Appicchatā - ‘fewness of desires’

 (attached to Thoughts of a great man)

AN I

63 (3)
“Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that so causes unarisen wholesome qualities to arise and arisen unwholesome qualities to decline as fewness of desires. For one with few desires, unarisen wholesome qualities arise and arisen unwholesome qualities decline.”

86 / 87
Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that leads to such great harm as strong desire … that leads to such great good as fewness of desires …”

102 / 103
“Among internal factors, bhikkhus, I do not see even a single factor that leads to such great harm as strong desire. Strong desire leads to great harm.”
“Among internal factors, bhikkhus, I do not see even a single factor that leads to such great good as fewness of desires. Fewness of desires leads to great good.”

118/119
“Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that so leads to the continuation, non-decline, and non-disappearance of the good Dhamma as fewness of desires. Fewness of desires leads to the continuation, non-decline, and non-disappearance of the good Dhamma.”
“Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that so leads to the decline and disappearance of the good Dhamma as strong desire ...

AN V

90

Again, a bhikkhu who is a trainee does not get to hear at will, without trouble or difficulty, talk concerned with the austere life that is conducive to opening up the heart, that is, talk on fewness of desires, on contentment, on solitude, on not getting bound up [with others], on arousing energy, on virtuous behavior, on concentration, on wisdom, on liberation, on the knowledge and vision of liberation; so he neglects seclusion and does not devote himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the fifth thing that leads to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.

Other things that lead to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee:

(1) “Here, a bhikkhu who is a trainee has many tasks and duties and is competent in various chores that must be done, so he neglects seclusion and does not devote himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the first thing that leads to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.
(2) “Again, a bhikkhu who is a trainee spends the day on some trifling work, so he neglects seclusion and does not devote himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the second thing that leads to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.
(3) “Again, a bhikkhu who is a trainee bonds closely with householders and monastics, socializing in an unfitting manner typical of laypeople, so he neglects seclusion and does not devote himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the third thing that leads to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.
(4) “Again, a bhikkhu who is a trainee enters a village too early and returns too late in the day, so he neglects seclusion and does not devote himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the fourth thing that leads to the decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.

(5) “Again, a bhikkhu who is a trainee gets to hear at will, without trouble or difficulty, talk concerned with the austere life that is conducive to opening up the heart, that is, talk on fewness of desires … on the knowledge and vision of liberation; so he does not neglect seclusion but devotes himself to internal serenity of mind. This is the fifth thing that leads to the non-decline of a bhikkhu who is a trainee.

181
181 Forest Dwellers

“Bhikkhus, there are these five kinds of forest dwellers. What five? (1) One who becomes a forest dweller because of his dullness and stupidity; (2) one who becomes a forest dweller because he has evil desires, because he is driven by desire; (3) one who becomes a forest dweller because he is mad and mentally deranged; (4) one who becomes a forest dweller, [thinking]: ‘It is praised by the Buddhas and the Buddhas’ disciples’; (5) and one who becomes a forest dweller for the sake of fewness of desires, for the sake of contentment, for the sake of eliminating [defilements], for the sake of solitude, for the sake of simplicity. These are the five kinds of forest dwellers. One who becomes a forest dweller for the sake of fewness of desires, for the sake of contentment, for the sake of eliminating [defilements], for the sake of solitude, for the sake of simplicity, is the foremost, the best, the preeminent, the supreme, and the finest of these five kinds of forest dwellers. (...)

AN VI

81
“Bhikkhus, possessing six qualities, one is deposited in heaven as if brought there. What six? One abstains from the destruction of life, abstains from taking what is not given, abstains from sexual misconduct, abstains from false speech; one has few desires, and one holds right view.

114
Fewness of desires is to be developed for abandoning strong desires.

AN VII 1 + AN VIII 3

“Bhikkhus, possessing seven qualities, a bhikkhu is pleasing and agreeable to his fellow monks and is respected and esteemed by them. What seven? [2] Here, (1) a bhikkhu is not desirous of gains, or (2) honor, or (3) a reputation; (4) he has a sense of moral shame and (5) moral dread; (6) he has few desires and (7) holds right view.
+ a bhikkhu does not praise those who are displeasing or (2) criticize those who are pleasing;

AN VIII 23

The bhikkhu then said to him:
“Friend, the Blessed One declared that you possess seven astounding and amazing qualities. What seven? ‘Bhikkhus, Hatthaka of Āḷavī is endowed with faith. He is virtuous and has a sense of moral shame and moral dread. He is learned, generous, and wise.’ The Blessed One declared that you possess these seven astounding and amazing qualities.”
“I hope, Bhante, that no white-robed layman was present?”
“No, friend. No white-robed layman was present.”
“That’s good, Bhante.”
Then that bhikkhu, having received almsfood at the residence of Hatthaka of Āḷavī, rose from his seat and departed. After his meal, on returning from his alms round, he approached the Blessed One,  paid homage to him, sat down to one side, [and reported to him all that had happened].
[The Blessed One said:] “Good, good, bhikkhu! That clansman has few desires, since he does not want his inner wholesome qualities to be known by others. Therefore, bhikkhu, you should remember Hatthaka of Āḷavī as one who possesses this eighth astounding and amazing quality, that is, (8) fewness of desires.”

AN IX 1

“Bhikkhus, if wanderers of other sects should ask you: ‘What, friends, is the proximate cause for the development of the aids to enlightenment?’ you should answer them as follows.
(1) “‘Here, friends, a bhikkhu has good friends, good companions, [352] good comrades. This is the first proximate cause for the development of the aids to enlightenment.
(2) “‘Again, friends, a bhikkhu is virtuous; he dwells restrained by the Pātimokkha, possessed of good conduct and resort, seeing danger in minute faults. Having undertaken the training rules, he trains in them. This is the second proximate cause….
(3) “‘Again, friends, a bhikkhu gets to hear at will, without trouble or difficulty, talk concerned with the austere life that is conducive to opening up the heart, that is, talk on fewness of desires, on contentment, on solitude, on not getting bound up [with others], on arousing energy, on virtuous behavior, on concentration, on wisdom, on liberation, on the knowledge and vision of liberation. This is the third proximate cause….
(4) “‘Again, friends, a bhikkhu has aroused energy for abandoning unwholesome qualities and acquiring wholesome qualities; he is strong, firm in exertion, not casting off the duty of cultivating wholesome qualities. This is the fourth proximate cause….

(5) “‘Again, friends, a bhikkhu is wise; he possesses the wisdom that discerns arising and passing away, which is noble and penetrative and leads to the complete destruction of suffering. This is the fifth proximate cause for the development of the aids to enlightenment.’
“When, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu has good friends, good companions, good comrades, it can be expected of him that he will be virtuous, one who dwells restrained by the Pātimokkha … will train in them.
“When a bhikkhu has good friends, good companions, good comrades, it can be expected of him that he will get to hear at will, without trouble or difficulty, talk concerned with the austere life that is conducive to opening up the heart, that is, talk on fewness of desires … on the knowledge and vision of liberation.
“When a bhikkhu has good friends, good companions, good comrades, it can be expected of him that he will arouse energy for abandoning unwholesome qualities … not casting off the duty of cultivating wholesome qualities.
“When a bhikkhu has good friends, good companions, good comrades, it can be expected of him that he will be wise, possessing the wisdom that discerns arising and passing away, which is noble and penetrative and leads to the complete destruction of suffering.
“Having based himself on these five things, the bhikkhu should develop further [another] four things. (6) [The perception of] unattractiveness should be developed to abandon lust. (7) Loving-kindness should be developed to abandon ill will. (8) Mindfulness of breathing should be developed to cut off thoughts. (9) The perception of impermanence should be developed to eradicate the conceit ‘I am.’ When one perceives impermanence, the perception of non-self is stabilized. One who perceives non-self eradicates the conceit ‘I am,’ [which is] nibbāna in this very life.”

AN X 69 /70

“Bhikkhus, it is not suitable for you, clansmen who have gone forth from the household life into homelessness out of faith, to engage in various kinds of pointless talk, that is: talk about kings, thieves, and ministers of state … talk about becoming this or that.
“There are, bhikkhus, these ten topics of discussion. What ten? Talk on fewness of desires, on contentment, on solitude, on not being bound up with others, on arousing energy, on virtuous behavior, on concentration, on wisdom, on liberation, on knowledge and vision of liberation. These are the ten topics of discussion.
“If, bhikkhus, you engage in discussion on any of these ten topics, your splendor might surpass even the splendor of the sun and moon, as powerful and mighty as they are, how much more then that of the wanderers of other sects!”

“Bhikkhus, there are these ten grounds for praise. What ten?
(1) “Here, a bhikkhu is himself of few desires and speaks to the bhikkhus on fewness of desires. This is a ground for praise: ‘The bhikkhu is himself of few desires and speaks to the bhikkhus on fewness of desires.’

82
1) “It is impossible, Ānanda, that a bhikkhu without faith will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline. (2) It is impossible that an immoral bhikkhu … (3) … a bhikkhu of little learning … (4) … a bhikkhu who is difficult to correct … (5) … a bhikkhu who has bad friends … (6) … a lazy bhikkhu … (7) … a muddle-minded bhikkhu … (8) … a bhikkhu who is not content … (9) … a bhikkhu of evil desires … (10) … a bhikkhu who holds wrong view will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline. It is impossible that a bhikkhu who possesses these ten qualities will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline.
(1) “It is possible, Ānanda, that a bhikkhu endowed with faith will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline. (2) It is possible that a virtuous bhikkhu … (3) … a bhikkhu of much learning … (4) … a bhikkhu who is easy to correct … (5) … a bhikkhu who has good friends … (6) … an energetic bhikkhu … (7) … a mindful bhikkhu … (8) … a contented bhikkhu … (9) … a bhikkhu of few desires … (10) … a bhikkhu who holds right view will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline. It is possible that a bhikkhu who possesses these ten qualities will achieve growth, progress, and maturity in this Dhamma and discipline.”

87
Again, a bhikkhu has few desires and he speaks in praise of the removal of desire. When a bhikkhu has few desires and he speaks in praise of the fewness of desire this is a quality that leads to affection, respect, esteem, accord, and unity.

SN
16: 5

“For a long time, venerable sir, I have been a forest dweller and have spoken in praise of forest dwelling; I have been an almsfood eater and have spoken in praise of eating almsfood; I have been a rag-robe wearer and have spoken in praise of wearing rag-robes; I have been a triple-robe user and have spoken in praise of using the triple robe; I have been of few desires and have spoken in praise of fewness of desires; I have been content and have spoken in praise of contentment; I have been secluded and have spoken in praise of solitude; I have been aloof from society and have spoken in praise of aloofness from society; I have been energetic and have spoken in praise of arousing energy.” ...

For myself I see a pleasant dwelling in this very life, and I have compassion for later generations, thinking, ‘May those of later generations follow my example!’ For when they hear, ‘The enlightened disciples of the Buddha were for a long time forest dwellers and spoke in praise of forest dwelling ...were of few desires and spoke in praise of fewness of desires… were energetic and spoke in praise of arousing energy,’ then they will practise accordingly, and that will lead to their welfare and happiness for a long time. ...

16: 18
The Blessed One then said to him: “Exhort the bhikkhus, Kassapa, give them a Dhamma talk. Either I should exhort the bhikkhus, Kassapa, or you should. Either I should give them a Dhamma talk or you should.”“Venerable sir, the bhikkhus are difficult to admonish now, and they have qualities which make them difficult to admonish. They are impatient and do not accept instruction respectfully.”“Just so, Kassapa, in the past the elder bhikkhus were forest dwellers and spoke in praise of forest dwelling; they were almsfood eaters and spoke in praise of eating almsfood; they were rag-robe wearers and spoke in praise of wearing rag-robes; they were triple-robe users and spoke in praise of using the triple robe; they were of few desires and spoke in praise of fewness of desires; they were content and spoke in praise of contentment; they were secluded and spoke in praise of solitude; they were aloof from society and spoke in praise of aloofness from society; they were energetic and spoke in praise of arousing energy.“

Then, when a bhikkhu was a forest dweller and spoke in praise of forest dwelling … [209] … when he was energetic and spoke in praise of arousing energy, the elder bhikkhus would invite him to a seat, saying: ‘Come, bhikkhu. What is this bhikkhu’s name? This is an excellent bhikkhu. This bhikkhu is keen on training. Come, bhikkhu, here’s a seat, sit down.’ Then it would occur to the newly ordained bhikkhus: ‘It seems that when a bhikkhu is a forest dweller and speaks in praise of forest dwelling ... when he is energetic and speaks in praise of arousing energy, the elder bhikkhus invite him to a seat….’ They would practise accordingly, and that would lead to their welfare and happiness for a long time.

“But now, Kassapa, the elder bhikkhus are no longer forest dwellers and do not speak in praise of forest dwelling …  … they are no longer energetic and do not speak in praise of arousing energy. Now it is the bhikkhu who is well known and famous, one who gains robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicinal requisites, that the elder bhikkhus invite to a seat, saying: ‘Come, bhikkhu. What is this bhikkhu’s name? This is an excellent bhikkhu. This bhikkhu is keen on the company of his brothers in the holy life. Come, bhikkhu, here’s a seat, sit down.’

Then it occurs to the newly ordained bhikkhus: ‘It seems that when a bhikkhu is well known and famous, one who gains robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicinal requisites, the elder bhikkhus invite him to a seat….’ They practise accordingly, and that leads to their harm and suffering for a long time.“If, Kassapa, one speaking rightly could say: ‘Those leading the holy life have been ruined by the ruination of those who lead the holy life; those leading the holy life have been vanquished by the vanquishing of those who lead the holy life,’ it is just thus that one could rightly say this.”

MN 3

“Now, bhikkhus, suppose that I had eaten, refused more food, had my fill, finished, had enough, had what I needed, and some almsfood was left over to be thrown away. Then two bhikkhus arrived hungry and weak, and I told them: ‘Bhikkhus, I have eaten…had what I needed, but there is this almsfood of mine left over to be thrown away. Eat if you like; if you do not eat then I shall throw it away where there is no greenery or drop it into water where there is no life.’

Then one bhikkhu thought: ‘The Blessed One has eaten…had what he needed, but there is this almsfood of the Blessed One left over to be thrown away; if we do not eat it the Blessed One will throw it away…But this has been said by the Blessed One: “Bhikkhus, be my heirs in Dhamma, not my heirs in material things.” Now this almsfood is one of the material things. Suppose that instead of eating this almsfood I pass the night and day hungry and weak.’ And instead of eating that almsfood he passed that night and day hungry and weak. Then the second bhikkhu thought: ‘The Blessed One has eaten…had what he needed, but there is this almsfood of the Blessed One left over to be thrown away…Suppose that I eat this almsfood and pass the night and day neither hungry nor weak.’ And after eating that almsfood he passed the night and day neither hungry nor weak. Now although that bhikkhu by eating that almsfood passed the night and day neither hungry nor weak, yet the first bhikkhu is more to be respected and commended by me. Why is that? Because that will for long conduce to his fewness of wishes, contentment, effacement, easy support, and arousal of energy. Therefore, bhikkhus, be my heirs in Dhamma, not my heirs in material things. Out of compassion for you I have thought: ‘How shall my disciples be my heirs in Dhamma, not my heirs in material things?’”

Of Unresigned People, Who Are Full of Self-Will

People say, 'Alas, sir, I wish I stood as well with God or had as much devotion and were as much at peace with God as others are, I wish I were like them, or that I were so poor,' or, 'I can never manage it unless I am there or there, or do this or that; I must get away from it all, or go and live in a cell or a cloister.' In fact, the reason lies entirely with yourself and with nothing else.

It is self-will, though you may not know it or believe it: restlessness never arises in you except from self-will, whether you realize it or not. Though we may think a man should flee these things or seek those things - places or people or methods, or company, or deeds ­ this is not the reason why methods or things hold you back: it is you yourself in the things that prevents you, for you have a wrong attitude to things.

Therefore start first with yourself, and resign yourself. In truth, unless you flee first from yourself, then wherever you flee to, you will find obstacles and restlessness no matter where it is. If people seek peace in outward things, whether in places or in methods or in people or in deeds or in banishment or in poverty or in humiliation, however great or of whatever kind all this may be, this is all in vain and brings them no peace. Those who seek thus seek wrongly; the further they go the less they find what they are seeking. They are like a man who has taken a wrong turning: the further he goes, the more he goes astray. But what should he do? He should resign himself to begin with, and then he has abandoned all things. In truth, if a man gave up a kingdom or the whole world and did not give up self, he would have given up nothing. But if a man gives up himself, then whatever he keeps, wealth, honor, or whatever it may be, still he has given up everything. One saint comments on St. Peter's words, "See, Lord, we have left everything" (Matt. 19:27) - and all that he had left was just a net and his boat. This saint says whoever leaves a little of his own free will, he leaves not that alone, but he leaves all that worldly people can get hold of, in fact all that they are able to desire. For he who resigns himself and his own will has left all things as truly as if they were his free possession and at his absolute disposal. For that which you don't want to desire, you have handed over and resigned for God's sake. That is why our Lord said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matt. 5:3), that is, in will. And none should doubt this, for if there were any better way our Lord would have declared it, just as he said, "If any one would follow me, he must fi rst deny himself" (Matt. 16:24). It all depends on that. Observe yourself, and wherever you fi nd yourself, leave yourself: that is the very best way.

from the book The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Meister Eckhart, Maurice OC. Walshe ) 

A pure heart is one which is worried by nothing and is tied to nothing...

 

And as true obedience should have no 'I want this,' so too one should never hear from it 'I don't want,' for 'I don't want' is an absolute bane of all obedience.
*
The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent to gain all things, and the noblest work of all is that which proceeds from a pure heart. The more pure it is, the more powerful, worthy, useful, praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work. A pure heart can do all things. What is a pure heart?
A pure heart is one which is worried by nothing and is tied to nothing, which has not bound its best part to any mode, does not seek its own in anything, that is fully immersed in God's dearest will and gone out of its own.
*
Do you want to know who is a truly poor man? That man is truly poor in spirit who can do without anything unnecessary. That is why he who sat naked in his tub said to Alexander the Great, to whom the whole world was subject, 'I am a greater ruler than you, for I have rejected more things than you have ever possessed. What you think it a great thing to possess, is too petty for me to scorn.' He is far more blessed who can do without all things and have no need of them, than he who has possession of all things and has wants. That man is the best who can do without what he does not need. Therefore he who can do without and despise the most has abandoned most. It seems a great thing if a man gives up a thousand marks of gold for God's sake and builds many hermitages and monasteries and feeds all the poor: that would be a great deed. But he would be far more blessed who should despise as much for God's sake. That man would possess very heaven who could for God's sake renounce all things, whatever God gave or did not give.
*
Concerning this inner, noble man in whom God's seed and God's image are impressed and sown, and how the seed and the image of divine nature and divine being, God's Son, appears and is made man­ ifest - but, too, is sometimes concealed - the great master Origen gives a simile: that God's image, God's Son, is in the ground of the soul like a living fountain. If earth is thrown on it (that is, earthly desire), that hinders and covers it up so that it is not recognized or perceived; yet it remains living within, and when the earth that was thrown on to it from without is removed, it appears visibly. He says this truth is indicated in the First Book of Moses, where it says that Abraham had dug wells of living water in his fi eld, and evildoers fi lled them with earth, and later when the earth was removed the living streams reappeared.

Here is another simile: the sun is always shining but, if there is a cloud or fog between us and the sun, we do not perceive its radiance.

Likewise, if the eye is weak and sick in itself, or is covered over, it perceives no light. I have also sometimes used a clear example: if an artist wants to make an image from wood or stone, he does not put the image into the wood, but he cuts away the chips that had hidden and concealed the image: he gives nothing to the wood but takes from it, cutting away the overlay and removing the dross, and then that which was hidden under it shines forth. That is the treasure hidden in a field of which our Lord tells in the Gospel (Matt. 13:44).

St. Augustine says that when the soul is turned entirely upward into eternity, into God alone, then God's image shines forth and glows; but when the soul is turned outward, if only to the outward practice of virtue, then the image is totally veiled.

*
There are some poor people who will go back home and say, 'I shall settle down and eat my bread and serve God.' By the eternal truth I declare that these people will remain in error, and will never be able to strive for and win what those others achieve who follow God in poverty and exile. Amen.
*
The other thing I want to tell you is that many a dull-witted man will declare that a lot of the things I have said in this book and elsewhere are not true. To this I reply with what St. Augustine says in the first book of his Confessions. He says God has now made all future things for thousands and thousands of years (if the world should last so long), and that He will make today all things which have passed away many thousand years ago. How can I help it if anyone does not understand this? And elsewhere he says that that man is obviously too fond of himself who wants to blind others to hide his own blindness. I am satisfied if what I say and write is true in me and in God. He who sees a stick thrust into the water thinks the stick is crooked, although it is quite straight; this is due to the water being denser than the air. But the stick is straight, not crooked, both in itself and in the eyes of him who sees it in clear air.

St. Augustine says, 'He who, free from all thoughts, all bodily forms and images, perceives within himself that which no outward seeing has conveyed to him, knows that this is true. But he who does not know this laughs and mocks at me, and I pity him. But such people want to behold and taste eternal things and divine activities, and stand in the light of eternity, while yet their heart is flitting about in yesterday and tomorrow.' A pagan master, Seneca, says, 'Great and lofty things should be discussed with great and lofty minds and with exalted souls.' And some will say that such teachings should not be uttered or written to the unlearned. To this I reply, if one may not teach the unlearned, then no one can teach or write. For we teach the unlearned so that from being unlearned they may become learned. If there were nothing new there would be nothing old. "Those who are well," says our Lord, "have no need of medicine" (Luke 5:31 ). The physician is there to heal the sick. But if anyone misinterprets this saying, how can he help it who rightly teaches this saying, which is right?

from the book The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Meister Eckhart, Maurice OC. Walshe etc.)

Thomas Chatterton

 When Hume wrote, ‘the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’, he was defining the attitude of his age: its admirable, new and, in a way, courageous tolerance of suicide as an act to which everyone had a right was counterbalanced by an innate distaste for dramatics and a habit of feeling, if not of mind, which made a gentleman of proper style and wit respond to despair with impatience. The only alternative was to break the mould entirely and be more or less disregarded: Christopher Smart wrote in a madhouse and was considered merely dotty; so was Blake who, although born into the period, was already part of an utterly different moment and style. For the rest, even the most exacerbated were unable to overcome the inhibitions of gentlemanly classicism and the tamed, limiting medium of late Augustan verse.

One of the many admiring ladies with whom Walpole exchanged his interminable letters remarked that in France the cause of suicide was nearly always bankruptcy, rarely love. In an eminently rational age money was the most acceptable and rational motive. Even Thomas Chatterton, the most famous of all literary suicides, poisoned himself not out of any excess of feeling but because he was unable to keep himself alive by writing. Later the Romantics transformed him into a symbol of the doomed poet. In fact, he was a victim of Grub Street and snobbery.

He came from the bottom of the social heap. His father’s family had for generations been sextons of the beautiful Gothic church of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol. His father had climbed a rung or two up the social ladder: he was a local schoolmaster, as well as an amateur musician and dabbler in magic. But he died three months before his son, Thomas, was born in 1752, and his widow was poverty-stricken all through the boy’s childhood. She started an infant school, took in needlework, drew indigo patterns on muslin for the local ladies to embroider. Just before he was eight, Chatterton was sent to a Bristol charity school, Colston’s Hospital; when he left seven years later, he was apprenticed to a Bristol scrivener. He had, in short, entered into the almost blind working-class alley where the best he could hope for was a weary scramble into the lower middle class by setting up, eventually, in a modest scrivening practice of his own. Yet within a couple of years, before he was seventeen, he had written the bulk of the Rowley poems – on parchment, in a convincing medieval script and style, complete with medieval spelling and vocabularly. It is the most astonishingly precocious performance before Rimbaud’s.

It got him more or less nowhere, Three Bristol elders took him up condescendingly. He gave them his exquisite Rowley manuscripts; they gave him, in return, their gracious company and a few shillings. He wrote to Dodsley, the London publisher and bookseller, sending him one of the best Rowley poems. But nothing came of it. Next he tried Horace Walpole who, in principle, seemed to be the ideal patron: not only was he rich, influential, well connected and fashionable, a leading spirit in the Gothic Revival, he was also a forger of sorts. His novel The Castle of Otranto was first put out as ‘a translation by William Marshall, from an Italian MS found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the North of England, and printed in Naples in the black letter in the year 1520’. He had also mentioned those pillars of the Rowley fabric, Redcliffe Church and ‘Maister Canynge’ in his Anecdotes of Painting. Chatterton accordingly sent a contribution to the Anecdotes: ‘The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowlie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge’. It was an elaborate piece of fake scholarship, stuffed with detail and research, in full Rowleian dialect. As a further sweetener, he added some verse fragments. Walpole was delighted: excited to be in on a discovery and flattered to be taken for an expert by, presumably, another expert. By return he wrote Chatterton an obsequious and effusive letter, as from one learned man to another, suggesting, among other things, that he might print some of the Rowley poems.

At this point, Chatterton made a major mistake: he assumed that Walpole admired the work for its own sake, not for the snobbish gratifications it offered him. So he sent more Rowley poems and, in his enthusiasm at being taken seriously by a literary lion, he also confessed that he was not a gentleman of leisure but a penniless sixteen-year-old apprentice in search of a patron. He could scarcely have known that Walpole’s meanness was as intense as his snobbery. Horrified as much at the thought of having demands made on him as at having been taken in, he dropped Chatterton flat. His own version, years later, was that he ‘wrote him a letter with as much kindness and tenderness as if I had been his guardian’. The drift of it was that Chatterton’s first duty was to support his widowed mother; poetry was a recreation for gentlemen. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. First he should make his fortune, then there would be time enough for the arts. He added that the experts he had consulted had assured him that the manuscripts were bogus. In short, he put the upstart firmly, aristocratically in his place. But he kept the manuscripts for good measure; it took several outraged letters from Chatterton to make him return them. Walpole never forgave the boy his impertinence and for years after his death he promoted an image of him as an ambitious petty swindler.

Chatterton was equally unforgiving but wholly ineffectual in his revenge. ‘I cannot reconcile your behaviour to me,’ he wrote to Walpole while still trying to recover his papers, ‘with the notions I once entertained of you. I think myself injured, sir: and, did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus.’20 Walpole called this ‘singularly impertinent’, but it was also singularly accurate. The overflowing talent, the facility, appetite and obsessed ingenuity which Chatterton demonstrated in every piece of writing he turned his hand to were not enough to absolve him from the original sin of having been born into the wrong class. His pride, which had always been as large as his talent, was already exacerbated by the boring, unpaid drudgery of his apprenticeship and by his menial position in the scrivener’s household, where he had to eat and live exclusively with the servants and share a bedroom with the footboy. Now it was rubbed raw by Walpole’s contemptuous treatment. Life among the dim, high-handed, penny-pinching Bristol elders began to seem insupportably narrow.

But it was also inescapable. As an apprentice, he was legally bound to his master, who provided only his keep, no wages. His mother gave him what she could, which was little, and the elders took his manuscripts and occasionally tipped him in return. Though his poems began to appear in magazines, he received no fees for them and, apparently, asked for none; publication was enough. Inevitably, he began to run up debts, small enough but, in his circumstances, impossible to repay.

Walpole finally returned his manuscripts in August 1769, after four months’ delay. In the same month Peter Smith, a Bristol poetaster and brother of Chatterton’s close school-friend William, committed suicide in a fit of pique with his family : he was twenty-one. Then, less than three months later, Thomas Phillips, who had been Chatterton’s tutor and mentor at school, died suddenly. Phillips, who was only a few years older than his protégé, was himself a poet and had encouraged the boy’s first efforts. It was a bad time. Chatterton began to quarrel with his pseudo-patrons and to lambast them, Walpole and anyone else who irritated him in satirical verse in the manner of the fashionable Charles Churchill. But that was, at best, a vicarious satisfaction and meanwhile his debts mounted.

By April 1770 he had reached the end of his tether. He wrote to a new friend, a distiller called Michael Clayfield, thanking him for his kindness and saying that by the time his letter arrived he would be dead. But like Freud’s early patient Dora, an eighteen-year-old hysteric who wrote a suicide note in order to get her way with her parents,21 he left the thing lying around and his master, Lambert, found it. In dismay, he passed it on to William Barrett, one of the elders with whom Chatterton had not yet quarrelled irrevocably. Barrett weighed in with advice and the following day Chatterton, who still didn’t know how Barrett had got wind of the letter, wrote explaining his motives :

It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such; – or DIE – perplexing alternative!

The pride was natural enough in a boy who was not only unprecedentedly gifted but had also been, all his life, the only male in a doting family. It was also part of the nature of his talent, a quality inherent in the ease with which he deliberately created appalling medieval obstacles for his poetry and then effortlessly overcame them. It was part, too, of his intense personal attraction which everyone, particularly women, found so hard to resist: an unusual manliness, self-possession and independence; an aura, when roused, of being passionately present, alternating with sudden fits of utter abstraction; above all, his extraordinary grey eyes with, said Barrett, ‘fire rolling at the bottom of them’; ‘a kind of hawk’s eye’, said George Catcott, another of the elders, ‘you could see his soul through it’.

Given a character like this, his penury and social impotence, his place among servants he despised, the snubs and condescension he had to put up with from everyone, all created in him a sense of intolerable outrage. As a final petty injury Henry Burgum, the stupidest of the Bristol elders, had refused to lend Chatterton the small sum – ‘in the whole not five Pounds’ – which would have cleared his debts. His bluff had already been called humiliatingly when his first suicide note was found. Now his pride would allow no alternative but to try again. On Easter Saturday, with the office presumably to himself, he settled down to write his Last Will and Testament, prefacing it with a note announcing: ‘All this wrote bet 11 & 2 oclock Saturday in the utmost Distress of Mind.’ Yet his distress is a good deal less obvious than his anger. The Will begins with a long section of vitriolic couplets on the three elders. The tone of the prose that follows is equally contemptuous of the philistinism of Bristol and its merchants. But he was careful not to mention his master, Lambert, as though, even when contemplating suicide, he was not willing to antagonize the one person on whom his future well-being – if he were to have a being at all – would depend.

For a suicide note it is a curiously exuberant performance; it reads as though he were enjoying himself. His own death, which he forecast for the following evening, seems far less important than his need to show everyone how sharply and unforgivingly he had seen through their pretensions. Once again he left the papers lying prominently around, once again they were promptly found. Lambert and his wife were horrified at the prospect of a suicide on their respectable premises and released Chatterton on the spot from his indentures. It was as though his most childishly omnipotent fantasies of a revenge suicide had come true. The threat of taking his own life had given him something which, before, only genuine suicide seemed to make possible: his freedom.

About a week later he left for London, confident that he would make his fortune as a writer. He had every reason to believe in his chances, since he had already published widely in metropolitan magazines whose editors had encouraged him and made vague, expansive promises. He visited them all as soon as he arrived in town and seems to have impressed them, as he impressed everybody, with his strangely impassioned, intense presence. They accepted his manuscripts and made even larger promises than before. The rich imagination which had invented Rowley transformed these hints into the visions of grandeur and success which he outlined enthusiastically in his letters to his mother and sister. For their benefit he also spun fantasies in which doors flew open at his touch and celebrities clamoured for his company.

In reality, he was living with a distant cousin of his mother’s in a Shoreditch slum and, as always, was sharing his bedroom. This time his room-mate was the son of the house, who was greatly put out by Chatterton’s habit of writing most of the night and then, before going to bed, strewing the floor with tiny fragments of the poems he had destroyed. Although he was publishing everywhere, churning out satiric verse, political essays and pamphlets with startling facility, he was also being systematically exploited. The editors grossly underpaid him, when they paid him at all. All his labours for the month of May brought him in only £4 15s. 9d., and even by the middle of that month, less than four weeks since his arrival in London, his luck was already running out. Two of the editors who encouraged him most were imprisoned for political reasons. The others read this, rightly, as an omen of a Government clamp-down on the Opposition press; they became proportionately cautious. Chatterton’s tiny sources of income began to dry up.

Yet within another month his luck seemed to have turned again. He had written a letter championing William Beckford, the Lord Mayor of London and one of the political heroes of the day. Beckford approved of the work and consented to have another, similar letter addressed to him. Chatterton, using all his energy and charm, persuaded William Bingley to publish it in the North Briton, the most distinguished of all the current weeklies. Bingley was so impressed by the boy that he agreed to devote a whole issue of the paper to Chatterton’s piece. Then, when the article was already set up in print, Beckford caught a cold which turned into rheumatic fever; on 21 June he died. Chatterton’s great chance was gone. According to his Shoreditch relative, Mrs Ballance, ‘He was perfectly frantic, out of his mind, and declared he was ruined.’

He had one final stroke of luck: a chance acquaintance in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre had introduced him to a musician, Dr Samuel Arnold. At Arnold’s suggestion, Chatterton revamped an operetta he had written in Bristol a year before and sold it, early in July, to the owner of the pleasure-gardens at Marylebone. He was paid five guineas for the work, the largest fee he ever received, and probably the last.

Elated, he sent off presents to his mother and sister, but the accompanying letter made none of the usual golden predictions for the future. It was enough that he could finally make them the grand gesture he had been promising since he arrived in London three months before. The money also enabled him to make another gesture he had probably been promising himself for far longer: he rented a room of his own, a garret in Brooke Street, Holborn. It was the only room he ever had to himself.

At that point his meagre sources of income dried up entirely. Lord North’s Government cracked down once more on the press, imprisoning more editors and wholly eliminating the market for Chatterton’s political satires and pamphlets. Then, as the summer lengthened and the fashionable ‘world’ moved out of London to the country and the seaside, there was no more market for anything. He wrote one of his last and best poems, ‘An Excelente Balade of Charitie’. Appropriately enough, it was the parable of the Good Samaritan updated into Rowleyese. He sent it to the one editor who had previously published a Rowley poem, but it was rejected. In Chatterton’s case, neither Samaritan nor patron nor even Grub Street came to his rescue.

His Shoreditch cousin had shared the house with the family of a plasterer called Walmsley. After Chatterton died, Walmsley’s niece said of him, ‘He never touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on the air.’ Her younger brother added, ‘He lived chiefly on a bit of bread, or a tart, and some water.’ By August even bread was almost beyond his means.

There was one vague hope: while he was in Bristol Chatterton, with the appetite and ease which marked his whole intellectual development, had picked up the elements of medicine from Barrett, who was a surgeon. In the eighteenth century that rudimentary training was enough to qualify him as a ship’s doctor, provided Barrett would vouch for him. At the end of a letter to Catcott on 12 August he wrote: ‘I intend going abroad as a Surgeon, Mr Barrett has it in his Power to assist me greatly by giving me a physical Character: I hope he will.’ That the last sentence was as near a cry for help as Chatterton ever allowed himself. But it did no good. Mean-minded to the last, Barrett failed to oblige.

The August issue of the Town and Country Magazine was not, as he had hoped, filled with his work and none of the editors who owed him for contributions would pay up. His ‘damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride’ would not allow him to take whatever menial alternatives there may have been to starvation, So he hung on, ‘living on the air’, until 24 August. There is a story that on that day his landlady, Mrs Angel, ‘as she knew Chatterton had not eaten anything for two or three days … begged him … to have some dinner with her. He was offended at her request, which seemed to hint to him that he was in want, and assured her he was not hungry.’22 The story fits his character but is probably untrue; survivors of a suicide usually try to cheer themselves up after the event by showing that they, at least, were not to blame.

That night his neighbours in the lodging-house said they heard him pacing restlessly to and fro until the small hours. When he failed to appear in the morning they thought he  was sleeping late. By the afternoon they were alarmed and finally forced his door. They found him, said Barrett, lying on his bed, ‘a horrid spectacle, with features distorted, as if from convulsions’. He had swallowed arsenic. As always, his floor was littered with manuscripts torn into fragments no bigger than a sixpence.

No one came to identify his body at the inquest, and in the Register of Deaths they got his Christian name wrong, putting him down as ‘William Chatterton’. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Shoe Lane workhouse. He was still three months short of his eighteenth birthday.

Chatterton’s tragedy is one of waste, a terrible waste of talent, vitality and promise. But it is also a peculiarly eighteenth-century tragedy of stinginess and snobbery and exploitation, a product of the high Tory, port-steeped arrogance of a time which was willing to squander any talent for the sake of its prejudices. Yet, in a way, Chatterton’s abounding gifts themselves made his suicide more likely. Out of them he built a last line of defence: that pride which enabled him, as a final gesture, to destroy contemptuously all those gifts which those around him so conspicuously lacked. William James once wrote:

Mankind’s common instinct for reality … has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this way or that, if yet we cling to life, and he is able ‘to fling it away like a flower’ as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a highhearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.23On these terms, Chatterton may have taken his own life ambitiously, to vindicate himself and cancel out his failure. That, certainly, accounts for the hold he has had over the imaginations of succeeding generations, despite the fact that his poetry, for good reasons, is not much read. He is the supreme illustration of the belief that those with most life and passion go soon, while those with little to lose hang on.

Yet the basic questions remain: why did he turn so readily to suicide – even if only as a gesture – when his life in Bristol became impossible? Why, pride apart, did he do it in the end? After all, pride is a superficial motive, an excuse you offer yourself for impulses you do not care to examine too closely. My own guess is that, even if his luck had been better and social prejudices less impossibly loaded against him, suicide would still not have been too far away. Certainly, what we now know of the mechanics of the act suggests most of the elements were present in Chatterton from the start. His father had died before he was born. I do not know if he was buried in the graveyard of St Mary Redcliffe but he and generations of his family had been associated with the church and had their graves there. What is sure is that, apart from a book on necromancy which the young Chatterton valued highly and kept with him until his sudden departure for London, the boy’s only patrimony was a pile of old parchments his father had taken from the Muniment Room of the church, where they had been left scattered over the floor. Since some came from ‘Mr Canynge’s Cofre’, a number of them must have concerned that wise, magnanimous patron – almost patronsaint – of the Rowley poems. In time they assumed a great emotional importance for the boy.

Despite his vast precocity, he was a slow starter. According to his sister, ‘My brother was dull at learning, not knowing many letters at four years old.’24 The master of the local infant school sent him home as unteachable, Then one day, when his mother was tearing up an old folio music book which had belonged to his father, his eye was caught by the large illuminated letters and, said his mother, ‘he fell in love with them’. From then on he learned quickly. But he objected to small books, so his mother taught him to read in a big black-letter medieval bible. In other words, he was soaked from the start in a medieval world which was directly associated with his dead father.

Later, when he came to write the Rowley poems, he was not satisfied simply with writing the verse, he also took huge pains to make the calligraphy, spelling and vocabulary resemble the parchments his father had left him. The results seemed authentic enough to convince many of the amateur antiquarians of his day. Add to that the poems’ framework of a benign, father-like Canynge who encouraged and cared for his devoted poet and admirer Thomas Rowley as a kind of insurance against oblivion, and who built, as his other monument for posterity, St Mary Redcliffe, the Chatterton family church. The whole extraordinary effort seems to me like an attempt to recreate an idealized image of his dead father for himself and exclusively on terms of his own making. It may even have been fantasies of this kind which possessed him when those weird fits of abstraction came over him, particularly when he was writing the Rowley poems. His friend William Smith, whose brother later committed suicide, remarked: ‘There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed always to take a particular delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of ecstasy or trance.’25Chatterton was a genius – in precociousness, if not in actual achievement – and there is never any simple mechanical explanation for that. All I am suggesting is that the need to resurrect his dead father – to set him up, as the psycho-analysts would say, in his ego – might account for some of the urgency and forwardness of his creative drive, just as it accounts more obviously for the over-all plan of the Rowley poems. It may also have made the idea of suicide, when the going got rough, more than usually tempting. As with Sylvia Plath, death might have seemed less terrible if it meant rejoining someone loved and already dead.

Yet no shadow of this gets into his poetry, except at a considerable remove of abstraction. His Rowley poems are part of the Gothic Revivial, as eighteenth-century in their way as his political pamphleteering. So, too, were his reasons for suicide. They had nothing to do with imagination or poetic vulnerability or extremism. Instead, suicide was a solution to a practical problem, altogether more obvious and nasty: Grub Street failure and starvation. Arsenic merely forestalled by a few days an ending that was already inevitable.

Al Alvarez

The Savage God

Zbigniew Herbert

 Zbigniew Herbert has had an exemplary Central European education. He was born in 1924 in Lwów in eastern Poland, the son of a lawyer and professor of economics whose great-grandfather spoke only English (hence his literary British surname). In September 1939, when Herbert was fifteen, Lwów was swallowed by the Russian whale. Twenty months later, the Germans marched in and Herbert finished high school underground, fighting in the Resistance. At the end of the war he went to university to study both his father’s disciplines: he took a master’s in economics at Kraków, then a master’s in law at Toruń, where he stayed on to study philosophy. In 1950 he moved briefly to Gdańsk, then on to Warsaw where for six years he held down a series of menial, Kafkaesque jobs: in a bank, in a shop, as a clerk in the management office of the peat industry, in the department for retired pensioners of the Teachers’ Cooperative, and in the legal department of the Composers’ Association.

During the Nazi occupation his poems had been published irregularly in underground magazines and they continued to appear more or less in the same unofficial way during the grim Stalinist period after the war. Although he was a precocious poet, he had to wait until Khrushchev’s thaw in 1956, when he was thirty-two, to publish his first book of poems. The second appeared the following year, two large collections representing a decade and a half of work, which established him as the leader of his exceptionally gifted generation. It is typical of his ironic indifference to success that he celebrated this recognition with an apologetic poem dedicated to the desk drawer which in sterner times had been his one true audience; his ‘rebel’s fist stiff in dissent,’ he wrote, had given him a subject and an excuse, and his new liberty to publish what he wants is only responsibility in another guise:

such is freedom one has again

to invent and overthrow gods

He has been inventing and overthrowing gods ever since, a party of one, permanently and warily in opposition. Although he lived abroad from 1965 to 1971, when the conditions in Poland were relatively relaxed, and was abroad again in the late 1970s – in 1979 he was awarded the Petrarch Prize, Germany’s greatest cultural accolade – he returned home immediately after the troubles started in Gdańsk, in 1980, and has stayed there since. His international reputation is now too secure for the authorities to harm him, yet he refuses to accept their embrace. His new collection, Report from the Besieged City, was first published by internees in the Rakowiecka Prison in Warsaw in 1983.

To understand modern Polish poetry it is necessary also to understand something of what the country went through during the Nazi occupation: 6 million killed out of a population of 30 million; dozens of villages destroyed and their inhabitants massacred, in the style of Lidice and Oradour; Warsaw razed and emptied of its million inhabitants, the Nazis boasting that they would turn it into ‘a second Carthage’; Governor General Hans Frank’s infamous Operation AB which aimed at the total elimination of the country’s intelligentsia and succeeded in murdering 3,500. There was an old historical grudge between the Germans and the Poles, and it was settled by twentieth-century totalitarian methods.

All this instilled in the survivors a distaste for rhetoric and artistic pretension that amounted almost to a hatred of poetry itself. Tadeusz Rózewicz, who is three years older than Herbert, looked on art as an offense against human suffering and reduced his poems to a minimalist notation stripped of meter, rhyme, even of metaphor. ‘Modern poetry,’ he wrote, ‘is a struggle for breath.’ Herbert, too, eschews all punctuation and every unearned gesture. ‘He lowers his voice rather than raising it,’ John and Bogdana Carpenter write in the introduction to Report from the Besieged City, ‘the rhythm of his poems sometimes approaching the level of a whisper, or silent thinking.’ Yet despite the lack of punctuation, the argument of his poems is unfailingly lucid and the voice, however low, is clear and precise. This clarity is the core of everything Herbert has written. Despite the historical catastrophes he has lived through, he is a classicist, like Eliot, whom he reveres, and Piero della Francesca, about whom he has written eloquently in his collection of essays, Barbarian in the Garden.

Or perhaps he is a classicist because the continuing Polish catastrophe has placed such curious burdens on its writers. It is a nation that has held itself together for the past two centuries only by a collective effort of will. For 150 years Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, reemerging between the world wars, then swallowed up again, first by the Germans, then by the Russians. All this puts a special strain on writers, for in an occupied or one-party nation literature takes on the patriotic, educative, and moral burdens normally assumed by the state. It becomes, for instance, a forum for national debate in which political issues are discussed in guise of imaginative writing. Whence the Polish penchant for allegory and what they call ‘Aesopian language.’ Whence, too, the strange phenomenon of the underground presses, during both the Nazi occupation and the present troubles, continuing to print poetry and fiction along with political leaflets. In the Polish context, a poem or story can seem as rousing and urgent as a fighting handbill, and is probably more effective.

One of Herbert’s earliest poems, written when he was in his teens, first appeared in this clandestine way. It is called ‘Two Drops’ and is prefaced by a quotation from the nineteenth-century poet Slowacki – ‘No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning’ – which the young Herbert, writing at a time when all of Poland was on fire, then proceeded to turn on its head:

The forests were on fire –

they however

wreathed their necks with their hands

like bouquets of roses

People ran to the shelters –

he said his wife had hair

in whose depths one could hide

Covered by one blanket

they whispered shameless words

the litany of those who love

When it got very bad

they leapt into each other’s eyes

and shut them firmly

So firmly they did not feel the flames

when they came up to the eyelashes

To the end they were brave

To the end they were faithful

To the end they were similar

like two drops

stuck at the edge of a face

It is a beautiful poem; given the circumstances in which it was written and the poet’s age at the time, it is extraordinary. The theme is one that Herbert has repeated, in one form or another, throughout his work: that the feeling that can flower between people, however frail, is somehow a match for history, however violent. Most young poets would have been satisfied with that ultimate existential gesture – making love while the bombs fall, as if a kiss could annihilate annihilation. Herbert, however, uses it to affirm less obvious, more abiding virtues: bravery, faithfulness, restraint (grief becomes merely ‘two drops / stuck at the edge of a face’). In the end, the poem is not about a gesture of defiance but about dignity; it is classical in the true Roman sense.

Herbert has never deviated from this passion for virtù. The hero of many of his later poems is Mr. Cogito, a battered descendant of Valéry’s luminously intelligent M. Teste, and also a descendant of Descartes who exists because he thinks about his existence. In other words, Mr. Cogito is a witness whose duty it is to serve truth not art, to think dispassionately about what he has seen, and to speak up for morality, however inappropriate it may seem:

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important …

That is from ‘The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,’ Herbert’s stern and moving last testament that ends his 1977 Selected Poems. But independence and courage, like clarity and restraint, have little chance against what he calls ‘the babble of the speaker’s platform the black foam of newspapers.’ The best he can do is elevate plainness into an aesthetic and moral principle. In an early poem, ‘A Knocker,’ he wrote wryly of his style, as though it were a limitation beyond his control:

my imagination

is a piece of board

my sole instrument

is a wooden stick

I strike the board

it answers me

yes–yes

no–no

In the latest collection, ‘Mr. Cogito and the Imagination’ repeats the same theme less hopefully, but as an article of faith:

he wanted to make it

an instrument of compassion

he wanted to understand to the very

end

…

and so to bring the dead back to life

to preserve the covenant

Mr. Cogito’s imagination

has the motion of a pendulum

it crosses with precision

from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it

for the artificial fires of poetry

he would like to remain faithful

to uncertain clarity

Early and late, Herbert has avoided ‘the artificial fires of poetry’ by using irony, that most classical of instruments and the enemy of rhetoric, of inflation, of distortion. But irony is also the weapon of the powerless, as Herbert himself pointed out – ironically, of course – at the end of a prose poem called ‘From Mythology’:

Then came the barbarians. They too

valued highly the little god of irony.

They would crush it under their heels

and add it to their dishes.

For Herbert, irony has always been a two-edged instrument that turns on the poet as readily as on the outside world. But in the earlier poems he used it playfully to rewrite his beloved classical myths in modern, deflationary terms – Arion, for instance, becomes ‘the Grecian Caruso’ – and even, in some of his love poems, as an improbable way of expressing desire without indiscretion:

Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.

She whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes and waits for a word.

Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to her – the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an excess of heavy goodness.

This youthful playfulness has seeped away over the years as his confidence in the power of truth and intelligence, as well as of irony, has weakened. The tone of his recent poems is grim, like the situation of his country and of the civilized standards on which his work is based. ‘I avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts,’ he says in the title poem of Report from the Besieged City.

‘Then came the barbarians’: when he called his prose collection Barbarian in the Garden he was implying that he himself was the barbarian outsider reacting to the civilized gardens of France, Italy, and ancient Greece. Yet these elegant, meticulous, oddly passionate essays return continually to the theme of vanished cultures and their violent destruction – the Templars, the Albigensians at Montségur, the Greek colonists at Paestum – as though his underlying concern was always the modern barbarians from East and West who have erupted into the precarious culture of his own country.

In the poems, too, the focus constantly shifts backward and forward between past and present. ‘Report from the Besieged City’ is both about Poland after December 1981, when General Jaruzelski declared ‘a state of war,’ and about Poland as it has been through the centuries, a crossroad for invading barbarians:

in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the City

along the frontier of our uncertain freedom

I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights

I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks

truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself

the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns

nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination

Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the

Transfiguration

who can count them

the colors of their banners change like the forest on the horizon

from delicate bird’s yellow in spring through green through red to winter’s

black

Invading armies have become so much a condition of Polish life that Herbert describes them as if they were manifestations of nature itself – that is, dispassionately and with an eye for their ‘delicate bird’s yellow’ beauty.

It is this objectivity – the rigorousness with which he avoids the easy outs of self-pity, melodrama, even nostalgia – that preserves the classical spirit in Herbert’s work. Mr. Cogito’s imagination may cross ‘with precision from suffering to suffering,’ but as it does so the precision matters as much as the suffering. Whatever his subject, the steady light of his intelligence imposes on it a kind of serenity of which the classics themselves are part, since they enable him to view the unruly present in the long, cooling perspective of history. What he wrote of his idol, Piero della Francesca, is also true of his own work: ‘Over the battle of shadows, convulsions and tumult, Piero has erected lucidus ordo – an eternal order of light and balance.’

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that Herbert survived the war and Stalinism because of ‘his personal qualities – good health, toughness, an orderly mind.’ Those qualities have also kept him from being abstract in his classicism, or pedantic, or superior. His poetry is founded on a belief in ordinary human values – love, dignity, intelligence, common decency – as the only true defense against the barbarians. ‘History teaches us that nations and their achievements can be destroyed in an almost total manner,’ he said in an interview quoted by the Carpenters in their introduction to the 1977 Selected Poems. ‘During the war I saw the fire of a library. The same fire was devouring wise and stupid books, good and bad. Then I understood that it is nihilism which menaces culture the most. Nihilism of fire, stupidity, and hatred.’

Herbert has steadily opposed nihilism with neither rhetoric nor anger, but with sanity – wakeful, ironic, evenhanded, intransigent:

The pebble

is a perfect creature

equal to itself

mindful of its limits

filled exactly

with a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anything

does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness

are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse

when I hold it in my hand

and its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

– Pebbles cannot be tamed

to the end they will look at us

with a calm and very clear eye

Herbert is the only contemporary poet I know who can talk about nobility and, more important, sound noble without also sounding false. It is a note that is rare in the arts of any period. The Romans had it, so did Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. But it hasn’t been much in evidence in recent years and perhaps it took someone who has witnessed close-up – ‘with a calm and very clear eye’ – some of the worst horrors of this century to speak out for virtù and endurance without sounding sentimental.

The strengths Herbert praises in his poems – steadfastness and independence, imperviousness to cant, contempt for the bullies – have their corollary in the purity of his style. He has been marvelously served by his translators but perhaps his persistent lucidity has made their task a little easier. All of them remark on how much is lost in translation. Despite that, his poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.

Al Alvarez 

New York Review of Books, 1985

From: Risky Business 

Meister Eckhart: if you have given up self, then you have really given up

 Be assured of this as I live: if we are to receive thus from Him, we must be raised up in eternity, above time.

*
What is a pure heart? That is pure which is separated and parted from all creatures, for all creatures produce impurity, because they are nothing and nothing is a lack and tarnishes the soul. All creatures are mere nothing, neither angels nor creatures are anything.
*
All things are created out of nothing, therefore their true source is nothing, and as far as this noble will inclines to creatures, it is dissipated with creatures in their nothing. The question arises, whether this noble will can be so dissipated that it can never return. The masters generally declare that it can never return insofar as it is dispersed in time. But I say, whenever this will turns back from itself, and from all creation for a moment into its primal source, then the will has its true birthright of freedom and is free, and in this moment all time lost is recovered.

People often say to me, 'Pray for me.' And I think, 'Why do you go out? Why do you not stay within yourself and draw on your own treasure? For you have the whole truth in its essence within you.' That we may thus truly stay within, that we may possess all truth immediately, without distinction, in true blessedness, may God help us. Amen.
*
You should be firm and steadfast; that is, you should be the same in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune, having the noble nature of precious stones; that is, all virtues should be enclosed in you and flow out of you in their true being. You should traverse and transcend all the virtues, drawing virtue solely from its source in that ground where it is one with the divine nature.
*
Why did God become man? That I might be born God Himself. God died that I might die to the whole world and all created things.

*

It has naught in common with anything. All that is created or creaturely is alien. It is a single one in itself, and takes in nothing from outside.

Our Lord ascended into heaven, beyond all light, beyond all under­ standing and all human ken. The man who is thus translated beyond all light, dwells in eternity. Therefore St. Paul says, "God dwells in a light to which there is no approach" (1 Tim. 6: 16), and that is in itself pure unity. Therefore a man must be slain and wholly dead, devoid of self and wholly without likeness, like to none, and then he is really God-like. For it is God's character, His nature, to be peerless and like no man.
*
A man once came to me - it was not long ago - and told me he had given up a great deal of property and goods, in order that he might save his soul. Then I thought, Alas! how little and how paltry are the things you have given up. It is blindness and folly, so long as you care a jot for what you have given up. But if you have given up self, then you have really given up.
*
The just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, and the closer he is to justice, the closer he is to freedom, and the more he is freedom itself. Whatever is created, is not free. So long as there is anything at all above me, that is not God, that oppresses me, however small it may be or whatever its nature; even though it were reason and love, as long as this is something created and not God Himself, it oppresses me, for it is not free.
*
In created things - as I have said before - there is no truth. There is something that transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact with created things, which are nothing; not even an angel has it, though he has a clear being that is pure and extensive: even that does not touch it. It is akin to the nature of deity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common with anything. It is a stumbling­ block to many a learned cleric. It is a strange and desert place, and is rather nameless than possessed of a name, and is more unknown than it is known. If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long as you mind yourself or any thing at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye of taste: so little do you know or discern what God is.
*
"Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing." I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he1 calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.
*
God is the true light: to see it, one must be blind and must strip from God all that is 'something.' A master says whoever speaks of God in any likeness, speaks impurely of Him. But to speak of God with nothing is to speak of Him correctly. When the soul is unified and there enters into total self-abnegation, then she finds God as in Nothing.
*
The soul cannot experience love or fear without knowing their occasion. If the soul does not go out into external things, she has come home, and dwells in her simple, pure light. There she does not love, nor does she know anxiety or fear.
*
Therefore there is nothing for it but to peel off and shed all that belongs to the soul: her life, her powers, her nature - all must go, and she must stand in the pure light where she is one single image with God: there she will fi nd God. It is characteristic of God that nothing alien enters Him, nothing is superimposed on Him or added to Him. Therefore the soul should have no alien impressions, nothing superimposed, nothing added.
*
We use the word homo for women as well as for men, but the Latins refuse it to woman because of her weakness.
*
This light is so potent that it is not merely in itself free of time and space, but whatever it falls on it  robs of time and space and all corporeal images and whatever is alien to it. I have said before, if there were no time or place or anything else, all would be one being. If a man were one like this and would cast himself into the ground of humility, he would there be watered with grace.
*
...'go forth and depart': go out of this world and leave everything your soul still inclines to. And wherever she is still attached to anything, let her hate it.
*
"And I have set you over nations," that is, over all the world, which you must be rid of, and "over kingdoms," that is: what­ ever is more than one is too much, for you must die to all things and be again in-formed in the height, where we dwell in the Holy Ghost.
*
It is the sign of a good man that he praises good people. So if a good man praises me, then I am truly praised, but if a bad man praises me, then in truth I am blamed. But if a bad man blames me, then in truth I am praised. "Of that which fills the heart, the mouth speaks" (Matt. 12:34). It is always the sign of a good man that he likes to speak of God, for people like to speak of what they are concerned with. Those who are concerned with tools like to talk about tools, those who are concerned with sermons like to talk about sermons. A good man likes to speak of nothing so much as God.
*
St. Dionysius says that holiness is complete purity, liberty, and perfection. Purity means that a man is separated from sin, and this makes the soul free.
*
Again, 'holiness' denotes 'what is withdrawn from the world.' God is something and is pure being, and sin is nothing and draws us away from God. ... When she is free from earthly things the soul is holy. ... St. Augustine says, 'If a man would be holy let him forsake mundane things.' I have often said that the soul cannot be pure unless she is reduced to her original purity, as God made her, just as gold cannot be made from copper by two or three roastings: it must be reduced to its primary nature.
*
It is easy to make show of virtues, or to talk of them: but to have them in reality is extremely rare.
*

Plato: 'What God is, I do not know, but what He is not I know well enough,'

*
St. Augustine says he rejoices all the time who rejoices above time. He says, "Rejoice all the time," that is, above time, and "have no care: the Lord is at hand and is near." The soul that is going to rejoice in the Lord must of necessity cast off all care, at least during the time when she yields herself to God.
*
St. Paul says, "In the fullness of time God sent His Son" (Gal. 4:4). St. Augustine says what this fullness of time is: 'Where there is no more time, that is the "fullness of time." '
*
Another meaning of "fullness of time": if anyone had the skill and the power to gather up time and all that has happened in six thousand years or that will happen till the end of time, into one present Now, that would be the "fullness of time." That is the Now of eternity ...
*
The soul in which God is to be born must drop away from time and time from her, she must soar aloft and stand gazing into this richness of God's ...and inasmuch as the soul has dropped away from time, there is there no woe or pain; even distress is turned for her to joy.
*
St. Augustine says a good man desires no praise, he desires to be worthy of praise. Now our masters say virtue is so pure, so wholly abstract and detached from all corporeal things in its ground and true nature that nothing whatever can enter into it without defiling the virtue and making it a vice. A single thought or any seeking of one's own advantage, and it is not a true virtue, it is turned to vice. Such is virtue by nature.

Now a pagan master says if a man practices virtue for the sake of anything else but virtue, then it never was a virtue. If he seeks praise or anything else, he is selling virtue. One should never give up a virtue by nature for anything in the world. Therefore a good man desires no praise, but he desires to be worthy of praise. A man should not be sorry if people are angry with him, he should be sorry to deserve the anger.
*
How should a man be who is to see God? He must be dead. Our Lord says, "No man can see me and live" (Exod. 33:20).7 Now St. Gregory says he is dead who is dead to the world. Now judge for yourselves what a dead man is like and how little he is touched by anything in the world. If we die to the world we do not die to God.
*
He who would hear God must be far removed from people.
*
"Then the woman said, 'Sir, give me of the water.' Then our Lord said, 'Bring me your husband,' and she said, 'Sir, I have none.' Then our Lord said, 'You are right, you have none. But you have had five, and the one you have now is not yours.' " St. Augustine says, 'Why does our Lord say, "You are right"? He means to say "the five husbands are the five senses: they had you in your youth according to all their will and desire. Now you have one in your old age and he is not yours: that is the intellect, that you do not obey."
*
This birth does not take place once a year or once a month or once a day, but all the time, that is, above time in the expanse where there is no here or now, nor nature nor thought.
*
Where is Christ sitting? He is sitting nowhere. Whoever seeks him anywhere will not fnd him. His least part is everywhere, his highest nowhere. A master says that whoever knows anything does not know God. Christ means the anointed, he who is anointed by the Holy Ghost. The masters say sitting denotes rest and implies timelessness. What turns and changes has no rest, and also, resting adds nothing. Our Lord says, "I am God and do not change" (Mal. 3 : 6).
*
Thus God cannot work except in the ground of humility, for the deeper we are in humility, the more receptive to God.
*
In the silence and peace - there God speaks in the soul and utters Himself completely in the soul.
... Therefore it is a much greater thing to be silent about God than to speak.
*
The reason why you find nothing is simply because you seek nothing. All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say they are a trifle or they are anything: they are pure nothing. What has no being, is not. All creatures have no being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant from all creatures, they would perish. I have sometimes said, and it is true, that he who possessed the whole world with God would have no more than if he had God by Himself. All creatures have nothing more without God than a midge would have without God - just the same, neither more nor less.

Now listen to a true saying! If a man gave a thousand marks of gold for building churches and convents, that would be a great thing. Yet that man would give far more who could regard a thousand marks as nothing; he would have done far more than the other.
*
As I have clearly stated before, Whoever would receive from above must be below in true humility. Know this truly: he who is not fully below obtains and receives nothing, however small. If you have an eye to yourself or to any thing or person, you are not right under and will get nothing, but if you are right under, you will receive fully and per­ fectly. It is God's nature to give, and His being depends on His giving to us when we are under. If we are not, and receive nothing, we do Him violence and kill Him. If we cannot do this to Him, then we do it to ourselves, as far as in us lies. If you would truly give Him all, see to it that you put yourself in true humility under God, raising up God in your heart and your understanding. "Our Lord God sent His Son into the world" (Gal. 4:4). I once said here, God sent His Son into the world in the soul's fullness of time, when she had fi nished with time.3 When the soul is free from time and place, then the Father sends His Son into the soul. This is the meaning of the words "The best gift and perfection come from above, from the Father of lights."
*
Moses says, "No man has seen God" (d. Exodus 33:20). As long as we are men and as long as anything human attaches to us and we are approaching, we cannot see God; we must be raised up and set in pure rest, and thus see God.
*
Anything, however small, adhering to the soul, prevents us from seeing God. ...The soul that is to fi nd God must leap over and pass beyond all creatures. ...Boethius says, 'If you would know truth clearly, cast off joy, and fear, expectation, and hope, and pain.' Joy is a means, fear is a means, expectation and hope and pain are all means. As long as you regard them and they regard you, you cannot see God.
*
The first point: it becomes detached from here and now. 'Here and now' means the same as place and time. Now is the minimum of time; it is not a portion of time or a part of time. It is just a taste of time, a tip of time, and end of time. Yet, small though it be, it must go: everything that touches or smacks of time must go. Again, it is detached from here. 'Here' means the same thing as place. The place where I am standing is small, but however small, it must still go before I can see God.
*
If a man were to rest on nothing, and cling to nothing, then, if heaven and earth were overturned, he would remain unmoved, since he would cling to nothing, and nothing would cling to him.

Selected from sermons 13 - 42
Translated and Edited by Maurice O'C. Walshe

Death Today -The Triumph of Medicalization

 

Everything proceeds as if the romantic model as it existed in the middle of the nineteenth century underwent a gradual dismantling. First, in the late nineteenth century, there were the changes that occurred in the early stages of dying, the period of very serious illness during which the patient is kept in ignorance and isolation: the case of Ivan Ilyich. Then, in the twentieth century, beginning in World War I, came the taboo against mourning and everything in public life that reminded one of death, at least the so-called natural (i.e., nonviolent) death. The image of death was contracting like the diaphragm of a photographic lens being stopped down. There remained only the actual moment of death, which at the time of Ivan Ilyich, and long afterward, retained its traditional characteristics: the reviewing of the life, the public quality, the scene of the farewells. But after World War II even this last survival disappeared, owing to the complete medicalization of death. This is the third and final stage in the process of reversal.

The essential fact is the well-known advance in surgical and medical techniques, which bring into play complex equipment, competent personnel, and frequent interventions. These techniques can only be fully effective in the hospital, at least so it has been believed until our own time. The hospital is not only a place of medical expertise, observation, and instruction, it is a focal point where auxiliary services such as pharmaceutical laboratories and rare, costly, and delicate equipment are concentrated, giving the hospital a local monopoly on death.

As soon as an illness seems serious, the doctor usually sends his patient to the hospital. Advances in surgery have brought parallel advances in resuscitation and in the reduction or elimination of pain and sensation. These procedures are no longer used only before, during, or after an operation; they have been extended to all the dying, in order to relieve their pain. For example, the dying man is given food and water intravenously, thus sparing him the discomfort of thirst. A tube runs from his mouth to a pump that drains his mucus and prevents him from choking. Doctors and nurses administer sedatives, whose effects they can control and whose doses they can vary. All this is well known today and explains the pitiful and henceforth classic image of the dying man with tubes all over his body.

By a swift and imperceptible transition someone who was dying came to be treated like someone recovering from major surgery. This is why, especially in the cities, people stopped dying at home—just as they stopped being born at home. In New York City in 1967, 75 percent of all deaths occurred in hospitals or similar institutions, as compared with 69 percent in 1955 (60 percent for the United States as a whole). The proportion of deaths in hospitals has risen steadily since then. In Paris it is common for an old man with a cardiac or pulmonary condition to be hospitalized so that he can have a painless death. It might be possible to provide the same care by hiring a visiting nurse, but home care is less well covered, if at all, by Social Security. It also imposes on the family a burden that it can no longer bear, especially when the wife works and there is no child, sister, cousin, or neighbor available.

At the beginning of this chapter I talked about the indecency of serious illness, the physical distaste it inspires, the need to conceal it from others and from oneself. To square their conscience, the family confuses their unconscious intolerance for the sordid aspects of disease with the requirements of cleanliness and hygiene. In most cases, especially in large cities like Paris, the family has made no attempt to keep the dying at home or to bring about social legislation less favorable to their departure.

The hospital is no longer merely the place where one is cured or where one dies because of a therapeutic failure; it is the scene of the normal death, expected and accepted by medical personnel. In France this is not true of the private clinics, which do not want to frighten their clientele, and also perhaps their nurses and doctors, by the presence of death. When death does arrive, when one is unable to avoid it, they immediately send the body home; one is regarded as having died in the eyes of the state, the medical expert, and the world.

This dispatching of the body is not possible in public hospitals, which tend therefore to be crowded with the very old, the incurable, and the dying. In some countries there is a movement to keep these patients in places that specialize in painless death and preparation for it, places where they could avoid the disadvantages of a medical organization designed for another purpose, to keep the patient alive at all costs. This is the new conception of the “hospice,” the model for which is the Hospice of Saint Christopher, in the suburbs of London.

Today Ivan Ilyich would have been sent to the hospital. Perhaps he would have been cured, and there would be no novel.

This transfer of death to the hospital has had profound consequences. It has accelerated an evolution that began in the late nineteenth century and pushed it to its logical conclusion. Death has been redefined: It has ceased to be the instant that it became in the seventeenth century, but whose punctuality it had not until then possessed. In the traditional mentality, the sense of the moment of death was softened by the certainty of a continuation: not necessarily the immortality of the Christians, but a subdued prolongation of some kind. After the seventeenth century, the more widespread belief in the duality of the soul and the body and in their separation at death eliminated the margin of time. Death became an instant.

The medicalized death of today has restored this margin, but by borrowing time from this life, not from the beyond. The time of death has been both lengthened and subdivided. Sociologists have the satisfaction of being able to apply their classificatory and typological methods; thus, there is brain death, biological death, and cellular death. The old signs, such as cessation of heartbeat or respiration, are no longer sufficient. They have been replaced by the measurement of cerebral activity, the electroencephalogram.

The time of death can be lengthened to suit the doctor. The doctor cannot eliminate death, but he can control its duration, from the few hours it once was, to several days, weeks, months, or even years. It has become possible to delay the fatal moment; the measures taken to soothe pain have the secondary effect of prolonging life.

Sometimes this prolonging of life becomes an end in itself, and hospital personnel refuse to discontinue the treatments that maintain an artificial life. The world will remember the Shakespearean agony of Franco, surrounded by his twenty doctors. The most sensational case is no doubt that of Karen Ann Quinlan, an American girl of twenty-two who, for thirteen months, was kept on a respirator and fed and given antibiotics intravenously. No one expected that she would ever regain consciousness. In spite of the pressure of the family and a court order, the hospital persisted in keeping her alive artifically because she was not in a state of brain death, that is, her electroencephalogram was still registering. It is not our purpose here to discuss the ethical problems raised by this rare case of “therapeutic tenacity.” What interests us is that medicine can cause someone who is almost dead to remain alive almost indefinitely: and not only medicine but the hospital itself, that is, the whole system that turns medical activity into a business and a bureaucracy that obeys strict regulations regarding method and discipline.

The example of Karen Ann Quinlan is exceptional, a borderline case caused specifically by the persistence of cerebral activity. Today doctors usually discontinue treatment when brain death has been determined, thus allowing vegetative life to be extinguished as well. In 1967 there was a public outcry when it was discovered that in a certain hospital in England the staff was marking the beds of certain old people NTBR, that is, “not to be resuscitated.”22

The duration of death may therefore depend on an agreement involving the family, the hospital, and even the court, or on a sovereign decision of the doctor. The dying man, who had already formed the habit of confiding to survivors wishes he no longer included in his will, abdicated gradually, abandoning to his family the control of the end of his life, and of his death. The family, in turn, passed this responsibility on to the scientific miracle worker, who possessed the secrets of health and sickness and who knew better than anyone else what should be done.

It has been noted that the doctor is less mysterious and less absolute in the home than he is in the hospital. This is because in the hospital he is part of a bureaucracy whose power depends on discipline, organization, and anonymity. These hospital conditions have given rise to a new model of medicalized death.

Death has ceased to be accepted as a natural, necessary phenomenon. Death is a failure, a “business lost.”23 This is the attitude of the doctor, who claims the control of death as his mission in life. But the doctor is merely a spokesman for society. When death arrives, it is regarded as an accident, a sign of helplessness or clumsiness that must be put out of mind. It must not interrupt the hospital routine, which is more delicate than that of any other professional milieu. It must therefore be discreet. What a shame that Mélisande did not die in a hospital! She would have made a good patient. The doctors and nurses would have made a fuss over her and remembered her fondly. It may be desirable to die without being aware of it, but it is also correct to die without anyone else being aware of it either.

If death is too noticeable, too dramatic, and too noisy, most especially, if it is also dignified, it arouses in the staff an emotion quite incompatible with their professional life, still less with hospital routine. For death has been brought under control in order to reconcile an accidental, sometimes inevitable phenomenon with the psychological security of the hospital.

Hospital personnel have defined an “acceptable style of facing death.” This is the death of the man who pretends that he is not going to die. He will be better at this deception if he does not know the truth himself. His ignorance is more necessary than it was in the time of Ivan Ilyich. His ignorance is for him a factor in his recovery, and for the hospital staff a necessary condition of their efficiency.24What today we call the good death, the beautiful death, corresponds exactly to what used to be the accursed death: the mors repentina et improvisa, the death that gives no warning. “He died tonight in his sleep: He just didn’t wake up. It was the best possible way to die.”

But today, with the advances in medicine, such an easy death has become rare. It takes skill to bring the slow death of the hospital closer to the mors repentina. The surest method is no doubt the ignorance of the patient. But this strategy is sometimes foiled by his diabolical cunning in interpreting the attitudes of the doctor and nurses. So, instinctively, unconsciously, the staff forces the patient to feign ignorance. In some cases the silence takes the form of a conspiracy; in others, fear of a confession or a call for help cuts off all communication.

The patient’s passivity is maintained by sedatives, especially at the end, when the pain becomes unbearable and would otherwise produce the “horrible screams” of an Ivan Ilyich or a Mme. Bovary. Morphine controls the great crises, but it also diminishes a consciousness that the patient then recovers only intermittently.

Such is today’s “acceptable style of facing death.” The opposite is the “embarrassingly graceless dying,” the bad death, the ugly death without elegance or delicacy, the disturbing death. This is always the death of a patient who knows. In some cases he is rebellious and aggressive; he screams. In other cases, which are no less feared by the medical team, he accepts his death, concentrates on it, and turns to the wall, loses interest in the world around him, cuts off communication with it. Doctors and nurses reject this rejection, which denies their existence and discourages their efforts. In it they recognize the hated image of death as a phenomenon of nature, whereas they had turned it into an accident of illness that must be brought under control.25In the case, fortunately more frequent, of the good death, one sometimes ends up not knowing whether the patient is dead or alive. This is the most desirable situation. Thus, David Sudnow tells us that a young student nurse in an American hospital could not get a seriously wounded man to drink through a straw. She called her supervisor for help. “Why, honey, of course he won’t respond. He’s been dead for twenty minutes!” It would have been a beautiful death for everyone if the young student nurse had not had an attack of hysterics.26

In charity hospitals the staff takes advantage of this uncertainty to select the most favorable moment for certain procedures. For example, they close the eyes of the dying a little while before they die; it’s easier. Or they arrange to have them die in the early morning, just before the night shift leaves. These are presumptuous and extreme acts in unsupervised and obscure places, the refuges of the old and abandoned. Yet their very crudeness reveals some aspects of that bureaucratization and “management” of death that are inseparable from the hospital as institution and the medicalization of death, and are to be found everywhere. Death no longer belongs to the dying man, who is first irresponsible, later unconscious, nor to the family, who are convinced of their inadequacy. Death is regulated and organized by bureaucrats whose competence and humanity cannot prevent them from treating death as their “thing,” a thing that must bother them as little as possible in the general interest.27The Return of the Warning;The Demand for Dignity; Death Today

This was the situation at the end of the 1950s. It has changed, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, in one essential respect: the ignorance of the dying. But in France, the attitude of the early twentieth century still exists. In 1966 the journal Médecine de France published a discussion between the philosopher Jankélévitch and three doctors, J.-R. Debray, P. Denoix, and P. Pichat. “The liar is the one who tells the truth,” declared Jankélévitch. “I am against the truth, passionately against the truth.” (It is a position that is accompanied by a scrupulous respect for life and its prolongation: “Even if you should prolong the life of the patient by only twenty-four hours, your efforts would be worthwhile. There is no reason to deprive him of this day. For a doctor, life itself has value, no matter how diminished or pathetic the person who is living it.”)

Robert Laplane understands the complexity of the problem: “M. Denoix was right to stress that there are cases in which the truth must be told in order to relieve the patient. I have said that most patients ask only not to be confronted with the truth about their condition. This is true in the majority of cases, but it also happens sometimes that we doctors are afraid of this truth, that we take refuge behind our authority, that we play hide-and-seek.… There are doctors who never say anything. The lie of convenience very often takes the form of silence.”

But in the United States in the past few years a complete reversal of attitudes has been taking place. The change was not initiated by the medical fraternity; it has been imposed on them by a group of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists who became aware of the pitiful situation of the dying and decided to defy the taboo. It was not easy. Before 1959 when Herman Feifel wanted to interview the dying about themselves, no doubt for the first time, hospital authorities were indignant. They found the project “cruel, sadistic, traumatic.” In 1965 when Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was looking for dying persons to interview, the heads of the hospitals and clinics to whom she addressed herself protested, “Dying? But there are no dying here!” There could be no dying in a well-organized and respectable institution. They were mortally offended.

But this resistance on the part of hospital personnel could not discourage the interest and sympathy of a few pioneers, who rapidly gained adherents. The first manifestation of the new attitude was an anthology edited by Feifel in 1959, The Meaning of Death.28 Ten years later another collective work, The Dying Patient, contained a bibliography of 340 titles published after 1955, all in English, on the subject of dying, as distinct from funerals, cemeteries, or mourning. The quantity of this literature gives some idea of the movement that shook the little world of the social sciences and that eventually reached the medical and hospital establishment. It was a woman who played a vital role in this effort, because she was a doctor and knew how to talk to her colleagues, in spite of many discouragements and humiliations. I refer, of course, to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose fine book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, has had a profound impact in America and England, where more than a million copies have been sold.29The new trend, born of pity for the alienated dying, was directed toward the amelioration of the actual process of death by restoring to the dying man his forgotten dignity. Banished from medical expertise except in cases of legal medicine, regarded as a temporary failure of science, death had not been studied for its own sake; it had been dismissed as a subject of philosophy that had nothing to do with science. Recent research is attempting to restore its reality and reintegrate it into medical study, from which it disappeared after the end of the nineteenth century.

The doctor, who along with the priest had long been the witness and messenger of death, these days has no experience of death outside the hospital. But it is now believed that a better-informed doctor will be able to prepare his patients better and will be less inclined to take refuge in silence.

It is the dignity of death that is at issue. This dignity requires first of all that death be recognized, not only as a real state but as an important event, an event that should not be conjured away.

One of the conditions of this recognition is that the dying man be informed of his state. English and American doctors have yielded to the pressure very rapidly, no doubt because it enabled them to share a responsibility that they were beginning to find intolerable.

Are we on the eve of a new and profound change in attitudes? Is the rule of silence becoming obsolete?

On May 13, 1976, an American television network broadcast an hour-long film called Dying, which received considerable attention, especially in the press, although many Americans ignored it.

The director, Michael Roemer, observed death in postindustrial America the way an ethnologist might study a primitive society. He took his camera into the homes and hospital rooms of terminal cancer patients and their families and lived intimately with them over a period of time. The resulting documentary is extraordinary and upsetting. It reveals the present state of public opinion better than all the literature published in the last few years.

One trait is common to the four cases presented and corresponds closely to the traditional death with which we are familiar. The patient and his family are given very specific notification by the doctor of the diagnosis and the probable course of the disease.

The first case is presented in the form of a monologue, in which a young woman in her thirties tells about the illness and death of her husband. They both knew what was happening. Indeed, the awareness the couple had of the situation, far from traumatizing them, brought them closer than ever. Surprising as it may seem, the wife said that the very last days were the happiest and most beautiful of her life. More than a century later, I seem to hear the accents of Albert or Alexandrine de La Ferronays. Here in the middle of the twentieth century, I recognize the romantic model of the beautiful death.

The fourth and last case is the long passion of a black preacher in his sixties. This time the camera takes us inside his modest home, among his large and harmonious family: his wife, whose simplest gestures have the natural nobility of a great tragedian; his married children; his grandchildren, still very young. He has cancer of the liver. We attend the consultation during which the doctor tells him and his wife that he is going to die. We sense what is going through their minds: a mixture of sadness and resignation, pity and tenderness, and faith. We are in church on Sunday when the minister makes his farewells to the congregation, who punctuate his sermon with short cries of response. We accompany him and his son on a pilgrimage to his childhood home in the Deep South, to visit the grave of his parents. When death approaches, we are at his bedside in the crowded room in which the whole family is gathered, the old and the young; we see the children come to kiss his deeply lined but peaceful face for the last time. Finally, we attend the funeral ceremony in the church, we watch the congregation file by the open coffin, we hear the singing and the tears. There is no mistaking it: This is the tame death, the familiar and public death.

The other two cases have nothing in common with our ancient or known models. On the contrary, they are typical of the new death of today among young adults in the comfortable milieu of the golden suburbs.

First there is the case of a young woman of thirty who has cancer of the brain and who lives with her mother. Her shaved head has been disfigured by the operation she has undergone, her body is half paralyzed, her speech difficult. However, she speaks to us very openly, in a detached manner, about her life, and about the death she expects any day now. She is not afraid of it; one must die; she doesn’t care when it is, as long as she is unconscious, in a coma.

She impresses us by her courage, but also by a complete absence of emotion, as if death were something of no importance, mors ut nihil. This resembles the omnia ut nihil of the seventeenth century, except that here the nihil has lost its tragic sense and has become quite ordinary.

The patient would be very much alone without the silent and attentive presence of her mother. As the disease grows worse, it reduces her to the state of dependence of a young child or animal who must be fed with a spoon and who can do nothing except open her mouth. Outside the complicity that binds mother and daughter beyond tears or confessions lies the solitude of beautiful empty houses and large deserted gardens. They are totally alone.

The other case takes place in a similar setting. A man of about the same age also has cancer of the brain, but he is married and the father of two teenage sons. His wife, who is traumatized (and perhaps upset by the presence of the camera), is trying to avoid all emotion and to convey an air of realism and efficiency. One afternoon she calls her husband in the hospital to inform him that she has succeeded in obtaining a plot in the cemetery. She speaks in a detached tone, as if she were talking about a hotel reservation. She has not even bothered to send the children out of the room, and they play on as if they were oblivious to everything.

But beneath this facade, the poor woman is ready to crack. One day, at the end of her rope, she goes to see the doctor—still on camera—in revolt. Her husband is so weak that he has become indifferent and takes no part in the life of the family. And yet the interminable prolongation of his life makes it impossible for her to remarry, to find another father for her children. And tomorrow it may be too late! One senses her wishes, but the doctor refuses to understand.

In the last images we see the patient, after he has left the hospital for the last time, back in his beautiful house and garden, imprisoned in a silence from which he will never emerge. The nonverbal communication that existed between mother and daughter in the preceding case is absent. Here the solitude is total.

The new phenomenon revealed by Dying is not so much this solitude as the desire to divulge things having to do with death and to speak about them naturally instead of hiding them. But the difference is not as great as it appears, and the exhibition achieves the same purpose as the silence of the taboo: to stifle emotion, to desensitize behavior. Indeed, the audacity of Dying seems more effective than the shame of the taboo. It succeeds even better in ruling out all possibility of communication; it ensures the most perfect isolation for the dying. Both attitudes, which are really very close, are responses to the uneasiness caused by the continued existence of death in a world that is eliminating suffering: moral suffering—hell and sin—in the nineteenth century; and physical suffering—pain and disease—in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century. Death should have disappeared along with disease, but it persists; it is not even any longer in retreat. Its persistence is a scandal whose presence calls up two possible attitudes. One is the attitude of the taboo, which consists in behaving as if death did not exist by banishing it from daily life. The other is the attitude of Dying: accepting death as a technical fact but reducing it to the state of an ordinary thing, as insignificant as it is necessary.

But even in the second case, some people think that the state of the dying has become intolerable. Dying must be made bearable, either by allowing the natural dignity of the dying to reappear, as in the case of Mélisande, or by means of a training which is learned like an art, a training such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gives at the University of Chicago. There students behind a one-way mirror are able to observe dying persons who have agreed to talk about themselves with men of feeling and science, the new masters of the art of dying. Those who receive this training may be able to alleviate some of the effects of death in the world of technology, but this does not mean that they will be able to eliminate death itself.

In the current debate, those who are not satisfied by such alleviations and who reject them as ambiguous compromises are led to contest the medicalization of society. Such is the case of Ivan Illich, who has the courage to take his idea to its logical conclusion. For him, the medicalization of death is only one case, albeit a particularly significant and serious one, of the general medicalization of culture. For him, the improvement of death would necessarily involve its demedicalization and the demedicalization of society as a whole.30But Ivan Illich is only one man. On the whole, the debate opened in 1959 by Feifel has remained confined to an intelligentsia, albeit a large one. Now and then this intelligentsia has contact with a wider public, which on these rare occasions reveals its underlying uneasiness and anxiety. For the reopening of discussion on death has not shaken society’s determination to repress the real image of death. I have some recent examples that show the persistence of the rejection of mourning. When a young European woman living in the United States suddenly lost her mother, she went abroad to attend her funeral, but she came back as soon as she could, dazed and suffering, to be with her husband and children. She hoped to have the support of her friends, but the telephone did not ring. Like Geoffrey Gorer’s sister-in-law, she was in quarantine: mourning in reverse. This is a very unusual attitude in a society where people are quick to feel pity and are always accessible.

Some people want to improve death in the hospital, provided death does not leave the hospital. However, there is a breach in the medical defense system through which life and death, so carefully separated, may well come together in a flood of popular protest. This is the question of euthanasia and the power to discontinue or prolong treatment.

Today nobody is really consciously concerned about the manner of his own death. But the image of another person dying in a tangle of tubes all over his body, breathing artificially, is beginning to break through taboos to galvanize a sensibility that has long been paralyzed. Perhaps public opinion will be aroused and will seize on the subject with the passion it has shown for other vital issues, notably abortion. Many things would be changed. Claudine Herzlich asks, “Are we about to witness a resurgence of the problems of death that will go beyond professional circles and eventually bring about a social movement as important as that of abortion? We know today that in some cases, at least, people die [or do not die] because someone else has decided it was time. Are people going to demand to die when they are ready to die?”31 We have no idea yet, but the very fact that the question is being raised in this way is significant. The most recent model of death is associated with the medicalization of society, that is, with the segment of industrial society in which the power of technology has been most widely accepted and is still least contested. For the first time, people are questioning the unconditional benevolence of this power. It is in this area of the collective conciousness that a change in contemporary attitudes might well occur.

Ariès, Philippe [date]

The hour of our death