hermit's thatch

Blame for the devolution of the French Revolution into a reign of terror has often been placed on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, specifically his Social Contract, a structuring of society wherein individual citizens cede part of their autonomy for the “general will.” Rousseau’s general will was conceived by him as a distasteful but necessary concession given what society had become: a Hobbesian structure of exploitation by the rich and powerful versus the dispirited situation of the masses. Rousseau was not an advocate of such a state but a prophet of its probable triumph, given the control over daily life and culture he had already discribed and critiqued in the Discourses.

Rousseau’s early works had already generated resentment and opposition across the ruling elites. His books were proscribed by both political and ecclesiastical authorities. In the nineteenth century, laws against blaphemy, let alone against the ideas of a societal alternative to injustice and oppression suggested by Rousseau, were endemic to Europe.Rousseau not only made enemies but lost friends who renounced him for their own safety. He was hounded from his own native Switzerland (where a mob once descended on his house pelting it with rocks), to France, to England. Rousseau returned to France at the behest of a wealthy sympathizer who promised him protection. He returned to Paris, in old age, where he lived in relative obscurity. He no longer held ambitions to popularize his ideas or persuade others. Instead, Rousseau wrote that he wanted nothing do with people, that everyone had become his enemy, that he would rather embrace solitude than put up with anyone from his past.

These remarks Rousseau wrote in a book intended only for himself: Reveries of a Solitary Walker. He wanted to review how he got to solitude. Still intensely consumed by his universal betrayal, the animosity of everyone, he wanted space to reflect on where he was at thisjunction. Naturally, Rousseau sounds bitter. He writes essays around the theme of taking reflective walks, a usefule device, perhaps. But the walks are not relaxing. On the first walk, taken from Paris to its outskirts (not a suburbia then but to the transition point from city to agriculture and wilderness), a reckless carriage hurdling down on him sends him into a ditch, nearly run over. On another walk he goes through a village cheerfully saluting the gaggle of small children curious about the stranger, but mothers and caregivers quickly scramble to bring the kids indoors, staring suspiciously at the walker. Rousseau imagines that they recognize him: it’s another persaonl affront.

The rest of the reveries of his “walks” are increasingly more resentful and bitter, and the device of “walks” drops away. Rousseau wrote ten of these little essays. His interest in botany, not unlike Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s, is refreshing, and occasionally he makes a philosophical remark to brighten his solitude. But the reveries are dark, often self-pitying, and melancholic. Yet Rousseau believed that human nature was essentially good. It was society and other people who ruined it. Or, as a later Frenchman (Sartre) says in his play No Exit: “Hell is other people.”

from https://existentialcomics.com/comic/379

Walking is a natural function. Walking took on a special meaning culturally when it became part of ritual and religion. Walking became a special expression of piety in pilgrimage: the Christian Way of St. James, the hajj of Islam, the Kumbh Mela of Hindu India.

Similarly, ritual postures are performed successively to pursue a regime that approaches piety. These are pronounced in Islam, especially Sufism, and exist to a modest degree in Christianity. The Hindu tradition formalized ritual postures into yoga, where the concept of yoga is both a mental/spiritual discipline and a succession of formal postures performed. A simple manifestation of posture servicing religion or spirituality is the act of sitting in meditation.

Walking is a unique function in the pursuit of wisdom. To walk, to pursue a single “postural” expression repeatedly, not a step or pose but motility itself, with direction and vigor, is flexible, functional, and eminently simple. Sage individuals have incorporated walking into their lives as methods of insight. The examples are many. The Greek philosophers were called peripatetic because they had no fixed abode,thus no fixed posture, intellectually or physically. Atthe same time, they perambulated, walking while teaching. The hermits of ancient China regularly sought out mountains in which to dwell, walking many miles in seeking new homes. What more evocative scene than Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao te ching, walking westward and stopping at a final outpost to share his thoughts with a solicitous sentry there, and then walking onwards, not to be seen again.

In modern times, great figures who consciously walked include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Henry David Thoreau, author of “Walking,” but also of the substantial Walden, which includes vignettes of walking, and Hermann Hesse, author of Wandering. A hermit-walker is the narrator of Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees. All of thee authors and their works address solitude and the solitary life.

Thoreau understands that walking is more than merely a means of transport, from one point of business to another. He prefers sauntering, and notes the interesting derivation of the word sauntering as walking within san terre,literally “holy land.” Walking in nature transforms the land about into an idyll in paradise. It is a conscious means to an intentional end: without carriage, without animal transport, not an equestrian, not a rider, but a walker, a “more ancient and honorable class,” Thoreau notes.

Rousseau, in bitter old age, also took long walks from his city residence in Paris into the countryside, in an era when city’s edge was farmland and nature, not suburbia. Rousseau recorded his thoughts on these long walks, frankly missing details of nature for his own preoccupations, although like Thoreau and Emily Dickinson after him, avid collector of herbs and flowers that attracted his eye, pursuing an amateur’s botantical knowledge in identifying and collecting plants.

Hesse’s fictional Wandering, which reads like nonfiction, is filled with aphorims, romantic reveries neither Rousseau nor Thoreau. Hesse’s incorporation of nature in a philosophy of life is, however, reminiscent and full of depth, where walking, like wandering itself, is a metaphor for making our way through life. And the way, the path, is life itself, unfolding before us.

Thoreau emphatically rejects walking for exercise. Such walking lacks the essential attitude of attentiveness to nature. Thoreau owns that walking in the woods could mean long stretches of time without getting far distant. On the other hand, a villager could walk for exercise without noticing anything in surrounding nature, let alone the resident of our contemporary cities where green spaces are sparse and nature sadly suppressed. But, after all, Thoreau’s essay is titled “Walking, or The Wild” and his signature conclusion is that “all good things are wild and free.”

A story in the Daily Star (UK) runs with the headline: “Homeless man has lived under noisy dual carriageway ‘like a hermit’ for 11 years.” The item is not unusual for a tabloid, conjuring up another story about a crazy man readers can gloat about with a thump, telling themselves they are glad and pleased not to be that madman. Not that the subject is conscious of some moral purpose or pretense. Or that he isn’t mad.

The item is a reminder of a Japanese Zen story about Tosui (among many sources is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, first published in 1957). The story gives a dramatic twist to virtue, strength, mindfullness. Plus, it’s a good story.

An old Zen master [Tosui] had grown weary of instructing monks and announced his retirement. He did not indicate to anyone what he intended to do or where he intended to go, but a novice student pursued him and asked. The master looked dubiously at the young inquirer. The master told him that he was going tolive under a bridge, and with that the master grabbed a few things for his bag and left. The novice followed him, saying “I intend to follow you.” The master looked back, scoffing, and turned to make his way.

After some time the master reached the bridge in the middle of the city, which was crowded with poor and lost souls. The master walked about, surveying the homeless, abandoned, half-crazed, confused, and desperate, but also noticing quiet, pensive, studied faces, some scrutinizing him fearlessly. The novice tagged dutifully behind. At last, the old master found an unoccupied spot and settled his few belongings. The novice sat next to him, conspicuously quiet, his large eyes looking about in a mixture of curiosity and terror. The darkness of evening was descending quickly,and so, too, the chilly air. The master wrapped himself in his old cloak and lay down, telling the novice that he was going to sleep. The novice was still looking around him, wide-eyed, fear etched in his face. Slowly, the scene settled, as men moved to their spots beneath the bridge and became motionless in the dark. The novice noticed that the old master had forgotten to eat. Or did not intend to do so, though the novice felt at one moment keen hunger, another a great nausea.

Hours later, daylight was breaking. The homeless under the bridge began to stir, a few at a time. The old master was among them. The novice slept, exhausted. The master looked at the man next to them. He was not moving, but the old master noticed that the man’s face was trapped in a grimace. The old master came nearer, and realized that the man had died overnight. The novice was stirring and pulling himself to a sitting posture. He was stil very uncomfortable, and still looked around himself warily. The old master noticed. “Ah, you are still here!” he said to the novice.”I was sure you would have returned to the monastery by now.”

The novice smiled wanly, searching the master’s eyes for comfort. “See here,” announced the master. “This fellow here, who slept a few feet from us, is quite dead. We will have to bury him shortly. And look! He has left us a half-eaten bowl of rice, no doubt his unfinished dinner. A bit cold, but here, young novice, let’s have breakfast.”

With that the novice wretched and heaved. “Bah!” said the master angrily. “I told you you were no good for this life. Now, go, back to the monastery with you! Get out! And make sure you tell no one that I am here.” And with that the young novice fled.

URL: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/homeless-man-lived-under-noisy-22868139

Speaking of the benefits of solitude, as in the previous post, a pandemic reading list of Chinese and Japanese hermits is always appropriate — even as pandemic continues, and the relevance of some of our favorite hermits continues to prove perennial. An “Isolation Reading List” from a contributor to the Buddhist magazine Tricycle dates from April 2020. (Other favorites can be added, to be sure.)

The five favorite poets are: 1. Hanshan, 2. Hsieh Ling-yun, 3. Saigyo, 4. Ryokan, 5. Shiwu (Stonehouse).

URL: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/isolation-reading-list/

The Conversation (an academic newsletter) describes briefly “Why philosophers say solitude can be helpful (even if you didn’t choose it).” Four benefits of solitude are:

1. Freedom to do what you want — any old time;
2. Reconnecting with yourself;
3. Finding your “inner citadel;”
4. Seeing the bigger picture.

Lots of representative quotes from favorite Western classics.

URL:https://theconversation.com/why-philosophers-say-solitude-can-be-helpful-even-if-you-didnt-choose-it-147440

Alas, Paul of Thebes is apocryphal, not an historical hermit; he is sprung from the creative quill of St. Jerome. Young Jerome was irascible, strong-willed, moving deftly within elite circles of Rome. Jerome wrote a hagiographic biography of the supposed first Christian hermit shortly after his own conversion around the age of thirty — although some versions suggest he wrote after offending enough people in Rome that he had to leave for Antioch and Bethlehem, where he pursued his best work. Given Jerome, one can speculate that the aspiring ascetic did not like or may even have been jealous of the success of the recent biography of St. Antony by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, which exaggerated the monumental struggles against demonic forces by the stalwart Antony — contrasted with the style of quiet contemplation and asceticism now animating Jerome.

The story of Paul, living in quiet solitude in his hermit’s cave, is the obverse of the busy Antony fighting demons and organizing ranks of aspiring hermits. Jerome has the young pre-desert Antony seeking out Paul of Thebes for advice. Antony is tolerated, perhaps, and sent by Paul to Athanasius to bring back a burial cloak for Paul. Here Antony is reduced to errand-runner, and he gets back too late. Paul has died in the meantime. A couple of lions have dug a grave for Paul, Antony having forgotten to bring a spade. Not for this story is Jerome associated with lions, but it’s an early clue of where hagiography about Jerome was to go!

The essential attraction of Paul of Thebes lies in his reflective questions to Antony when Antony first happens upon Paul, isolated in the desert. Says Paul, rhetorically:

Tell me, how fares the human race?
Do new roofs rise in ancient cities?
Whose empire now sways the world?
Do any yet survive, snared in the errors of demons?

And here is the essential question of history and human affairs, whether asked by an observer east or west, ancient or modern. That which the average person finds permanent, enduring, important, are for deeper souls reflective of impermanence, temporality, even poignant in its short-lived presence on earth. This wide contemplation of a trajectory that transcends the concerns of average people is what the hermit catches on to. The hermit pays heed to and takes to heart, the lesson of life and death, watching as the world passes.

A number of characteristics of the early desert hermits of early Christianity both distinguish the hermits and also underscore important characteristics of all likeable hermits, regardless of geography, culture, tradition, or era.

In the first place, the desert hermits are distinctly driven by a spirituality of their own design and practice. Yes, they are Christian, after all, and tacitly accept the dogma and teaching of their era and of the ecclesiastical authorities. But their chief interest is crafting of themselves a perfect spiritual vessel, simple, natural, and unencumbered by the controversies and invective of the day. As St. Antony the Great, the first desert hermit, reputedly said, pursue what God shows you to be your strengths. (And as Thomas Merton notes, the bishops were far away and not very interested in the desert!)

Not only was eremitism their strength but their strength was the manner of life suggested by eremitism: filled with disciplined hours of contemplation, quiet cooperation with others, economic simplicity, adaptation to nature, isolation from crowded populations and their curious idlers.

The desert hermits had no interest in entertaining visitors, though they received them with inevitable patience. Two examples of this:

1. Abba Moses was walking by a crossroads when a group of pilgrims came up, asking where the house of Abba Moses was. “Why do you want to see that old fool?” Moses replied. They insisted. Well, then, said Moses, pointing down the road — except that he was pointing in the opposite direction from his hut.

2. A prestigious bishop came to a hermit to hear what he had to say. After a moment of conversation, the hermit asked the bishop if he would take advice. Yes, certainly, replied the bishop. The hermit leaned closer and said, “In the future, if you hear that I am in a certain place, do not come to see me. For if I see you I must see everyone, and then I will have to leave the place.

And so the desert hermits would not concede that any visitor had priority over their solitude, over their spirituality, over their project. At the same time, we see a touch of the attitude that characterized Diogenes, our first favorite hermit.

This attitude extended to the community of hermits itself. One Sunday, a visiting priest (not knowing the way of hermits, presumably) announced that a particular novice brother present must leave the community — for something heard in confession, it is to be surmised. A certain elder hermit, tall and distinguished, stood up and began making his way out. Wait, cried the priest, where are you going? The elder turned and stated quietly that he, too, is a sinner. The priest was humbled and the novice recalled. For the hermit spirituality was different. Abba Moses himself was famous for his advice when asked about what to do to maintain peace of mind. “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

And as one amma (woman hermit) noted, what is the point of great learning if you lack humility, if you know the fine points of dogma but lack charity, if you go out to see signs and wonders but do not see the marvel of what can be made of your spirit? She was practical enough, too, to note that what is the point of going out to the desert if your heart is full of the city? (Granted that there is a tradition of “hermit in the city” but that would not differ too much from the amma‘s point.) How imminently practical more advice of the amma: What is the point of fasting if you break your fast with a sumptuous meal? Better to eat less daily and not fast at all.

But these anecdotes hone in on only a few expressions of eremitism, expressions of what might be called self-effacement. Leafing through a book on desert hermits (such as Helen Waddell or Benedicta Ward or Thomas Merton) reveals a panoply of archetypal eremitic expressions of the desert hermits. And it’s hard to choose only one hermit or two among them as favorites.

Some of my favorite hermits of Western antiquity had “attitude.” What is “attitude”? — surliness, crankiness, anti-social behavior? This “attitude” would fit the stereotype of the hermit being annoying — to society at the least, on the edge of mental instability at most.

But plenty of surly and antisocial people are not hermits. Indeed, the definition of the true hermit includes a deeper self-motive: religious, philosophical, spiritual. While motive does not define “attitude” nor escape the stereotype, the historical hermits have never been socially combative, uncharitable, or obnoxious; they are not recluses shunning people, and have been able to converse civilly and affectionately as needed. But the true hermit also does not coddle hypocrisy.

Diogenes of Sinope, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, lived in ancient Athens in public places, eating, sleeping, even relieving himself in public — a modern “homeless” person, haranguing the wealthy passersby with choice philosophical advice, “Socrates gone mad,” Plato said of him. Because his behavior was excoriated by the nobler people of the marketplace, who also could not stand his critiques, Diogenes was called a dog, which translates to a “cynic,” hence he is attributed founder of the philosophical school of Cynicism.

One day Alexander the Great and his company was in the vicinity, and Alexander thought to amuse himself by provoking Diogenes. He rode up to him and started a conversation, asking many questions. Diogenes said nothing. Exasperated, Alexander finally asked, “Diogenes, what do you want of me?” We can imagine Diogenes shading his eyes with his hand. “For you to go away. You are blocking the sunlight,” came the reply.

Attitude. A certain inappropriateness, dismissiveness, yet a certain restraint while delivering a withering response. Diogenes is not per se a hermit, but the values he holds closest are a preliminary, a basic ethos. After all, Alexander asked of Diogenes what he wanted. Diogenes replies that basically he wants nothing, not only for his personal needs, no riches, goods, or title, but especially nothing from a vain and powerful man. A man of power whom the hermit disdains but finds not relevant enough to be critiqued, argued with, or given the light of day.

Nietzsche presents a Diogenes-like figure in his little vignette of the madman in the marketplace. In the marketplace, the Athenian agora, the rich and well-born are chatting, trading, bargaining, puffing up their reputations, exchanging gossip. A madman at the edge of the crowd, disheveled, muttering, carrying a lantern, approaches. The madman demands to know why everything is business as usual when, in fact, the big news is out: God is dead! The movers and shakers are amused, and taunt the madman, telling him that, no, God is on holiday, gone to sleep, gotten himself lost, is hiding. The madman shouts that no, God is dead, and you, (corrupt loafers!) have killed him! Now what will you do? What water can wash the blood from your hands? Do you not smell the purification already?

But the crowd is merely uncomfortably silenced. The madman looks around, looks at each of them. No, they don’t know. They don’t realize. The news has not reached them, like the light from an imploding star that has not yet reached the Earth. The madman smashes the lantern to the ground. No, he says, I have come too early. And with that he turns and walks away.

Nietzsche’s Diogenes fits the philosopher’s own interests, of course: the grand question that if modern culture has killed the ethical import of God (an import to which they never lived up and used hypocritically), will they now become gods, substitutes for power, for morals? But the hermit always divines a larger tableau to time, nature, and culture, a tableau not discerned by the people who carry on their small circumspect lives and pursue the demands of society and the marketplace. Diogenes fits the sense of attitude that the hermits don’t necessarily reveal -— and certainly not with such flamboyance. But that is their trajectory, as we shall see.

Next: the desert hermits.

Popular media eagerly links apropos music to the sensibilities of the present pandemic. Fans of pop-rock music will find “Living in a Ghost Town” by The Rolling Stones a representative choice. The lyrics mention having to go “underground.” The idea suggests two classic literary presentations of “underground,” namely Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

In both novels, “underground” is not just a physical location but a state of mind of the protagonists, a state of involuntary solitude amounting to alienation, disdain, and distrust of society. In Dostoevsky, the protagonist is a bitter man who cannot tolerate hypocrisy, and prefers his aloneness to the company of those he can no longer tolerate. He blames himself for chasing after them too long, for secretly admiring the station and haughtiness of this crowd whom he tried to impress and persuade to like him but failed miserably to win. So he has consciously decided to live “underground,” having nothing to do with them — though he still resents his failure.

In Ellison, “underground” is a method of self-salvation, a black man abused by both blacks and whites, of different political and social persuasions, all of the others flawed, unreliable, failing to understand the protagonist’s personal plight, or the plight of African-Americans in general (the novel was published in 1952). “Underground” to Ellison’s protagonist is safety, anonymity, the status of being an “invisible man,” meaning that he will no longer attempt to persuade others or justify himself to them, but dwell comfortably in his self-effacement. Ellison acknowledged his debt to Dostoevsky, but did not elaborate any analogy with the historical “Underground Railroad” of nineteenth-century United States history. After all, that underground was a physical pathway out of slavery, and such an equivalent social pathway did not exist in his day.

“Living in a Ghost Town” includes a line lamenting that if the lyricist wants to party during the lockdown, it’s a party of one. True. But it’s always a party of one. If the lockdown ends, if the pandemic ends, will society be any different in the eyes of the solitary,the urban hermit, or the one gone underground?

Anthony Storr, the author of Solitude, A Return to Self, quotes the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s 1958 essay “The Capacity to Be Alone,” where Winnicott notes the popular emphasis on “the fear to be alone or the wish to be alone [rather] than on the ability to be alone.” As Storr and others have since shown, this capacity is not pathological but, in fact, necessary and healthy. And the pandemic is reminding us of this fact.

URLs: Hermitary reviews: https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/dostoyevsky.html and https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/ellison.html; “Living in a Gost Town”: https://youtu.be/LNNPNweSbp8

The coronavirus pandemic has prompted many columnists, bloggers, and popularizers to comment on solitude, usually addressed as a necessary coping mechanism. They are speaking not of solitude as such but of what author Sue Halpern describes in her book Migrations to Solitude as “involuntary solitude.” But can staying at home, social isolation in a pandemic, equate to the involuntary solitude of the recluse, the prison inmate, the patient with terminal disease, the widowed or bereaved, the mentally ill? A true solitude is not only not involuntary but a profession, a project, an embrace of persona and destiny. Not a small order, compared to what the columnists think of as a spell of isolation calling for lots of time-killers: games and puzzles, movie-binging, and the reading of tomes never intended to be read anyway.

Solitude is the realm of the hermit, the mystic, the creative artist. It belongs to a different realm than physical solitude, than the psychological realm that equates solitude with loneliness. Solitude is assigned to the introvert to a degree, but is otherwise chosen deliberately, if not consciously.

The health worker confronting illness and death is not a solitary, of course. But also not a mere unit working with others as in a military operation. (The vocabulary of war, attack, assault, defense, troops, front lines, etc.is unfortunate and ultimately misleading, revealing how society values the work — and death — of the warrior over that of anyone else.) The health worker holds to a unique and selfless vocation, not an involuntary pursuit. But the moral dimension of their arduous work lifts them, in a time of pandemic, to a loftier realm. Not loftier in an entirely moral sense, for it is not a matter of pointing out heroism versus pedestrianism. All this makes solitude for the person stuck at home–grudgingly conforming to social isolation–an opportunity to pursue better habits. Taking up better habits with reluctance and a willful involuntariness is self-defeating and bad faith.

One good reading source in a time of pandemic is Albert Camus’ The Plague. As an existentialist, Camus is attempting to reveal a necessary truth about any situation, but without moralizing, just plainly and realistically. The plague of the novel is the backdrop to a specific geography and people. Granted that several main characters are clear projections of Camus, that the city is a projection of life itself, does not detract from the detail and suspense of daily existence, or our concern for the fate of the characters.

The chief protagonist is Dr. Rieux, who comes to be in charge of the quarantined city’s medical response, who spends his days and evenings facing the plague and its death ravages unflinchingly. A journalist Rembert wants to escape the city, bribe the sentries that he may break the quarantine and return to Paris, but eventually the example of Rieux convinces him to stay and to work with the doctor. Similarly, the priest Panteloux sermonizes at the beginning that the plague was God’s punishment for the guilty. As the plague continues its course, killing indifferently, Panteloux starts searching for clearer explanations, and joins Rieux in the hospital wards. There, at Rieux’s side, they witness a child die in agony, crying out wretchedly until dying, and the doctor whirls angrily at the priest, stating that the child at least was certainly innocent. We must bend to the mysterious will of God,the priest argues. We must come to love that will. No, replies Rieux. “Until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” Panteloux searches for the final word, telling himself that he himself must, therefore, have grace. Rieux demurs. Panteloux congratulates Rieux for working for man’s salvation, like himself. “Salvation is much too big a word for me. I don’t aim so high. I’m concerned with man’s health, and for me his health comes first.”

The character Tarrou offers a lengthy summary of Camus’ philosophy of life.”Each of us has the plague within him,” he says. “We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face.” The plague here is not just microbial. It is not just an abstract notion of original sin or human nature. It is the malevolence of the world and society that infects every person. It sits within waiting to manifest itself and infect others. It is, as Tarrou suggests, “a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.” And until that release, “I know no place in the world of today.” When he refused to follow social conventions of war and violence, Tarrou knew that he “doomed” himself to “an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history … I’ve learned modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims,and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences.”

“It comes to this,” Tarrou said almost casually; “what interests me is learning how to become a saint.”
“But you don’t believe in God.” [Rieux replies].
“Exactly! Can one be a saint without God? — that’s the problem, in fact the only problem.”

In the end, the characters realize that life in the plague is simply life itself. Suffering and death are always around us, are intrinsic to existence, that they are not separate, that we are the plague itself. That is why we are in this together, not because we form society, friendship, or perform acts of heroism, sanctity, or high morals. Rather, because we are human beings, we live and die, all of us. This is the common, the universal fate we all share,and we owe one another a certain “decency,” as Camus puts it, regardless of our personal beliefs.

One last thought. This is the month of April. The opening line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” tells us: “April is the cruelest month …” It is the cruelest month because it taunts us with the coming of spring, the passing of winter, sometimes clear and sunny, sometimes filling the air with sleet and snowfall. Pity the plants perked to raise their heads above the ground to welcome a spell of warmth only to be beaten down. And the birds, their cheerful song and carefree flitters cut short by a sudden cold, killing many. Such is the course of life, misinterpreting the signs, trusting in hopes, expectations dashed, refusing to wait long enough to discover the true nature of the cycle of seasons, the cycles of nature, the cycles of life. Patience and observation are the sage’s strengths, never assuming or grasping, practicing Chuang-tzu’s wu-wei, or “no-action” or, at least no harm.