dream I know I can’t, so I take good care not to open that particular book.

But these are modest words, for after blindness in his mid-fifties, Borges was obliged to dictate his stories and poems and essays, hence his amused acknowledgement that he had to copy and restyle what he had written long before. Yet everything he had written to that point he had written with the dark foreknowledge that he would lose his eyesight. Was this a factor in his insightful writing, his creativity, his stories that read like a prophetic or mystical voice announcing of things that others had not seen?

Blindness is a kind of solitude, involuntary to be sure, separating the self from people in a sense-dependent way, missing cues and emotional revelations in others that signify so much of relationships. But this can as much be imposed by others who persist in not comprehending that one sense-perception is not the universe of knowledge, creativity, or insight. As the philosopher Diderot wrote, “A blind man values himself as much as, and perhaps more than, we who see.” He was referring to a blind man he had encountered, a busy husband, father, and chemist, who surprised Diderot with his assertiveness and self-esteem.

So the attitude of others is as much a key to what is blindness as whatever the blind person can pursue. In unwitting social circles, the blind can revert (or be reverted) to a kind of numbness if not themselves cautious and philosophical. For example, many blind people are in poorer countries today where tolerance of their condition will revert to the attitude of antiquity, and only ten percent of blind people today can read Braille, fostering a dependence on audio technology that is both a blessing and a threat.

Even so, solitude need not separate anyone from nature or from that deepest part of self that is the link to universal things. Solitude always challenges the self to be a better steward of the mind and soul, to pursue paths that provide greater insight into self. What an irony that blindness understood as a potential rather than merely a handicap could serve at least metaphorically as a parallel gift of insight.

Gratitude is an ambiguous term. Does it mean thankfulness for what we have? But as opposed to if we did not have what we have? And what do we have for which to feel thankful? Health, possessions, friends, esteem, position? If we are grateful for these, is it not at the expense of others, or is any effort of our own not the result of serendipity or the work of others bringing us to this point?

To be grateful for something in our lives can appear an arrogance when others lack: lack possessions, lack self-esteem, lack position, social circle, health. Gratitude can be an itemization of blessings, counting ourselves blessed, which suggests we are lucky, deserving, special, or exceptional. Every religious tradition has faced this narrow paradox. The Brahmin is blessed by the gods, or deserving from a previous life of virtue, while the mere day-worker must have been evil in a previous existence. The Western scripturalist is to itemize God’s favors and, like the Pharisee, tells himself that he has been chosen out of the many and is thankfully not like the others, sinful and impure. Even in a non-theological psychology we are expected to be grateful for what we have, to be pleased, satisfied, proud of achievement that is mere circumstance. Society shapes expectation, and our lack of this possessions or of this or that circumstance is cause for regret and antidepressants. Power further exploits the relationship, taking credit for the possessions and possessiveness of its subjects, and alternatively stripping them of possessions and hope when gratitude for mere survival is in order.

The only way out of gratitude as self-congratulations is twofold: to view all as necessary or to view all as accidental — or both.

The former sees all events as rigidly preconceived and unfolding like a mathematical formula. We ought no more to celebrate good health as to curse bad fortune. Stoics and Taoists took the actions of nature as given but random, inspecting their core ramifications dispassionately, not to be taken personally. The conspiracy of power was as ordered against the autonomous self as much as the conspiracy of weather brings heat stroke or snow showers bring wetness. Circumstances are defined by their attributes of randomness and inevitability. We must prepare for them, and they come to us regardless of our attitude or preparation. Indeed, morality is based on a livelihood and behavior that brings mental preparation and tranquility capable of anticipating any vicissitudes.

This sentiment is expressed more basically in chapter 5 of Chuang-tzu, which quotes Confucius as authority, though the sentiment is Taoist. The passage refers to a man born with one foot:

Confucius said, “Life and death are great affairs, and yet they are no change to him. Though heaven and earth flop over and fall down, it is no loss to him. He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things. He takes it as fate that things should change, and he holds fast to the source.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Ch’ang Chi.

Confucius said, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh. But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one. A man like this doesn’t know what his ears or eyes should approve — he lets his mind play in the harmony of virtue. As for things, he sees them as one and does not see their loss.”

Confucius then concludes that this man “regards the loss of a foot as a lump of earth thrown away.” In short, he is neither grateful that he still has one foot, nor resentful that he does not have two. But the analogy, though strained here, is more largely contextualized by Chuang-tzu’s image of pine trees that are stolid in winter snows as in summer heat, or to water that does not permit self-reflection unless it is still and not turbulent. So, too, with mind.

We can think, then, that everything must be accidental. You are rich and I am poor, but it is entirely an accident of nature that I am not the wealthy one and you are not the poor one. And if it is an accident, then what is the difference between us, any of us, except the temporary losses we sustain or the privileges society assigns to stratify and control us, each in our spheres? You are a Brahmin and I am a day laborer. You are a lord and I am a tenant. You are grateful for your status and expect me to be wretched, resentful, and doomed. Your ideology is contrived to make your accidental fortunes a necessity of virtues you never practiced in the womb, and to make my solitude a scornful sign of sloth and rootlessness attached to an ideology built on hatred of your circumstances.

The key to justice is not to level the inevitable but to stop defining justice as vertical, as enabling all to be Brahmins, lords, and mongers of power. The key is not to behead the lords and crown the impoverished. The key is to stop being grateful.

Gratitude implies hierarchy of desire, a material definition of values. If we succumb to what others have defined as gratitude, we perpetuate injustice and privilege. What is required is to redefine gratitude and dematerialize our responses to circumstances. We dematerialize by leaving gratitude neither in the realm of worldly society nor in the realm of abstract belief.

Instead, we must live and work opportunistically, like the butterfly discovering a flower, or a flower enjoying a refreshing rainfall. We must emulate the stolidness of the pine tree and pursue the trajectory toward stillness of water in seeking the center within us and not within the world. We can anthropomorphize the accidental and make it part of a moment’s joy, part of a day’s serendipity, make it such that we really can speak of that moment, that encounter, as a blessing — and nothing more. We become like the Japanese haiku poet walking the hedgerow at dawn and unexpectedly coming across a peony that leaves him speechless except to say “Ah!”

The Edge Foundation sponsors academics discussing their specialties and interests in a popularized context of talks and videos. The effort is not unlike the early 20th-century American Chautauqua aimed at non-academics, itself derived from traveling evangelizing ministries originating in the Great Awakening revivalist religious movements of a century earlier. The origins reach even further back to the rarefied intellectual circles of Enlightenment salons hosting the philosophes, who, however, lacked an audience except themselves and wealthy patrons. Today’s popular TED talks represent a similar phenomenon, further broadcast in bundles by public radio.

Still clinging to this effort of popularizing science and knowledge (or some parts of knowledge) is the symbiotic relationship of institutionalized thinkers and wealthy patrons, the latter transformed into governments and corporations.

This effort is characterized as democratic in the sense that it attempts to present decision making, scientific policy, and thoughtful reflection on current issues as the input of the many, especially of the enlightened many across the world. But the so-called democracies are oligarchies, if not plutocracies. Perhaps the revivalism of the popular media blunts this sharp-edged reality.

A current Edge book assembles scores of academics, chiefly in the sciences, to opine on “What Should We Be Worried About?” The short but numerous essays can be reduced to something like the familiar dialectic ascribed to Hegel:

• Technology can be good (… wonderful, progressive, liberating, efficient, compelling, inevitable, salvific …)
• But, technology can be bad ( … destructive, disruptive, abused, misapplied, misunderstood, unchecked …)
• Therefore, we should worry about it.

No conclusion is ever reached by these many voices because no fundamental premises are ever touched upon. None of these philosophes actually says that technology is intrinsically an expression of human society pursued by the powerful for the purposes of maintaining power, as Rousseau said centuries ago.

Technology’s presumed uses for good (thesis) or for evil (antithesis) is a false dilemma, especially in the modern world among modern scientists, for oligarchies always utilize sources of power such as technology for their own aggrandizing purposes.

Much of the remorse of scientists about the abuse of technology is what may be called the Einstein effect, not as scientist think of it but as a commonplace observer might. In this case the new Einstein effect refers to science’s most eloquently remorseful representative, who championed through his work the knowledge and technology of atomic fission leading to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima, nuclear weapons (bombs, missiles, depleted uranium), and countless nuclear power plants around the world that must be maintained for centuries to come regardless of the state of economic resources in the future.

Einstein came to regret all this (synthesis). But should Einstein — or any scientist or technologist — not have understood the fundamental nature of power and its utilitarian nature? Should it not be understood that what we should worry about (going back to the book title) is the inimical human drive to aggression and what to do about that? But the very first essay in the book, intended to blunt all others, is composed by the ubiquitous Steven Pinker, who reassures us that violence and war is at an all-time ebb, and nothing to worry about.

None of this debate should suggest that the original scientific method of observation, with increasingly sophisticated tools, is inaccurate or produces false data. For example, climate change need not be disputed, not just because scientific observations confirm it, but because climate change is the inevitable product of technological society’s insatiability and its absolute dichotimization of nature and human society. Nor can it be disputed that much technology saves lives, but, ironically, it saves the lives of especially those damaged by the very applications of technology, namely war, environmental pollution, changes to natural habitat and food, and acute reactions to diseases of civilization and to pharmaceuticals.

The redemptive, salvific role of technology advocated by oligarchies overlooks the reality that the same technologies cause many of the intractable and inimical circumstances of life and society in the first place.

The Dalai Lama has acquired a worldwide reputation for popularizing Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual themes, but his rapprochement with science, especially neuroscience, will yield minimal interest among the world’s scientists. His effort does not take into account the nature of science and technology, which is grounded on an intrinsically non-ethical methodology (“observation”) with unregulated experimentation and the contriving of acts.

Even acknowledging the moral scruples of some scientists, their work is always co-opted by technological applications that service inimical ends, even while some of the byproducts are benign or helpful. The same producers of technology are familiar with marketing, after all, whether to oligarchies or to the public. One can expect technology to be spun for its positive effects. Marketing focuses on individual testimonies. Marketing’s role is not to address the larger evolutionary patterns at work in frustrating nature and ethics. For example, medicine’s grand efforts today, such as cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and autism, quietly overlook the fact that these modern diseases are caused by modern technology itself in the form of chemicals, pesticides, adulterated foods, and pharmaceuticals.

But to point out this obvious fact is to undo everything societal. Only individuals with insight can address their own situation. Only individuals can reinsert ethics and constructive habits into their daily lives.

If the scientists of Edge can stir up a cacophony of worries about which they have no control (but whose research and that of their predecessors abets), then even a newly-redefined Einstein effect will be muted and the technologists will shrug off the necessity of ethical thinking.

Francois Noudelmann’s The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano is an intimate look at the impact of not music alone but the skill of each of sight-reading playing of the piano, and what it did to shape the psychic lives of these philosophers. Nietzsche was a composer, and all three familiar enough with musicology to write essays and criticism. But Sartre talked about Stockhausen while playing Chopin, and the post-modernist Marxist semiotics critic Barthes considered Schumann his favorite composer. Nietzsche was enamored of Wagner’s music early in his professional career but turned against him for lyric opera, with Bizet’s Carmen his favorite!

All of these unexpected interests are deftly analyzed by Noudelmann, who skillfully discovers (or uncovers) the sensitive emotional life within by tracking the piano-playing avocation. All three thinkers lost their father early in childhood. All found piano-playing, specifically in the presence of the women of their family (mother, sister, friends) a social and communal affirmation. Each was close to his mother throughout his life. Their piano playing was amateur, however well-informed, for they took liberties in rhythm, timbre, and chords to create music as solace not virtuosity. Thus the “masculine” function of thinking and writing was juxtaposed by feminine emotion, nostalgia, security.

Both Sartre and Nietzsche rebelled against a childhood of traditional religious music. Sartre longed to become a jazz pianist, “constructing an opposition to his guardian figures,” notes Noudelmann, but Sartre never acted on this impulse, finding Chopin to reflect a liberty within tradition that was also to appeal to Nietzsche, as did the equivalent sentiment of Schumann to Barthes. For Sartre even suspended his political activism and engagement to write a tome on Flaubert, that arch-bourgeois according to both Sartre and his disciples, but in order to comprehend the mind of his opponents. He wanted to undermine, not demolish his enemies, and he came to understand Chopin as a bridge to his loved ones rather than an advocate of outdated values.

Nietzsche was a skilled pianist and ambitious composer whose father’s lineage of theology and organ music inevitably left its mark in the young Nietzsche’s switch to philosophy and the (secular) piano. In Wagner he thought he had discovered the height of cultural amalgamation, a strategy of both powerful thought and expression. Richard Wagner and wife Cosima only toyed with him, and Nietzsche was devastated when an imitative composition he submitted to a Wagnerian conductor was returned with ridicule. Nietzsche returned to Chopin for the same reason Sartre would, seeing Wagner as the last gasp of a secularized mythology of scornful Romanticism. Zarathustra brought Nietzsche a new lyricism, an enchantment with the Mediterranean, and an appreciation for the uncontrived, this-worldliness of light opera, especially Bizet’s Carmen, which Noudelmann says was for Nietzsche “a musical antidote, beneficial to his health … a healing power.” The philosopher would shed tears at Italian operas, even as he wrote in the persona of a “pitiless critic or solitary philosopher.” During the strange eleven years after his breakdown, in which Nietzsche fell silent, he nevertheless spent a couple of hours a day playing piano music impeccably.

On to Barthes, who eclectic interests were bound to include music. Barthes identifies music as expression, engagement, pursuit, and creation, even to the (alleged) erotic element of how a work is approached. Despite his radical credentials, in the end he favors Schumann for his emotional precision, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for its organic structure, and the “French” composers, namely Debussy and Ravel, for their vision of how to employ rather than denigrate the past (the same theme of Sartre and Nietzsche) and to bring a freshness and light to musical expression that parallels art.

Fascinating insights into a less-popularized part of these philosophers is entertainingly covered by this book. Piano playing is a solitary occupation which these figures attempt to socialize in their modest and private way, but which ultimately remains a product of their own complex minds, for they never identified themselves as performers or professionals. The ability to play a classical instrument may yet today be identified with a certain socio-economic background. Yet music exists in every culture; music is intrinsic to human existence, whether it derives from birds or wind or modulations of the voice, or an ethereal otherness. The solitude of music awaits anyone who thinks, or anyone sensitive to sound, which ought to be all of us.

The enlightenment experience is viewed differently according to the given spiritual tradition. A structural model is aptly articulated by the Hindu formula “Not this, not this.” The utility of this formula (neti, neti) is that it enumerates the beings and experiences in the practitioner’s state of mind without thereby confining observers to a given prescription, belief system, or content. The practitioner is identifying that which is not essential, not substantial, which does not resonate with the search or objectification which is sought. Interestingly, neti refers to the cleansing process in yoga, universalized into a cleansing of mind from worldly accretions.

In that sense, the process never finishes. The philosophical goal is not manifestations of power, divinity, or visualization. Because all is continuous, interrelated, and interconnected, the process is an unfolding as much as a maintenance.

Enlightenment is not an isolated state, and pursuit of enlightenment is futile without a context. The recourse is to establish a way of living, a path. As the Buddhist Shantideva (8th century) so firmly emphasized, one must pursue a way of living that precedes and is prerequisite to any higher state of mind. Indeed, this way or path is superior to the enlightenment state. The way or path is grounded between ethics and nature, while enlightenment is a transient state and not a norm for human beings.

A consistent, sustained way of living is the investment that could potentially yield the fruit of enlightenment. There are no shortcuts. All traditions, even where enlightenment stories are presented regularly, present them casually or anecdotally, first assuming the investment as practice, then secondly assuming enlightenment states to be accretions and not goals, happenstance that may be good or may be indifferent. The Zen saying of mountains and rivers are mountains and rivers before, then not mountains and rivers, then mountains and rivers after, means that reality is and has been always the same, but the individual changes.

In Judaism, Ezekiel the prophet waits on the mountainside where he lives as a hermit or at any rate lives in seclusion. He stands before the natural elements on a wild night of watching. The winds roar, lightning bolts flash, thunder booms — but “not that, not that.” Only when the storm abates and stillness falls, and silence envelopes him on the dark mountain, a slight breeze caresses his forehead, and he recognizes God’s presence.
“That!” he may have exclaimed.

In Zen tradition, a meditator sits deep into the night. Darkness and silence envelope his body and senses. His breathing is minimal, his thoughts have long diminished with the rhythm of his breath. Suddenly, a bird sings. The meditator, in that moment, is stirred. “That’s it!” he may exclaim.

In Christianity, especially that practice closest to the desert hermits, is found the tradition of the via negativa, the negative way or path, which consists essentially in discarding that which is not divine or leading directly to God. But even here, the same named path in Meister Eckhart presents a different flavor than the practice of Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross. The latter seem to try to very consciously and deliberately to make their practice achieve transcendence. Their austerities and asceticism are genuine, but the force of these twin personalities — with John of the Cross attempting to describe like an early psychologist the road map to enlightenment — deprecates the quiet and dogged practice of “not this” with a sense of competition and pursuit. Hence the oscillating cycles of a “dark night of the soul” with “ecstasies,” which are identified as elements of Western mysticism but which are unknown in the quieter personalities of Orthodoxy or Asian traditions.

Is mysticism the same as enlightenment? Does the variety of personalities suggest a variety of religious experiences other than the generalities described by William James? The mystic connotes a forward and assertive personality eager to plumb the depths of a vision. However, the excesses of such a pursuit can easily conflate a sense of power with exceptionalism that alienate others — and in the cases of Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, and John of the Cross got them into trouble with authorities. In these cases, the mystics’ troubles arose due to intolerance by authorities, but authorities are bound to be skeptical and strive to uphold orthodoxy. Historically, then, the troubles were due to the absence of an important component of most Western traditions: eremitism.

Ecclesiastical authorities in the medieval West (and thereafter) knew that asceticism can lead to disenchantment with the world that may culminate in disenchantment with authority because authority always lacks a certain moral force to temper its power. Asceticism is this moral force lacking in institutions and their representatives. Thus asceticism was curbed by communitarian settings in monasteries and convents. Hermits were looked upon with suspicion, literally confined and yet observable in the case of female religious in anchorholds, or regulated into orders in the case of men, until eremitism disappeared in the West in the 16th century.

But historically wherever eremitism was safeguarded, and popular sentiment saw the hermit as a reservoir of wisdom, including the hermit’s critique of communitarian, social and power settings, eremitism was able to provide the physical conditions for the way or path originally mentioned as the prerequisite to enlightenment.

This is why the Christian desert hermits read so refreshingly in contrast to the later mystics, who while diligent in their attempts to articulate their understanding, nevertheless must be intentionally vague not only because of the nature of their experiences but because of the scrutiny of authorities. In comparison, the solitaries of the East historically could write and communicate more freely and openly because their eremitism had no oversight.

It is only natural that solitude frees the self to pursue a path that is always difficult in the world, especially when the world consists of deliberate hostility towards a serious eremitic path. The Western world (and its imitators today) does not so much offer the freedom to pursue solitude as it offers autonomy. Autonomy means that anyone can do anything. Autonomy is a flexible social latitude and contrived functional tolerance afforded individuals who stay within spheres of normality. But autonomy is the continuity of ancient authority, still defining the lines of behavior and demarcating through culture and technology preferred practices and behaviors. This autonomy represents a spiritual chaos. At the same time that it is destroying the cultural environment for pursuit of a path, autonomy is destroying nature and viable forms of solitary labor and self-sufficiency.

The solitary will find many obstacles to daily practice, and especially to enlightenment practice, which today requires a certain understanding of what the modern world is doing. Such a current awareness overlaps with trivia, news, gossip, celebrity, and power, all inimical to the tranquility required by the solitary. Yet trustworthy monasteries and anchorholds are fewer and fewer because their trustworthiness is always in question by solitaries leery of power, abuse, and interaction with others. Fewer and fewer, too, are isolated places in the world where nature is undisturbed and exploited. The cell must be one’s retreat, and the descent of quiet our mental atmosphere. Above all, attuning to one’s personality, conforming oneself to the personality patterns of past adepts, is a profoundly individual task but the only way to insight.

If the reader of Five Billion Years of Solitude does not surmise the argument of the book from the title, then certainly the first chapters do. Astronomer Frank Drake, now in his eighties, reminisces about the effort to identify extraterrestrial life. The heyday of funding for larger and larger telescopes and for multiple space probes called TPFs (Terrestrial Planter Finders) is over, as may be the whole enthusiasm for the search that was once reflected in the SETI project. Increasingly, the math was insurmountable: even an unambiguous radio signal to a viable exo-planet would take a minimum of a thousand years to travel, let alone another thousand years to return, assuming that it was targeted just so and remained unimpeded. Distance is demonstrably the telling factor now that all potential near-space possibilities have been disproved. “So you think we’re stuck in the solar system?” asks the author of Drake. “Yeah, I think so,” Drake replies somberly.

Author Lee Billings’ intriguing account follows more than dry astrophysics but perceptibly highlights the personal angles to the larger scientific inquiries. This mix presents science popularization at its best. Here is movement founder Frank Drake, reluctant optimist, who identified the longevity formula that posits the narrow window of exo-planet discovery by Earth-bound projects. Here are European and American astronomers competing to reveal the latest potential exo-planet candidates, only to cast unfriendly doubts on the work of one another. Billings usefully reviews the history of interest in outer space; taking research on atmospheres, chemistry, and astrophysics he applies them to Earth, demonstrating one of the ironic benefits of presumably abstract science: Understanding what happens to celestial bodies is engagingly relevant to what happens on Earth, to what we call Nature.

In a chapter titled “The Big Picture,” the author looks at what created ancient Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Plateau, and the enormous gas-bearing black shale of the Marcellus formation. Here the description under-weaves the observations of sedimentary geologist Mike Arthur of Penn State University, and culminates in the science of climate change and what atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen called the Anthropocene era. Arthur concludes that all of the gas will inevitably be extracted and burned, perhaps in twenty years, at enormous peril to the very sustainability of human existence, notes Billings. On the analogy of a 24-hour clock, the planet is only a second away from midnight.

Billings also talks to Jim Kasting of Penn State, “specializing in the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere and climate.” Kasting’s models of Venus have bridged explanatory models of Earth climate change. Identification of planet habitability and carbon cycles (Kasting’s specialties) have special relevance to exo-planet signatures, and James Lovelock’s Gaia theory is discussed, with its emphasis on fundamental life as basically cyanobacteria preceding and shaping habitability. Kasting is blunt in conversation”

It’s not just the climate. … We’re squandering Earth’s resources. We’re doing terrible things to biodiversity. I have no doubt we’re living in the midst of another mass extinction of our own making.

But as with many astronomy-oriented scientists, Kasting hopes for the equivalent of a miracle, namely, building a TPF and finding in far-away space what will convince humanity to stop and “appreciate our own planet.”

In the concluding chapters of the book, Billings looks at the impact of the 1990’s Hubble telescope effort, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program, the 2000’s plummet in funding, a brief note on the passionate Carl Sagan, and the meteoric rise of exo-planet research advocate Sara Seager. Seager’s life story could demand its own book, but her love of nature, wilderness, and the outdoors, combined with expertise in exo-planet studies closes Billings’ informative narrative on a humane touch.

Even for the non-scientist, and especially for that reader, Five Billion Years of Solitude is instructive. It underscores the paradox of knowledge versus helplessness, and the profound solitude of human beings on a fragile planet in a vast and ultimately baffling universe. The famous 1990 Voyager photograph of Earth as a “blue marble,” which showed the necessary interdependence of all sentient beings on the planet, ironically also highlighted the stark reality of our uniqueness and solitude as a species and as individuals.

Besides his many insightful observations of the natural world, biologist Bernard Heinrich adds philosophical insights that confirm the relevance of science to a reflective and sensitive evaluation of human reality. Humans are objects of observation, of course, and are part of the natural world, as much as they militate against that identification.

Thus, while Heinrich’s Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death, focuses on biological recyclers from beetles to ravens, always from first-person experience, reflecting classical scientists’ reliance on being in the field versus being in the lab, the author also discusses human behavior in the context of early or primordial human hunting and scavenging behaviors. Despite the image of the benign and self-sufficient hunter presented in many modern circles of thought, humans moved in fast and rapacious social groups that destroyed many large mammalian species, driving them to extinction, the same mindless human behavior that more recently has accelerated the extinction of contemporary species. Prompting human evolution were increased brain size, social hierarchy, and an unlimited drive for destruction, even when consumption and needs were long satisfied. Heinrich calls this behavior, negatively, “no knowledge of limits.” He notes:

Our tapping into the energy of meat some three or four million years ago instigated an “ordinary” evolution , with one innovation furiously generating the next. This eventually led to a new stage of human social evolution, now cultural instead of biological, which was kick-started and maintained by the massive influx of energy from recycling the remains of 3000-million-year-old plants, most prominently trees. This processing of fossil energy led to iron smelting, which opened the way to even more tools for energy extraction. Now these processes are fueling us through our farms and factories by feeding on ancient cycads, horsetails, and tree ferns. We are the ultimate scavenger of all time. Everything from the coal forests to a large part of the earth’s animal biomass — domestic birds and mammals (and , increasingly, fish) — are cycled into us, instead of into a sustainable world ecosystem. …

Key characteristics of human evolution seemed to hard-wire the killing skills of hominids into human society and culture ever since. Killing animals for food is enshrined in Western religious ritual, whether literally in the bovine sacrifices of the Hebrews or the horse sacrifices of the Indo-Europeans, or the symbolic flesh and blood of Christianity, and even in the secular sacrifices of mainstream culture’s holidays.

The image of the strong, brave, hunter so admired by society taps into the two animal instincts of survival and reproduction. The societal image is variously transmuted as soldier, athlete, celebrity, and power-holder, surviving war and competition to win the right to survival in luxury and/or to reproduce with chosen child-bearers.

The massive destruction of species in earliest human times is continued into the modern era and transmuted into the destruction of all nature. Modern humanity in advanced technological societies have simply extended the rapacity of earliest humans to control and destroy, from animals and plants to other peoples, cultures, and societies. This process extends to the “conquest” of space, where the motive to seek out extraterrestrial intelligence may well have sprung genetically from the desire to destroy all competitors for survival and reproduction, or culturally as a secular searching for extraterrestrial intelligence substituting God.

Aggression is the lot of human nature in groups, such that only the individual can check in him or her self the inherited patterns that require addressing. It cannot be done collectively. The creation of the now-called Anthropocene age of mass destruction has been coming for millions of years, and cannot be stopped. Yet this is what makes the detailed and admirable work of scientists like Heinrich so fascinating in its contrast.

Intelligent reading always requires the use of translations, and however short they may fall from conveying an author’s or language’s nuances, we are always better off working at the knowledge and information that potentially enriches us. We may not want to read Butler’s or Chapman’s translation of Homer, let’s say, but we cannot dispense with an awareness of Homer. Plus so many successive translators have now rescued limitless texts that we have no excuse for failing to address the ongoing need for our cultural enrichment.

At the same time, more intimate reading confirms the old saying that “translation is treason.” Not merely the mechanical transfer of word and sentence from one language to another, it is argued, but an entire cultural context of the original is lost, betrayed, or distorted. Many classics translated into English from Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian, Chinese, etc., have suffered from English translations frozen in their British, then American, milieu.

Translations sought to rescue meaning and satisfy curiosity but could not effectively convey nuance and cultural context. Only now do we know better and can criticize translators more rigorously. The differences are minor, utilitarian, insignificant, it may be argued in defense of the old translations. At one time, it was more important to bring the classics of Europe and Asia to the English-only world, after all. The gist of what the works were about should have been received with gratitude.

But the average reader was not to be faulted. As William Deresiewicz (in a New York Times item) has pointed out, the idea of reading in translation versus the original language was a favorite tool of elites to scorn those who could not read the originals because of lack of education and, therefore, class. “The contempt for translation partly reflects a desire to keep literature away from the grubby hands of the great unwashed, who don’t know how to appreciate it anyway,” he notes pointedly.

The history of translation as a cultural phenomenon in the West has always been momentous, and not recent. Begin with the Greek influence on Hebrew scriptures, then on Christianity in the early Roman Empire. Translation of Aristotle and others by Arab thinkers into the Latin of the Middle Ages affected the progress of philosophizing in Europe, followed by the Reformation controversy over translating the Bible into vernacular languages. The early 19th-century discovery of Asian thought (as a result of British imperialism, however) brought a series of stilted Anglicized versions of Hindu and Buddhist classics onto the English-speaking world, which, for all their accuracy, nevertheless inspired many thinkers. For example, Emerson and Thoreau, both of whom praise the Bhagavad-gita, were undoubtedly affected by this waft of fresh air otherwise inaccessible to them without translation.

Nor are modern translations necessarily better than 19th-century ones. To this writer’s mind, the Long translation of Marcus Aurelius seems hard to surpass. The modern version of Gregory Hays, with its clipped truncated style, loses the grand irony of an intelligent emperor reduced to reflection, instead offering a busy book of quick advice.

Then there is the controversy of Constance Garnett’s sweeping translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The famous phrase extrapolating from Nietzsche’s theme — “If God is dead, everything is permitted” — has long been argued as not being stated by any character at all. It was not in the translation, it was argued. But this argument was due to not accessing the Russian original (which few could do) and by dependence on Garnett. The modern translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remedy the deficiencies of Garnett as a whole with their sensitivity to Russian culture, and the phrase or sentiment is easily reconstructed after all.

Another modern controversy has been Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The British translator Stuart Gilbert took a didactic tack and interpolated explanatory twists into what Camus had presented as nearly Hemingway-esque clipped cadence. Gilbert translated the famous French term of endearment “Mamun” for “Mother,” thus contradicting an important aspect of the protagonist’s mindset, as Sartre himself pointed out. Stuart formalized the protagonist’s relationship with his mother with this colder term of British custom. This translation has been displaced for many readers by American translator Matthew Ward’s. Perhaps not quickly, but qualitatively.

Translator Susan Bernovsky discusses (in a New York Times blog entry) the nuances of translating Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” especially the core words describing the insect and how it moves and reacts. Here the translating is, as in the case of Camus, from one Western language to another, but the faithfulness of translation is in conveying the original intent of the author and in reproducing the author’s thoughts, fears, feelings, and perceptions, not merely in getting within range.

If Western languages can generate translation controversies, how far are we in grasping the nuances of Asian authors and their works. Today, that task is much eased by native language translators, and by the openness of scholarly exchange and critical review, but in the end, one must sense the affinity and identification of sensibilities of the author, the culture, the era, the physical environment — all increasingly lost as modernity races on.

Here is my quick two-word assessment in no particular order of ten English translations of Lao-tzu — a little glib, perhaps. My favorites also happen to include the original Chinese on facing pages, as if to say “you may check me.” These are Feng/English and Red Pine; Star and Henricks also include the Chinese. Of course, that inclusion may have depended on the generosity of the publisher.

LAO-TZU TRANSLATORS AND THEIR STYLES

Stephen Mitchell – contemporary reverence
D. C. Lau – reliable service
John C. H. Wu – inspired wealth
James Legge – inscrutability dabbling
Red Pine – dogged clarity
Jonathan Star – rigorous complexity
Ursula LeGuin – daring literalism
Robert G. Henricks – utile iconoclasm
Gia-fu Feng & Jane English – happy comprehension
Thomas Cleary – mysterious didacticism

Composers of classical music have always tried to reflect moods, themes, narratives, and settings in their works, sometimes literally as in Respighi’s The Birds or Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Genre works prefigure the mood, such as Romantic, but even in intellectual or abstract works, listeners inevitably interpret motives and emotional and psychological states, even when the composer may not have intended the specific interpretation. Bach’s mystifying Art of Fugue or Musical Offering are abstract but still reveal the creative mind entering a particular mode of expression that differs from his more transparent keyboard works or cantatas.

Can silence and solitude be presented as program music, or simply reflected in abstract work? Here it is not the quiet morning sunrise of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, or the occasional hushed calm of Debussy’s La Mer. Representations of silence are not the same as a theme that suggests silence. Satie broke down complexity of melody and rhythm while consciously trying to portray an environment of silence in the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, while still maintaining an image linking to “program” music. The music is not less complex or thoughtful for its simplicity. Mompou’s Impressions intimes or Musica Callada (Silent Music) continued this style, which is simple, wistful, and reflective, but not dark, ambiguous, or concealed. No single composer (including Satie) has worked exclusively in this classical genre (the genre proposed here!); some works of some composers before and after have been close to this aesthetic: Fauré, Koechlin, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Milhaud, even the early Cage. And while modern chorale and other composers exemplify a transcendent feeling in their work (Rutter, Tavener, Vasks, Part, Lauridsen, Hovhaness), the sectarian sources they tap may limit their audience.

The transition from classical has been via New Age music genres creating atmospheres or space music. This avenue has long been original and fruitful (Liquid Mind, Jon Serrie, Steve Roach, Rudy Adrian, and many others) but their relegation by industry to a genre of “relaxation” unjustly traps these composers and their work into mental background music. Just as classical music was not originally dependent on publisher profits, the need to break through directly to listeners has arrived with technology and new models of listening.

An interesting contemporary phenomenon, therefore, is the emergence of computerized or digital music, available to composers and listeners without the strictures of profit and marketing, approximating the genre of silence or “silent” music. For example, The Free Floating Music website (http://www.freefloatingmusic.com) identifies its purpose as promoting this genre, and does so with completely free downloads.

Free Floating Music exists to release and promote serene, peaceful ambient music –- music that grows out of and flows through the silence around it, sculpting spaces for reflection, repose and rejuvenation.

Some of the site’s works are tense or dark, or may feature (even once) a twang or crescendo or unwelcome surprise. But the idea of identifying music that approximates silence is an important insight into a subject that inevitably has an aesthetic component and, ironically, and aural one. The persistence of silent music is significant, a mirror to an ignored reality, a palliative to a frantic world.