Th Lady in White - a biography full of grace and vision

 On the farm where she grew up, in Monson, Emily’s mother found her little brother dead in his cradle, like a little sugar loaf wrapped up by death the grocerwoman. Then she lost two other brothers and her father. Finally, one year before Emily’s birth, she buried her mother. She brought her daughter into the world under a sun spotted with mourning. A few days before giving birth she repapered the walls of the nursery, but it is not enough to redecorate the walls to ensure a newborn child of an open life. Ghosts bent over Emily’s cradle. They observed this child who would become their scribe; her radiant sensibility already permeated the wall of inattention that divides absent from present.

Poets are pretty when a century has gone by, when they’re dead and in the ground and alive through their texts. But when you have a poet in your home, a child who is in love with the absolute, shut away in her room with her books like some young wild animal in a divinely smoke-filled lair, how are you to raise her? Children know all there is to know of heaven until the day they begin to learn things. Poets are children who have not been interrupted; they are sky-gazers, impossible to raise.

Legend has it that Saint Christopher carried the Christ child across a river on his shoulders. The truth is that it is mothers who step bare-legged into the great black current of time, carrying their children on their shoulders, feeling the corset of cold around their waists, and they think only of keeping the child above water. Sometimes one of them lets go and sinks into the river. Then it is up to the child, drenched to the soul in fear, to become the mother of her mother and try to reach the opposite shore. From 1850 on, Emily’s mother’s brain was on fire. She became the prophetess of a migrainous God, and her silent oracles caused her entourage to tremble. Emily looked after her mother. She bustled about in the middle of the black river, not without a certain cheer when she spoke of that time in her late childhood when her mother dressed her in cloth so poorly cut that she felt as if she were “wearing excuses rather than clothing.” In 1880—for thirty years she had been carrying her on her shoulders—she let out a sigh: “the cricket of the hearth is a burden, because it is getting old.”

Melancholy mothers can never be thanked enough. Their throne is in the middle of the sky. They have tossed their shawl over the sun. From their eyes comes a night so deep that their children marvel at the tiniest spot of light. Emily went in search of daylight where it could be found, not far from the realm of mothers—in passionate nighttime discussions with her brother, for example, by the hearth in the kitchen with its apple-green walls, “while the righteous sleep.”

When he had finished his studies, Austin left for Boston to become a teacher and was beset with homesickness—although that home was nothing more than a brick house in Amherst, and that house nothing more than his mother’s slow-beating heart. He came back to Amherst, and his father offered him a job. He accepted. His mother observed her son’s return in silence. Silence is the sword of moody mothers. They plunge it into the nomad souls of their shattered children. Blessed are the mothers: whoever makes life impossible for us gives our heart every chance to become great.

With his disheveled ginger hair and turned out like a prince—a brightly colored riding jacket, a wide-brimmed planter’s hat, an orangewood walking stick—Austin strode up and down the streets of Amherst like a monarch in his tiny kingdom. He was the treasurer at the college, and like his father before him he decided upon the spirit of the education to be dispensed there. He liked painting, theatre, and horses. Swaggering and scathing, he was curt with everyone except Emily. His sister fascinated him. For him she was the “incarnation of good.” He needed her, even once he was married. Emily joked with him, mended his socks and shirts, asked him to go shopping for her, pressed him for the town gossip. She flattered, reassured, and encouraged him. She was his little mother. Emily watched over Austin, and Vinnie watched over Emily. The three children held hands and tried to cross the great river of life without drowning. They had no parents. No one has ever had parents, someone whose mere presence could keep one from dying—that does not exist.

Like the wind in the aspen leaves, life wrote its luminously contradictory texts on the face of Sophia Holland, Emily’s friend. Suddenly God creased the masterpiece of that adolescent face as if it were paper. When Emily learned that her friend was going to die, she asked to see her. Death is a potter spinning his work backward. Emily observed the body’s clay, its divine breath departing. That vision would make her forever the custodian of vanished lives, a dealer in stolen invisibility. Sophia’s soul dropped like an emerald into the jewel box of her red heart.

As a child, Emily heard a minister—thunderstruck by his own eloquence like a horseman thrown by his mount—exclaim: “Is the arm of our Lord so short that He can save no one?” The minister replied dully to his own question, yet he could not put out the fire lit in a child’s mind. Sophia buried, Emily entered the convent of depression on tiptoe. To help her recover, her parents sent her to her aunt Lavinia’s for a month. For the second time she would find peace there, even if she could not forget Sophia’s lesson: with every second, behold the end of the world.

Love and the void belong to the same terrible genus. Our soul is the terrain of their unsettled contest.

Whenever a young man showed an interest in the Dickinson daughters, their father would raise the Great Wall of his eyebrows, but he could not prevent Joseph Lyman from charming the sleek, witty, flirtatious Vinnie. The young man kissed her by her rosebushes then vanished, on the pretext that Vinnie could not have borne the thought of leaving her family home. Vinnie remained petrified among her roses, as if in a fairy tale, frozen in the fateful moment of a curse.

The rosebush deserter vanished into the distance. Beneath his horse’s hooves was stardust, the golden powder of a vision, a portrait of Emily that he would write in 1860: “A library dimly lighted [. . .] Enter a spirit clad in white, figure so draped as to be misty[,] face moist, translucent alabaster, forehead firmer as of statuary marble.” “Hazel” eyes that do not see what appears before them but “the core of all thi[n]gs”; “hands small, firm, deft but utterly emancipated from all claspings of perishable things, very firm strong little hands, absolutely under control of the brain [. . .] mouth made for nothing and used for nothing but uttering choice speech, rare thoughts, glittering, starry misty figures, winged words.”

In her lifetime, Emily would not see her forehead circled in a crown of genius; all her writing would sleep at the bottom of a drawer in her night table, along with her crown of thorns. While she wrote, Vinnie fed the cats that followed her everywhere through the house—little gold-eyed courtesans for a lady in black cashmere. She also swept the steps and did the shopping. She played the role of Martha in the Gospel; she had the sententious toughness for it. “[Emily] had to think—she was the only one of us who had that to do. Father believed; and mother loved; and Austin had Amherst.” As her sister no longer left the house, Vinnie acted as her dressmaker’s dummy, trying on the seraphic white dresses that Emily would wear. When shopkeepers asked her why she did not try to convince her sister to get some fresh air “for her own good,” she replied that Emily was gifted for a fervent life of reading and silence. Why on earth should she oblige her to do anything else?

During the night on Independence Day, 1879, a large warehouse in the center of town not far from the Dickinson home went up in flames. The bells woke Emily, and she ran barefoot to the window, saw a giant sun devouring the sky while a pale moon looked on in astonishment. Drawn from their nests by the disaster, drunk on light, the birds were singing full-throated. Vinnie ran in and immediately reassured her sister. “Don’t be afraid, Emily, it’s only the fourth of July!” She took her by the hand and led her to their mother’s bedroom. The din had not awoken her. She was one of those souls who were so unhappy that nothing could trouble them; such indifference is not unlike wisdom. The two daughters let her sleep. Maggie, the housekeeper, was sitting by her side. She in turn reassured Emily: it was only a barn burning, nothing more. Emily acted as if she believed their lies. On Amherst’s main street the witches in the fire combed their long red hair, biting ravenously into the wood. Outside it was so light that one could make out a caterpillar’s velvet accordion on the leaf of a plum tree at the end of the garden. “Vinnie’s ‘it’s only the fourth of July’ I shall always remember. I think she will tell us so when we die, to keep us from being afraid.”

There were four windows in Emily’s room—and a fifth one, the Bible, a picture window through which the soul discovered a paradise, terribly near. Emily’s Bible, in fine-grained green morocco leather, was printed in such tiny characters that she had to hold it very close to her face to read it. In one of the stories, three children were thrown into the flames. They were found sitting around the fire, laughing and singing praises. No doubt they had an invisible Vinnie by their side to help them pass through the flames of abandonment, with a peace in their soul that nothing could wrest from them.

“My country is Truth,” said Emily, and referring to her sister’s lingering migraines, “Vinnie lives much of the time in the State of Regret.” She who was so gifted at bringing tranquility to her loved ones was powerless against this nostalgia for a stolen kiss by the flaming rosebush.

Jealous serpents glided across the floor of the room where the three little Dickinsons walked barefoot: by day they lurked in the shadows of the children’s games, by night they rippled among the tall grasses of a dream. Thirty years later they were still there. There were times when Austin rebelled against his sister’s invisible consecration. He claimed that she was “posing” when she received guests—dressed in a cloud of white, speaking to them in a little girl’s voice. But if anyone tried to make him admit to his sister’s strangeness he clenched his jaw; she went so rarely into the streets of Amherst that people called her “The Myth.” There is nothing odd about my sister’s behavior, he would affirm, rebuffing strangers who were unaware that the Dickinson clan was a law unto itself. Vinnie said as much, haughtily, “Each of us in this family is the king of his or her own realm.”

Edward had gagged his soul to such a degree that—like a revenge of the invisible—the children he had fathered were daydreamers, devourers of books. Austin had become a jurist, yet he showed Emily a few poems of his own devising. She read them and remarked, with an iron humor: “Now Brother Pegasus, I’ll tell you what it is—I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!” Brother Pegasus would abandon his writing, at least with ink. At his own expense, he redesigned the grounds of the college, planting bushes with red berries to warm the winter, and trees that retained their green confidence all through the gray months. This goodness that seeks no reward for itself, this restlessness for the faraway are marks of deepest poetry.

In the gloom of the little school, Emily discovered the power of books to resurrect. In high school she fell in love with a young teacher, Leonard Humphrey. He died in 1851. The Lord burning behind a beloved face gives it his brilliance. If he comes too close, the face turns waxy white, then melts and disappears. “I do not care for the body—I love the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul.”

The pupil of Amherst, too well-behaved, watched as God made up the world with each passing instant. She compiled a secret list of what she loved: poets, the sun, summer, paradise. That was all. The list was full, she wrote, and the word “poets” would suffice in itself: poets give birth to a sun more pure than the sun itself, their summer never fades, and heaven can only be a place of beauty if a poet has painted it.

Fierce, silent, prone to fits of laughter, Emily belonged to a small group at her high school, each of whom had a nickname. Hers was “Socrates”—for the thinker who exasperated the people of Athens with his stubborn pursuit of the truth. The girls addressed impatient letters to each other and several times a day hid behind their fans of pealing laughter. They knew that the more serious days of harvest time lay ahead: husband, children, respectability. Emily sipped delicately at the wine of youth, at the ephemeral grace where sorrows and fervor can be shared. Disappointment arrives from on high. The time would come for them to leave, but for whom, and why?

Something is given at birth to each newborn child. This thing is nothing; it has neither shape nor name nor prestige. It is our only asset. We glimpse it in flashes. “I find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” Saints share this white flower of nothingness that blooms from time to time in a red heart. It never fades. To be a saint is to be alive. To be alive is to be oneself, one of a kind. Abiah Palmer Root—sensual, radiant, upright—climbed the stairs with the solemn slowness of a queen to where Emily was waiting, astonished. Abiah was a vision: in her hair, and dangling like trophies from her ears, were flaming dandelion flowers. Her peasant grace and her triumphant calm fractured Emily’s heart. Until 1854 Emily would address her in writing as the Mother Superior of the Order of Dandelions.

Abiah did not know that she was a vision. She did not always reply, at the risk of ending up in the “box of Phantoms,” where Emily put those who disappointed her. As she learned the weaknesses of the world, Emily discovered in return the force of writing. That girl who had once made earrings from the tousled sunlight of dandelions moved on, elsewhere, into a life that was dimmed and comfortable. The glory of dandelions has remained: even in the torment of lashing autumn rains, or grazed by cows hobbled to a monotonous hunger, these flowers radiate the language that knows how to express them and love them. The word is an imperishable sun.

From: The Lady in White by Christian Bobin

Eremitism is elitism

Life in the woods allows us to pay our debts. We breathe, eat fruit, pick flowers, we bathe in a river’s waters and then one day, we die without paying the bill to the planet. Life is sneaking a meal in a restaurant. The ideal would be to go through life like the Scandinavian troll who roams the moorland without leaving any tracks in the heather. Robert Baden-Powell’s advice should be made a universal principle: ‘When through with a campsite, take care to leave two things behind. Firstly: nothing. Secondly: your thanks.’ What is essential? Not to weigh too heavily on the surface of the globe. Shut inside his cube of logs, the hermit does not soil the Earth. From the threshold of his izba, he watches the seasons perform the dance of the eternal return. Possessing no machines, he keeps his body fit. Cut off from all communication, he deciphers the language of the trees. Released from the grip of television, he discovers that a window is more transparent than a TV screen. His cabin provides comfort and brightens up the lakeshore. One day, we tire of talking about ‘de-growth’ and the love of nature: we want to get our actions in sync with our ideas. It’s time to leave the city and close the curtains of the forest over speechifying.
The cabin, realm of simplification. Beneath the pines, life is reduced to vital gestures, and time spared from daily chores is spent in rest, contemplation, small pleasures. The array of tasks to be done has shrunk. Reading, drawing water, cutting wood, writing, pouring tea: such things become liturgies. In the city, each action takes place to the detriment of a thousand others. The forest draws together what the city disperses.
*
Life in the forest: escapism? That’s how people mired in routine disparage the vital, creative force of life. A game? Absolutely! What else would you call willingly staying alone on a lakeshore by a forest with a crate of books and some snowshoes? A quest? Too big a word. An experiment? In the scientific sense, yes. The cabin is a laboratory, where you precipitate your longings for freedom, silence and solitude. An experimental field where you invent a slowed-down life for yourself.
*
The cabin is a perfect terrain in which to build a life founded on luxurious sobriety. The sobriety of the hermit is not to encumber yourself with either objects or your fellow man. And to break the habits of your former needs.
The luxury of the hermit is beauty. Wherever you look, there is absolute glory. The parade of hours is uninterrupted (aside from yesterday’s contretemps). Technology does not imprison you within its circle of fire through the needs it creates.
Retreating to the forest cannot be everyone’s course. Eremitism is elitism. Aldo Leopold says as much in his A Sand County Almanac, which I began rereading this morning right after lighting the stove: ‘All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.’ When crowds enter the forests, it’s to chop them down. Life in the woods is no solution to ecological problems. The phenomenon contains its own counter-principle: the masses, taking to the woods, would bring along the evils they’d hoped to flee by leaving the city. No exit.
*
I was familiar with the vertical vertigo of the climber clinging to the cliff in terror at the sight of the abyss. I remembered the horizontal vertigo of the traveller on the steppe, staggered by vanishing perspectives. I’d experienced the vertigo of the drunkard who thinks he’s come up with a brilliant idea that his brain just won’t process even though he can sense it growing within him. And I discover the vertigo of the hermit, the fear of the temporal void. The same pang of distress as on the cliff – only not for what lies below, but for what lies ahead.
I am free to do anything in a world where there is nothing to do. I look at the icon of Seraphim. He had God.
God, never sated with the prayers of men, is a helluva pastime. Me? I have writing.
*
In Paris I never dwelled much on my state of mind. Life wasn’t conducive to tracking the seismographic data of the soul. Here, in the whited-out silence, I have time to perceive the nuances of my own tectonics. The hermit faces this question: can one stand living with oneself?
*
Societies do not like hermits and do not forgive them for their flight. They disapprove of the solitary figure throwing his ‘Go on without me’ in everyone else’s face. To withdraw is to take leave of one’s fellows. The hermit denies the vocation of civilization and becomes a living reproach to it. He is a blot on the social contract. How can one accept this person who crosses the line and latches onto the first passing breeze?
*
Sometimes, this desire to do nothing. I’ve been sitting at my table for an hour, surveying the progress of sunbeams across the tablecloth. Light ennobles all it touches even glancingly: wood, the row of books, the knife handles, the curve of a face and of time going by, even the dust motes  in the air. That’s not nothing, to be specks of dust in this world.
*
A free man possesses time. A man who dominates space is merely powerful. In cities, the minutes, hours and years are the flowing blood of wounded time, and they escape us. In the cabin, time grows calm. It lies at your feet like a good old  dog and suddenly, you’ve even forgotten it’s there. I am free because my days are.
*
Hölderlin’s epigraph for Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece is taken from the epitaph on the tombstone of St Ignatius of Loyola: Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine. In short, after an outing, after gorging on the grandeur of the lake, remember to give a little wink to a small servant of beauty: a snowflake, some lichen, a tit.
*
A gust of wind shoves an icy draught under the door. A hermit, isolated? But from what? Air slips through the beams, sunshine floods the table, water flows within a stone’s throw, humus lies beneath the wooden floor, snow filters in via the pores of the cabin, the scent of the forest percolates through gaps, an insect invites itself in to check out the parquet. In the city a layer of asphalt protects the foot from all contact with the earth, and people are hemmed in by walls of stone.
*
In the world I left, the presence of others has some control over our actions, and maintains discipline. In the city, when shielded from the eyes of our neighbours, we behave less elegantly. Who has never eaten alone, standing in the kitchen, happy not to have to set the table, eagerly devouring a tin of cold ravioli? In a cabin, standards are always at risk of slipping. How many solitary Siberians, delivered from all social imperatives, knowing that there is no one to judge them, wind up flopped on a bed of cigarette butts, scratching their rashes?  Crusoe was aware of this danger and decided, so as not to debase himself, to have supper every evening at a table and properly dressed, as if he had invited a guest.
Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.
*
The hermit gains in gentleness what he loses in civility. ‘The less sensitive he was to suffering, perhaps, the more receptive our ancestor was to pleasure, and the more conscious of his happiness,’ writes Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
If he wishes to safeguard his mental health, an anchorite cast up on the shore must live in the moment. Let him begin to elaborate plans, and he will descend into madness. The present: a protective straitjacket against the sirens of the future.
*

In Paris, I was warned before I left. Boredom would be my deadly enemy! I’d die of it! I listened politely. People who said such things assumed that they themselves were a superb form of entertainment. ‘Reduced to myself alone, I feed, it is true, on my own substance, but it does not run out …’ writes Rousseau in the Reveries.
Rousseau becomes aware of the challenge and ordeal of loneliness in the Fifth Walk. The solitary man must strictly devote himself to virtue, he says, and must never indulge in cruelty. If he behaves badly, the experience of his hermit’s way of life will impose a double penance on him: on the one hand, he will have to endure an atmosphere corrupted by his own baseness, and on the other, he’ll be forced to admit his own failure as a human being. In opposition to the natural man stands the civil man: ‘The civil man desires the approval of others; the solitary man must of necessity be content with himself, or his life is unbearable. And so  the latter is forced to be virtuous.’ Rousseau’s solitude generates goodness, and through a feedback effect, it will dissolve the memory of human wickedness. Solitude is the balm applied to the wound caused by the distrust of one’s fellow men: ‘I would rather flee them than hate them,’ he writes in the Sixth Walk.
It is in the interest of the solitary man to treat his surroundings well, to rally to his cause all animals, plants and gods. Why should he increase the austerity of his state with the hostility of the world? The hermit refuses to brutalize his environment. It’s the ‘Saint Francis of Assisi syndrome’. The saint speaks to his brothers the birds, Buddha soothes the mad elephant with a gentle pat, Saint Seraphim feeds the bears, and Rousseau seeks consolation by botanizing.
*
There is a Chinese tradition in which old men would retire to a cabin to die. Some of them had served the emperor, held government posts, while others were scholars, poets or simple hermits. Their cabins were all alike, the settings selected according to strict criteria. The hut had to be on a mountain, near a source of water, with a bush for the wind to caress. Sometimes the view was towards a valley alive with the bustle of humanity. Incense smoke helped time to pass. In the evening, a friend would appear, to be welcomed with a glass of tea and a few circumspect words. After having wanted to act upon the world, these men retrenched, determined to let the world act upon them. Life is an oscillation between two temptations.
But please note! Chinese non-action is not sloth. Non-action sharpens all perception. The hermit absorbs the universe, paying acute attention to its smallest manifestation. Sitting cross-legged beneath an almond tree, he hears the shock of a petal striking the surface of a pond. He sees the edge of a feather vibrate as a crane flies overhead. He feels the perfume of a happy flower rise from the blossom to envelop the evening.
*
The urban liberal, leftist, revolutionary and upper-middle-class citizen all pay money for bread, gas and taxes. The hermit asks nothing from the state and gives nothing to the state. He disappears into the woods and thrives there. His retreat constitutes a loss of income for the government. Becoming a loss of income should be the objective of true revolutionaries. A repast of grilled fish and blueberries gathered in the forest is more anti-statist than a protest demonstration bristling with black flags. Those who dynamite the citadel need the citadel. They are against the state in the sense that they lean against it. Walt Whitman: ‘I have nothing to do with this system, not even enough to oppose it.’ On that October day five years ago when I discovered old Walt’s Leaves of Grass, I had no idea that reading it would lead me to a cabin. It’s dangerous to open a book.
A retreat is a revolt. Entering one’s cabin means vanishing from surveillance screens. The hermit erases himself. He sends no more numeric traces, no telephonic signals, no banking data. He divests himself of all identity. He effects a kind of reverse hacking, and leaves the Great Game. No need, moreover, to head for the woods. Revolutionary asceticism can adapt to an urban milieu. The consumer society offers the choice to conform to it, and with a little discipline … Surrounded by abundance, some are free to live like pushovers but others may play the monk and stay lean amid the murmur of books, retreating to inner forests without leaving their apartments. In a society of penury, there is no other alternative. One is condemned to a state of want, and conditioned by it. Willpower  is neither here nor there. A famous Soviet joke says a guy goes into a butcher shop and asks: ‘You have any bread?’ Answer: ‘Ah, no, this is the place where we have no meat, so for the place where they have no bread, go next door to the bakery.’ The Hungarian lady who raised me taught me such things and I often think of her. The consumer society is a somewhat vile expression, born of the phantasm of childish grown-ups disappointed at having been too spoiled. They haven’t the strength to reform on their own and dream of being constrained to live in sober moderation.
*
This life brings peace. Not that all longings fade away. The cabin is no tree of Buddhist Enlightenment. A hermitage draws ambitions back to proportions of possibility. By restricting the panoply of actions, one goes deeper into each experience. Reading, writing, fishing, scaling heights, skating, strolling in the woods … Existence becomes reduced to a dozen or so activities. The castaway enjoys absolute freedom – but within the limits of his island. At the beginning of all Robinsonian narratives, the hero tries to escape by building a boat. He is convinced that anything is possible, that happiness lies just over the horizon. Cast up once again on the shore, he understands that he will not escape and, at peace, discovers that limitation brings joy. He is then said to resign himself. Resigned, the hermit? No more than the city dweller who, haggard, suddenly realizes beneath the twinkling lights of the boulevard that his whole life will still not be enough for him to sample all the attractions at the party.
*
The hermit stays off to one side in polite refusal, like a guest who, with a gentle gesture, declines the proffered dish. If society disappeared, the hermit would go on living as a hermit. Those in revolt against society, however, would find themselves technically out of work. The hermit does not oppose, but espouses a way of life. He seeks not to denounce a lie, but to find a truth. He is physically inoffensive and is tolerated as if he belonged to an intermediate order, a caste halfway between barbarians and civilized people. The chivalrous hero of the  twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, driven mad by the loss of his lady-love, wanders naked in a forest until he is taken in and cared for by a hermit, who restores his reason and leads him back to civilization. The hermit: a passeur, a go-between of worlds.
*
I read a few of Cicero’s letters. The hermit, without access to the news of the day, owes it to himself to be up-to-date on the doings of ancient Rome. In The Thousand and One Nights, amid the palms and the opulence, this sentence strikes an unpleasant note: ‘This generosity you’re putting on for me here must surely have a purpose.’ I prefer this homage to gratuity in Gilles, Drieu La Rochelle’s novel about the education of a French fascist between the two world wars: ‘The less direction his life had, the more sense it made.’
*
Through some mystery, I stripped myself of all desire at the very moment when I was winning the maximum of freedom.  I feel lacustrine landscapes developing in my heart. I have awakened the old Chinese hermit within me.

Quotes from the book Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga
by Sylvain Tesson

Scott would push himself beyond any physical limitation...

 The bond between Fischer and Hall had been cemented back in 1992, when they had bumped into each other on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Hall was attempting the peak with his compañero and business partner, Gary Ball; Fischer was climbing with an elite American climber named Ed Viesturs. On their way down from the summit in a howling storm, Fischer, Viesturs, and a third American, Charlie Mace, encountered Hall struggling to cope with a barely conscious Ball, who had been stricken with a life-threatening case of altitude sickness and was unable to move under his own power. Fischer, Viesturs, and Mace helped drag Ball down the avalanche-swept lower slopes of the mountain through the blizzard, saving his life. (A year later Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)

Fischer, forty, was a strapping, gregarious man with a blond ponytail and a surfeit of manic energy. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he had chanced upon a television program about mountaineering and was enthralled. The next summer he traveled to Wyoming and enrolled in an Outward Bound–style wilderness course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). As soon as he graduated from high school he moved west permanently, found seasonal employment as a NOLS instructor, placed climbing at the center of his cosmos, and never looked back.

When Fischer was eighteen and working at NOLS, he fell in love with a student in his course named Jean Price. They were married seven years later, settled in Seattle, and had two children, Andy and Katie Rose (who were nine and five, respectively, when Scott went to Everest in 1996). Price earned her commercial pilot’s license and became a captain for Alaska Airlines—a prestigious, well-paying career that allowed Fischer to climb full-time. Her income also permitted Fischer to launch Mountain Madness in 1984.

If the name of Hall’s business, Adventure Consultants, mirrored his methodical, fastidious approach to climbing, Mountain Madness was an even more accurate reflection of Scott’s personal style. By his early twenties, he had developed a reputation for a harrowing, damn-the-torpedoes approach to ascent. Throughout his climbing career, but especially during those early years, he survived a number of frightening mishaps that by all rights should have killed him.

On at least two occasions while rock climbing—once in Wyoming, another time in Yosemite—he crashed into the ground from more than 80 feet up. While working as a junior instructor on a NOLS course in the Wind River Range he plunged 70 feet, unroped, to the bottom of a crevasse on the Din-woody Glacier. Perhaps his most infamous tumble, though, occurred when he was a novice ice climber: despite his inexperience, Fischer had decided to attempt the coveted first ascent of a difficult frozen cascade called Bridal Veil Falls, in Utah’s Provo Canyon. Racing two expert climbers up the ice, Fischer lost his purchase 100 feet off the deck and plummeted to the ground.

To the amazement of those who witnessed the incident, he picked himself up and walked away with relatively minor injuries. During his long plunge to earth, however, the tubular pick of an ice tool impaled his calf and came out the other side. When the hollow pick was extracted, it removed a core sample of tissue, leaving a hole in his leg big enough to stick a pencil through. After being discharged from the emergency room at a local hospital, Fischer saw no reason to waste his limited supply of cash on additional medical treatment, so he climbed for the next six months with an open, suppurating wound. Fifteen years later he proudly showed me the permanent scar inflicted by that fall: a pair of shiny, dime-size marks bracketing his Achilles tendon.

“Scott would push himself beyond any physical limitation,” recalls Don Peterson, a renowned American climber who met Fischer soon after his slip from Bridal Veil Falls. Peterson became something of a mentor to Fischer and climbed with him intermittently over the next two decades. “His will was astonishing. It didn’t matter how much pain he was in—he would ignore it and keep going. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would turn around because he had a sore foot.

“Scott had this burning ambition to be a great climber, to be one of the best in the world. I remember at the NOLS headquarters there was a crude sort of gym. Scott would go into that room and regularly work out so hard that he threw up. Regularly. One doesn’t meet many people with that kind of drive.”

People were drawn to Fischer’s energy and generosity, his absence of guile, his almost childlike enthusiasm. Raw and emotional, disinclined toward introspection, he had the kind of gregarious, magnetic personality that instantly won him friends for life; hundreds of individuals—including some he’d met just once or twice—considered him a bosom buddy. He was also strikingly handsome with a bodybuilder’s physique and the chiseled features of a movie star. Among those attracted to him were not a few members of the opposite sex, and he wasn’t immune to the attention.

A man of rampant appetites, Fischer smoked a lot of cannabis (although not while working) and drank more than was healthy. A back room at the Mountain Madness office functioned as a sort of secret clubhouse for Scott: after putting his kids to bed he liked to retire there with his pals to pass around a pipe and look at slides of their brave deeds on the heights.

During the 1980s Fischer made a number of impressive ascents that earned him a modicum of local renown, but celebrity in the world climbing community eluded him. Despite his concerted efforts, he was unable to land a lucrative commercial sponsorship of the sort enjoyed by some of his more famous peers. He worried that some of these top climbers didn’t respect him.

“Recognition was important to Scott,” says Jane Bromet, his publicist, confidant, and occasional training partner, who accompanied the Mountain Madness expedition to Base Camp to file Internet reports for Outside Online. “He ached for it. He had a vulnerable side that most people didn’t see; it really bothered him that he wasn’t more widely respected as a butt-kicking climber. He felt slighted, and it hurt.”

By the time Fischer left for Nepal in the spring of 1996, he’d begun to garner more of the recognition that he thought was his due. Much of it came in the wake of his 1994 ascent of Everest, accomplished without supplemental oxygen. Christened the Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition, Fischer’s team removed 5,000 pounds of trash from the mountain—which was very good for the landscape and turned out to be even better public relations. In January 1996, Fischer led a high-profile fund-raising ascent of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, that netted half a million dollars for the charity CARE. Thanks largely to the 1994 Everest clean-up expedition and this latter charity climb, by the time Fischer left for Everest in 1996 he had been featured prominently and often in the Seattle news media, and his climbing career was soaring.

Journalists inevitably asked Fischer about the risks associated with the kind of climbing he did and wondered how he reconciled it with being a husband and father. Fischer answered that he now took far fewer chances than he had during his reckless youth—that he had become a much more careful, more conservative climber. Shortly before leaving for Everest in 1996, he told Seattle writer Bruce Barcott, “I believe 100 percent I’m coming back.… My wife believes 100 percent I’m coming back. She isn’t concerned about me at all when I’m guiding because I’m gonna make all the right choices. When accidents happen, I think it’s always human error. So that’s what I want to eliminate. I’ve had lots of climbing accidents in my youth. You come up with lots of reasons, but ultimately it’s human error.”

Fischer’s assurances notwithstanding, his peripatetic alpine career was rough on his family. He was crazy about his kids, and when he was in Seattle he was an unusually attentive father, but climbing regularly took him away from home for months at a time. He’d been absent for seven of his son’s nine birthdays. In fact, say some of his friends, by the time he departed for Everest in 1996, Fischer’s marriage had been badly strained.

But Jean Price doesn’t attribute the rough patch in their relationship to Scott’s climbing. She says, rather, that any stress in the Fischer–Price household owed more to problems she was having with her employer: the victim of alleged sexual harassment, throughout 1995 Price was embroiled in a disheartening legal claim against Alaska Airlines. Although the suit was eventually resolved, the legal wrangling had been nasty, and had deprived her of a paycheck for the better part of a year. Revenues from Fischer’s guiding business weren’t nearly enough to make up for the loss of Price’s substantial flying income. “For the first time since moving to Seattle, we had money problems,” she laments.

Like most of its rivals, Mountain Madness was a fiscally marginal enterprise and had been since its inception: in 1995 Fischer took home only about $12,000. But things were finally starting to look more promising, thanks to Fischer’s growing celebrity and to the efforts of his business partner–cum–office manager, Karen Dickinson, whose organizational skills and levelheadedness compensated for Fischer’s seat-of-the-pants, what-me-worry modus operandi. Taking note of Rob Hall’s success in guiding Everest—and the large fees he was able to command as a consequence—Fischer decided it was time for him to enter the Everest market. If he could emulate Hall, it would quickly catapult Mountain Madness to profitability.

The money itself didn’t seem terribly important to Fischer. He cared little for material things but he hungered for respect and he was acutely aware that in the culture in which he lived, money was the prevailing gauge of success.

A few weeks after Fischer returned victorious from Everest in 1994, I encountered him in Seattle. I didn’t know him well, but we had some friends in common and often ran into each other at the crags or at climbers’ parties. On this occasion he buttonholed me to talk about the guided Everest expedition he was planning: I should come along, he cajoled, and write an article about the climb for Outside. When I replied that it would be crazy for someone with my limited high-altitude experience to attempt Everest, he said, “Hey, experience is overrated. It’s not the altitude that’s important, it’s your attitude, bro. You’ll do fine. You’ve done some pretty sick climbs—stuff that’s way harder than Everest. We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.”

Scott had piqued my interest—more, even, than he probably realized—and he was relentless. He talked up Everest every time he saw me and repeatedly harangued Brad Wetzler, an editor at Outside, about the idea. By January 1996, thanks in no small part to Fischer’s concerted lobbying, the magazine made a firm commitment to send me to Everest—probably, Wetzler indicated, as a member of Fischer’s expedition. In Scott’s mind it was a done deal.

From: Jon Krakauer’s

INTO THIN AIR

The evolutionary origins of Jewish collectivism and ethnocentrism

Jews originate in the Middle Old World cultural area11 and retain several of the key cultural features of their ancestral population. The Middle Old World culture group is characterized by extended kinship groups based on relatedness through the male line (patrilineal) rather than the bilateral relationships characteristic of Europeans. These male-dominated groups functioned as military units to protect herds, and between-group conflict is a much more important component of their evolutionary history. There is a great deal of pressure to form larger groups in order to increase military strength, and this is done partly by acquiring extra women through bridewealth.12 (Bridewealth involves the transfer of resources in return for marriage rights to a female, as in the marriages of Abraham and Isaac recounted in the Old Testament.) As a result, polygyny rather than the monogamy characteristic of European culture is the norm. Another contrast is that traditional Jewish groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. This is exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies toward exogamy. (See MacDonald 1994, Chs. 3 and 8 for a discussion of Jewish tendencies toward polygyny, endogamy, and consanguineous marriage.) Table 1 contrasts European and Jewish cultural characteristics.13Whereas individualist cultures are biased toward separation from the wider group, individuals in collectivist societies have a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries based on genetic relatedness as a result of the greater importance of group conflict during their evolutionary history. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups (e.g., Coon 1958, 153; Eickelman 1981, 157–174). Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups. Consider Carleton Coon’s (1958) description of Middle Eastern society:

There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. (Coon 1958, 153)

Between-group conflict often lurked just beneath the surface of these societies. For example, Dumont (1982, 223) describes the increase in anti-Semitism in Turkey in the late 19th century consequent to increased resource competition. In many towns, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even lived in the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse” (p. 222).

Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hyper-collectivism and hyper-ethnocentrism—a phenomenon that goes a long way toward explaining the chronic hostilities in the area. I give many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism is biologically based (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; 1998a, Ch. 1). It was noted above that individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany.14 The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite—findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

I provide many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism. Recently, I have been much impressed with the theme of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in the writings of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999). In their examination of current Jewish fundamentalists and their influence in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky argue that present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala— Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men”, “human beings”, and “cosmic” to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls” (p. 58).

The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world . . . The difference of the inner quality [of the body], . . . is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic15 difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘their bodies are in vain’. . . . An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. (In Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 59–60)

This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s (1985, 153) claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional.

The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews as completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition.

Within Israel, these Jewish fundamentalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties make up about 25% of the Israeli  electorate (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 8)—a percentage that is sure to increase because of their high fertility and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation of the Palestinians.

The point here is not so much about the fundamentalists in contemporary Israel but that traditional Jewish communities were intensely ethnocentric and collectivist—a major theme of all three of my books on Judaism. A thread throughout CofC is that Jewish intellectuals and political activists strongly identified as Jews and saw their work as furthering specific Jewish agendas. Their advocacy of intellectual and political causes, although often expressed in the language of moral universalism, was actually moral particularism in disguise.

Given that ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community, the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans—a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in CofC—is best seen as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. In Chapter 8 of CofC, I called attention to a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S. As noted throughout CofC, Jewish advocates addressing Western audiences have promoted policies that satisfy Jewish (particularist) interests in terms of the morally universalist language that is a central feature of Western moral and intellectual discourse. These policies include church-state separation, attitudes toward multi-culturalism, and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups. This double standard is fairly pervasive.16A principal theme of CofC is that Jewish organizations played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation. Nevertheless, these organizations have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of the Jewish people. Consider, for example, a press release of May 28, 1999 by the ADL:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today lauded the passage of sweeping changes in Germany’s immigration law, saying the easing of the nation’s once rigorous naturalization requirements “will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance. It is encouraging to see pluralism taking root in a society that, despite its strong democracy, had for decades maintained an unyielding policy of citizenship by blood or descent only,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The easing of immigration requirements is especially significant in light of Germany’s history of the Holocaust and  persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The new law will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance in a nation with an onerous legacy of xenophobia, where the concept of ‘us versus them’ will be replaced by a principle of citizenship for all.”17

There is no mention of analogous laws in place in Israel restricting immigration to Jews and the long-standing policy of rejecting the possibility of repatriation for Palestinian refugees wishing to return to Israel or the occupied territories. The prospective change in the “us versus them” attitude alleged to be characteristic of Germany is applauded, while the “us versus them” attitude characteristic of Israel and Jewish culture throughout history is unmentioned. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will no longer be able to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut by half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel.18 Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to be strong proponents of multi-ethnic immigration to the United States.19 This pervasive double standard was noticed by writer Vincent Sheean in his observations of Zionists in Palestine in 1930: “how idealism goes hand in hand with the most terrific cynicism; . . . how they are Fascists in their own affairs, with regard to Palestine, and internationalists in everything else.”20

My view is that Judaism must be conceived primarily as an ethnic rather than a religious group. Recent statements by prominent Jewish figures show that an ethnic conceptualization of Judaism fits with the self-images of many Jews. Speaking to a largely Jewish audience, Benjamin Netanyahu, prominent Likud Party member and until recently prime minister of Israel, stated, “If Israel had not come into existence after World War II then I am certain the Jewish race wouldn’t have survived. . . . I stand before you and say you must strengthen your commitment to Israel. You must become leaders and stand up as Jews. We must be proud of our past to be confident of our future.”21 Charles Bronfman, a main sponsor of the $210 million “Birthright Israel” project which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews, expresses a similar sentiment: “You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you’re losing a lot—losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”22 (Bronfman is co-chairman of the Seagram company and brother of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress.) Such sentiments would be unthinkable coming from European-American leaders. European-Americans making such assertions of racial pride would quickly be labeled haters and extremists.

A revealing comment by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight (2001) illustrates the profound ethnic nationalism that has pervaded the socialization of American Jews continuing into the present:

I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one. . . . [I]t must be admitted that the essence of the process of my nationalist training was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between “us” and “them.” Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside.23

Assertions of Jewish ethnicity are well-founded. Scientific studies supporting the genetic cohesiveness of Jewish groups continue to appear, most notably Hammer et al. (2000). Based on Y-chromosome data, Hammer et al. conclude that 1 in 200 matings within Jewish communities were with non-Jews over a 2000 year period.

In general, the contemporary organized Jewish community is characterized by high levels of Jewish identification and ethnocentrism. Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the AJCommittee are not creations of the fundamentalist and Orthodox, but represent the broad Jewish community, including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. In general, the more actively people are involved in the Jewish community, the more committed they are to preventing intermarriage and retaining Jewish ethnic cohesion. And despite a considerable level of intermarriage among less committed Jews, the leadership of the Jewish community in the U.S. is not now made up of the offspring of intermarried people to any significant extent.

Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the  complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it—some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents (Chs. 6–8), and the rather awesome hypocrisy of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans.

11. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87–123.

12. Barfield, T. J. (1993). The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

13. Support for this classification comes from several places in my trilogy on Judaism and in turn depends on the work of many scholars. Besides the sources in this preface, special note should be made of the following: Evolutionary history: MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; Marriage practices: MacDonald 1994 (Chs. 3 and 8); Marriage psychology: CofC (Chs. 4, 8); Position of women CofC (Ch. 4); Attitude toward outgroups and strangers: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Ch. 1); Social structure: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Chs. 1, 3–5), CofC (Chs. 6, 8, and passim as feature of Jewish intellectual movements); Socialization: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 5); Intellectual stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 6 and passim); Moral stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 6), CofC (Ch. 8).

14. Grossman et al. and Sagi et al., in I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), GrowingPoints in Attachment Theory and Research. Monographs for the Society forResearch in Child Development, 50(1–2), 233–275 . Sagi et al. suggest temperamental differences in stranger anxiety may be important because of the unusual intensity of the reactions of many of the Israeli infants. The tests were often terminated because of the intense crying of the infants. Sagi et al. find this pattern among both Kibbutz-reared and city-reared infants, although less strongly in the latter. However, the city-reared infants were subjected to somewhat different testing conditions: They were not subjected to a pre-test socialization episode with a stranger. Sagi et al. suggest that the socialization pre-test may have intensified reactions to strangers among the Kibbutz-reared babies, but they note that such pre-tests do not have this effect in samples of infants from Sweden and the U.S. This again highlights the difference between Israeli and European samples.

15. A halachic difference refers to a distinction based on Jewish religious law.

16. The following comment illustrates well the different mindset that many strongly identified Jews have toward America versus Israel:

While walking through the streets of Jerusalem, I feel Jewish identity is first and foremost about self-determination and, by extension, the security and power that comes with having a state. I am quite comfortable in Israel with the sight of soldiers standing with machine guns and the knowledge that even a fair number of the civilians around me are probably packing heat. The seminal event in my Zionist consciousness, despite my being born after 1967 and having serious misgivings about Israel’s control over the territories, is still the dramatic victory of a Jewish army in the Six-Day War. Put me in New York, however, and suddenly the National Rifle Association symbolizes this country’s darkest side. It’s as if my subconscious knows instinctively that the moment we land at JFK Airport, it becomes time to stash away those images of Israeli soldiers taking control of Jerusalem’s Old City, of Moshe Dayan standing at the Western Wall, and to replace them with the familiar photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching by the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (A. Eden, “Liberalism in Diaspora.” The Forward, Sept. 21, 2001)

17.www.adl.org/presrele/dirab%5F41/3396%5F41.asp

18.Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2001.

19. See, e.g., the ADL Policy Report on the prospects of immigration legislation in the George W. Bush administration and the 107th Congress: www.adl.org/issue%5Fgovernment/107/immigration.html.

20. In: S. S. Boyle (2001). The Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of GeorgeAntonius. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, p. 160. As recounted by Boyle, Sheean was hired by the Zionist publication, New Palestine, in 1929 to write about the progress of Zionism in that country. He went to Palestine, and after studying the situation, returned the money the Zionists had paid him. He then wrote a book (Personal History; New York: Literary Guild Country Life Press, 1935)—long out of print—describing his negative impressions of the Zionists. He noted, for example, “how they never can or will admit that anybody who disagrees with them is honest” (p. 160). This comment reflects the authoritarian exclusion of dissenters noted as a characteristic of Jewish intellectual and political movements in CofC (Ch. 6). His book was a commercial failure and he passed quietly into oblivion. The subject of Boyle’s book, George Antonius, was a Greek Orthodox Arab from what is today Lebanon. His book, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938) presented the Arab case in the Palestinian-Zionist dispute. The appendices to his book include the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of October 24, 1915, between Sharif Hussein (who authorized the Arab revolt against the Turks) and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt. The correspondence shows that the Arabs were promised independence in the whole area (including Palestine) after the war. Also in the appendices are the Hogarth Memorandum of January 1918 and the Declaration to the Seven of June 16, 1918, both of which were meant to reassure the Arabs that England would honor its earlier promises to them when the Arabs expressed concern after the Balfour Declaration. Britain kept these documents classified until Antonius published them in The Arab Awakening. Antonius was pushed out of the Palestine Mandate Administration by British Zionists and died broken and impoverished.

21.Daily Pilot, Newport Beach/ Costa Mesa, California, Feb. 28, 2000.

22. “Project Reminds Young Jews of Heritage.” The Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A19.

23. Steinlight tempers these remarks by noting the Jewish commitment to moral universalism, including the attraction to Marxism so characteristic of Jews during most of the 20th century. However, as indicated in Chapter 3, Jewish commitment to leftist universalism was always conditioned on whether leftist universalism conformed to perceived Jewish interests, and in fact Jewish leftist universalism has often functioned as little more than a weapon against the traditional bonds of cohesiveness of Western societies.

Kevin MacDonald

THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE:

AN EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS OF JEWISH INVOLVEMENT IN

 TWENTIETH-CENTURY

 INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL

 MOVEMENTS

KEVIN MACDONALD

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

The present & Amor fati

According to Epictetus, the goal of the discipline of desire was that we not be frustrated in our desires, nor fall into that which we had been trying to avoid. In order to realize this goal, we had to desire only that which depends upon us—that is, the moral good—and flee only from that which depends on us: in this case, moral evil. That which does not depend on us is the realm of the indifferent: we must not desire it, but we must not flee from it either, for if we do we risk “falling into what we are trying to avoid.” Epictetus, we noted, linked this attitude to our consent to Destiny.

Marcus Aurelius takes up this doctrine point for point, yet in his writings its implications and its consequences appear more clearly and explicitly. Above all, the discipline of desire in Marcus is related first and foremost to the way in which we are to greet the events which result from the overall movement of universal Nature, which are produced by what Marcus calls the “exterior cause” (VIII, 7):

Rational nature (that is, the nature peculiar to human beings) follows the path which is appropriate to it… if it has desires and aversions only for that which depends upon us, and if it greets with joy all that common Nature allots to it.

What is thus allotted to human nature is nothing other than the events which happen to it (III, 16, 3):

The proper characteristic of the good man is to love and to greet joyfully all those events which he encounters (ta sumbainonta), and which are linked to him by Destiny.

We have already seen that, for the Stoics, what is present for me is that which is currently happening to me: in other words, not merely my current actions, but also the present event with which I am confronted. Here again, as in the case of the present in general, it is my thought and my attention which singles out from the flux of things that which has meaning for me; at which point my inner discourse will declare that such-and-such an event is happening to me. Moreover—whether I know it or not—the overall movement of the universe, set in motion by divine Reason, has brought it about that I have been destined, from all eternity, to encounter such-and-such an event. This is why I have translated the word sumbainon (etymologically “that which goes together [with]”), which Marcus customarily uses to denote that which happens, by the phrase “the events which we encounter.” To be still more precise, one would have to translate this as “the event which adjusts itself to us,” but such an expression cannot always be used. This is, however, precisely the meaning which Marcus gives to the word sumbainon (V, 8, 3):

We say that events are fitting to us (sumbainein), just as masons say that the square stones they use in walls or in pyramids “fit each other” (sumbainein), when they are well-adapted to each other in a given combination.

The imagery of the construction of the edifice of the universe is reinforced by that of weaving. The interweaving of the woof and the warp was a traditional, archaic image, linked to the figure of the Moirai, who, as early as Homer, spun the destiny of each human being.11 The three Parcai, named Lachēsis, Clothō, and Atropos, appear—first in the Orphic Derveni papyrus,12 and then in Plato13 and the Stoics—as the mythical figures of the cosmic law which emanates from divine Reason. The following is a testimony to the Stoic doctrine:14

The Moirai (or “Parts”) are so named because of the process of separation (diamerismos) which they carry out: Clothō (“the spinner”), Lachēsis (“she who distributes the lots”), and Atropos (“the inflexible one”). Lachēsis is so called because she distributes the lots which individuals have received according to justice; Atropos [gets her name] because the division of the parts is unchangeable in any of its details, and is immutable since eternal time. Finally, Clothō is so named because the distribution takes place in accordance with Destiny, and that which occurs reaches its end in conformity with what she has spun.

Another testimony gives voice to approximately the same representations:15

The Moirai get their name from the fact that they distribute and assign things to each one of us…. Chrysippus suggests that the number of the Moirai corresponds to the three times in which all things have their circular movement, and by means of which all things achieve their completion. Lachēsis is so called because she attributes to each human being his or her destiny; Atropos is so called because of the immutable and unchanging character of the distribution; and Clothō is so called because of the fact that all things are woven and linked together, and that they can travel only one path, which is perfectly well-ordered.

The “events which I encounter,” and which “adjust themselves to me” have been woven together with me by Clothō, the figure of Destiny or universal Reason (IV, 34):

Abandon yourself willingly to Clothō; let her weave you together with whatever event she pleases.

Marcus Aurelius is fond of mentioning this interweaving:

This event which you are encountering… it happened to you; it was coordinated with you; and was in relation to you, since it was woven together with you, from as far back as the most ancient of causes (V, 8, 12).

So something has happened to you? Good! Every event that you encounter has been linked to you by Destiny, and has, since the beginning, been woven together with you from the All (IV, 26).

Whatever happens to you has been prepared for you in advance from all eternity, and the interweaving of causes has, since forever, woven together your substance and your encounter with this event (X, 5).

While this motif is strongly emphasized by Marcus, it is not absent from Epictetus’ sayings, as recorded by Arrian (I, 12, 25):

Will you be angry and unhappy with what Zeus has ordained? He defined and ordained these things together with the Moirai, who were present at your birth and wove your destiny.

For the Stoics, events were predicates, as we saw in the case of “walking,” which is present to me when “I am walking.” If, then, an event happens to me, this means that it has been produced by the universal totality of the causes which constitute the cosmos. The relationship between myself and such an event presupposes the entire universe, as well as the will of universal Reason. We shall have to examine later whether this will defines the event in all its details, or merely gives it an initial impulse. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that whether I am ill, or lose my child, or am the victim of an accident, it is the entire cosmos which is implicated in the event.

This interconnection or interweaving—the mutual implication of all things in all things—is one of Marcus’ favorite themes. For him, as for the Stoics in general, the cosmos is but a single living entity, endowed with a unique consciousness and will (IV, 40):

How all things cooperate to produce everything that is produced; how everything is linked and wound up together

in order to form a “sacred connection” (IV, 40; VI, 38; VII, 9).

Thus, each present moment, the event which I encounter within it, and my encounter with this event, imply and potentially contain all the movement of the universe. This notion is in agreement with the Stoic conception of reality as total mixture, or the interpenetration of all things within all things.16 Chrysippus used to speak of a drop of wine which first becomes mixed with the entire sea, and thence is extended to the whole world.17 Similar world-visions are not, moreover, out of date: Hubert Reeves, for example, speaks of E. Mach’s notion according to which “the whole universe is mysteriously present in each place and at each instant of the world.”18 I am not trying to claim that such representations are based upon science; rather, they are based upon an original, fundamental, existential experience, which can be expressed in poetic form, as it is in these verses by Francis Thompson:

All things

Near and far

Are linked to each other

In a hidden way

By an immortal power

So that you cannot pick a flower

Without disturbing a star.19

Here again, we encounter the fundamental intuition of the cohesion and coherence of reality with itself, an intuition which led the Stoics to perceive love of self and accord with oneself in each movement of a living being as much as in the movement of the universe as a whole, or in the perfection of the sage. This is what Marcus expresses in passages like the following (X, 21):

The Earth loves! She loves the rain! And the venerable Ether? It loves too! The World, too, loves to produce that which must occur. And I say to the World: I, too, love—along with you. Don’t we say: “such-and-such loves to happen”?

Everyday language, which could use the verb “to love” to signify “to be accustomed to,” is here congruent with mythology, which gives us to understand, in its allegorical way, that it is characteristic of the All to love itself. What Marcus is alluding to here is the grandiose image of the hieros gamos between the sky (or Ether) and the earth, such as it is described by Euripides:

The Earth loves! She loves the rain, when the waterless field, sterile with dryness, needs moisture. The venerable Sky, too, when filled with rain, loves to fall upon the earth, by the power of Aphrodite.20

This myth allows us to glimpse that such self-love is not the solitary, egoistic love of the Whole for itself, but rather the mutual love, within the Whole, of the parts for each other, of the parts for the Whole, and of the Whole for the parts. Between the parts and the Whole, there is a “harmony” or “co-respiration,” which puts them in accord with one another. Everything that happens to the part is useful for the Whole, and everything that is “prescribed” for each part is, almost in the medical sense of the term, “prescribed” (V, 8) for the health of the Whole, and consequently for all the other parts as well.

The discipline of desire therefore consists in replacing each event within the perspective of the Whole, and this is why it corresponds to the physical part of philosophy. To replace each event within the perspective of the Whole means to understand two things simultaneously: that I am encountering it, or that it is present to me, because it was destined for me by the Whole, but also that the Whole is present within it. Since such an event does not depend upon me, in itself it is indifferent, and we might therefore expect the Stoic to greet it with indifference. Indifference, however, does not mean coldness. On the contrary: since such an event is the expression of the love which the Whole has for itself, and since it is useful for and willed by the Whole, we too must want and love it. In this way, my will shall identify itself with the divine Will which has willed this event to happen. To be indifferent to indifferent things—that is, to things which do not depend on me—in fact means to make no difference between them: it means to love them equally, just as Nature or the Whole produces them with equal love. It is the Whole which, through and by me, loves itself, and it is up to me not to destroy the cohesion of the Whole, by refusing to accept such-and-such an event.

Marcus describes this feeling of loving consent to the will of the Whole and identification with the divine will in terms of the need to “find satisfaction” in the events which happen to us. He writes that we must “greet them joyfully,” “accept them with pleasure,” “love” them and “will” them. The Manual of Epictetus, as written by Arrian, expressed this same attitude in striking terms which encapsulate the entire discipline of desire (chap. 8):

Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.

This entire attitude is admirably summed up in Marcus’ prayer to the World (IV, 23):

All that is in accord with you is in accord with me, O World! Nothing which occurs at the right time for you comes too soon or too late for me. All that your seasons produce, O Nature, is fruit for me. It is from you that all things come; all things are within you, and all things move toward you.

This brings us back to the theme of the present. A particular event is not predestined for me and accorded with me only because it is harmonized with the World; rather, it is so because it occurs in this particular moment and no other. It occurs in accordance with the kairos (“right moment”), which, as the Greeks had always known, is unique. Therefore, that which is happening to me at this moment is happening at the right moment, in accordance with the necessary, methodical, and harmonious unfolding of all events, all of which occur at their proper time and season.

To will the event that is happening at this moment, and in this present instant, is to will the entire universe which has brought it about.

Amor fati

I have entitled this section “amor fati.” Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in Greek, obviously did not use these two Latin words; what is more, they are not, as far as I know, used by any Latin writer in antiquity. The phrase is Nietzsche’s, and my intention in alluding to the love of Destiny of which Nietzsche speaks is to help us better to understand, by means of analogies and contrasts, the spiritual attitude which, in Marcus, corresponds to the discipline of desire. Nietzsche writes, for example:

My formula for what is great in mankind is amor fati: not to wish for anything other than that which is; whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity. Not just to put up with the inevitable—much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary—but to love it.21

Everything that is necessary, when seen from above and from the perspective of the vast economy of the whole, is in itself equally useful. We must not only put up with it, but love it…. Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.22“To wish for nothing other than that which is": Marcus Aurelius could have said this, just as he could have concurred with the following:

The main question is not at all whether or not we are satisfied with ourselves, but whether, more generally, there is anything at all with which we are satisfied. Let us suppose we said Yes to one single instant: we have thereby said Yes not only to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing is sufficient unto itself—neither in ourselves, nor among things—and if, just one single time, our soul has vibrated and resonated with happiness, like a stretched cord, then it has taken all of eternity to bring about that single event. And, at that unique instant of our Yes, all eternity was accepted, saved, justified, and affirmed.23For Marcus, as for Epictetus, there is no link between this loving consent to the events which happen to us and the Stoic doctrine of the Eternal Return. This doctrine asserted that the world repeats itself eternally, for the rational Fire which spreads throughout the world is subject to a perpetual alternation of diastoles and systoles, which, in their succession, engender a series of periods all of which are unique, and during which the same events repeat themselves in a completely identical manner. For the Stoics, the ideas of Providence and Destiny, together with the concepts of the complete interpenetration of all the parts of the world, and of the loving accord between the Whole and all its parts, were enough to justify that attitude of loving acceptance in the face of all that comes from Nature which constitutes the discipline of desire. Nietzsche, by contrast, links the love of Destiny to the myth of the Eternal Return. To love Destiny thus means to want that what I am doing in this moment, as well as the way in which I live my life, should be eternally, identically repeated. It means to live any given instant in such a way that I want to relive again this instant I am now living, eternally. This is where Nietzsche’s amor fati takes on a highly idiosyncratic meaning:

The highest state which a philosopher can attain: to have a Dionysiac attitude toward existence. My formula for that is amor fati….

For this, we must conceive of the heretofore denied aspects of existence not only as necessary, but as desirable: and not only desirable with regard to the aspects which have been approved up until now (as their complements, for example, or as their presuppositions), but in themselves, as the aspects of existence which are more powerful, more fertile, and more true, in which its will expresses itself most clearly.24As we shall see, Marcus did indeed consider the repulsive aspects of existence as necessary complements or inevitable consequences of the initial will of Nature. Nietzsche, however, goes much further: in fact, an abyss appears between his views and those of Stoicism. Whereas the Stoic “yes” means a rational consent to the world, the Dionysiac affirmation of the world of which Nietzsche speaks is a “yes” given to irrationality, the blind cruelty of life, and the will to power which is beyond good and evil.

We have wandered far from Marcus; yet this detour has perhaps allowed us to arrive at a better definition of that consent to Destiny which is the essence of the discipline of desire.

As we have seen, the exercises of definition of the self and concentration on the present, together with our consent to the will of Nature as it is manifested in each event, raise our consciousness to a cosmic level. By consenting to the present event which is happening to me, in which the whole world is implied, I want that which universal Reason wants, and identify myself with it in my feeling of participation and of belonging to a Whole which transcends the limits of individuality. I feel a sensation of intimacy with the universe, and plunge myself into the immensity of the cosmos. One thinks of Blake’s verses:25To see the World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Thus the self qua will or liberty coincides with the will of universal Reason, or the logos which extends throughout all things. The self as guiding principle coincides with the guiding principle of the universe.

If, then, the self’s awareness is accompanied by a consent to events, it does not become isolated, like some tiny island, in the universe. On the contrary: it is opened up to the whole of cosmic becoming, to the extent that the self elevates itself from its limited situation and partial, restricted individual viewpoint, toward a universal perspective. Thus, my consciousness is dilated until it coincides with the dimensions of cosmic consciousness. In the presence of each event—no matter how banal—my vision now coincides with that of universal Reason.

When Marcus writes (IX, 6): “Your present inner disposition is enough for you, as long as it finds its joy within the present conjuncture of events,” the expression “is enough for you” has two meanings. In the first place, as we have seen, it means that we possess the whole of reality within this present instant. As Seneca said,26 at each present moment we can say, with God, “Everything belongs to me.” This, however, means that if my moral intentions are good in this present moment, and I am consequently happy, neither all the duration of life nor all eternity could bring me one iota more of happiness. In the words of Chrysippus:27 “If one has wisdom for one instant, he will be no less happy than he who possesses it for all eternity.” Elsewhere, Seneca28 writes: “The measure of the good is the same, although its duration may vary. Whether one draws a large circle or a small one does not depend on its shape, but on the surface which they enclose.” A circle is a circle, whether it is large or small. Similarly, moral good, when it is lived within the present moment, is an absolute of infinite value, which neither duration nor any other external factor can affect. Once again, I can and I must live the present which I am living at this moment as if it were the last moment of my life; for even if it is not followed by any other instant, I will be able, because of the absolute value of moral intention and of the love of the good which I have lived in this instant, to say in that very instant: I have realized my life, and have gotten everything I could have expected out of it.29 It is this that enables me to die. As Marcus says (XI, 1, 1):

The rational soul… attains its proper end wherever it achieves the limit of its life. It is not like the dance or the theater or other arts of that kind, in which all the action is incomplete if they are interrupted. On the contrary: the action of the rational soul, in each of its parts, and at whatever point one considers it, carries out for itself what it was planning fully and without fault, so that it can say, “I have reached my fulfillment.”

Whereas a dance or the reading of a poem reach their goal only when they are finished, moral activity reaches its goal in the very instant when it is accomplished. It is therefore entirely contained within the present moment, which is to say, within the unity of the moral intention which, in this very moment, animates my actions or my inner disposition. Once again, we note that the present instant can thus immediately open up the totality of being and of value. One thinks of the words of Wittgenstein: “If we understand by “eternity” not an infinite temporal duration, but a lack of temporality, then he who lives within the present lives eternally.”30

From:

The Inner Citadel The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Pierre Hadot 

Wilderness Song

 

Wilderness Song

I have been one who loved the wilderness:
Swaggered and softly crept between the mountain peaks;
I listened long to the sea's brave music;
I sang my songs above the shriek of desert winds.
On canyon trails when warm night winds were blowing,
Blowing, and sighing gently through the star-tipped pines,
Musing, I walked behind my placid burro.
While water rushed and broke on pointed rocks below.
I have known a green sea's heaving; I have loved
Red rocks and twisted trees and cloudless turquoise skies,
Slow sunny clouds, and red sand blowing.
I have felt the rain and slept behind the waterfall.
In cool sweet grasses I have lain and heard
The ghostly murmur of regretful winds In aspen glades, where rustling silver leaves
Whisper wild sorrows to the green-gold solitudes.
I have watched the shadowed clouds pile high;
Singing I rode to meet the splendid, shouting storm
And fought its fury till the hidden sun
Foundered in darkness, and the lightning heard my song.
Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;
That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;
Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;
Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!
Always I shall be one who loves the wilderness:
Swaggers and softly creeps between the mountain peaks;
I shall listen long to the sea's brave music;
I shall sing my song above the shriek of desert winds.

Pledge to the Wind

Onward from vast uncharted spaces,
Forward through timeless voids,
Into all of us surges and races
The measureless might of the wind.
Strongly sweeping from open plains.
Keen and pure from mountain heights,
Freshly blowing after rains,
It welds itself into our souls.
In the steep silence of thin blue air.
High on a lonely cliff-ledge,
Where the air has a clear, clean rarity,
I give to the wind . . . my pledge:
"By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eye.
By the skill of my fingers, I swear.
As long as life dwells in me, never will I
Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind.
I will feel the wind's buoyancy until I die;
I will work with the wind's exhilaration;
I will search for its purity; and never will I
Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind."
Here in the utter stillness,
High on a lonely cliff-ledge.
Where the air is trembling with lightning,
I have given the wind my pledge.
**
The Indian Council Cave

Wand'ring among the painted rocks one day
I saw some ancient, moss-grown boulders there
That leaned together in a friendly way
And formed a cave that might have housed a hear.
But on the high arched ceiling were designs
And symbols that some Indian had drawn;
A rising sun, marked out in faint red lines,
A row of running wolves, a deerand fawn.
Bones from forgotten feasts wereon the floor,
Picked clean by men who sataround a fire
Discussing and deciding peace or war
Or chanting solemn prayers, in gay attire.
The cave is empty now, the paintings fade . . .
And here the silent centuries invade.

—Everett Ruess, published in The American Indian, April 1929
-Poem by Everett Ruess
Quote from the book Everett Ruess, a vagabond for beauty