Love in the Forest

 Love in the Forest

I , too, had loved someone. Love had fulfilled its function: all else had disappeared. She was a pale, warm girl who lives in the forests of Landes. We would take walks along the pathways in the evening. The pine trees planted 150 years earlier had colonized the marshland, flourished in the hinterland behind the dunes, and exuded a warm, acrid smell: the sweat of the earth. We walked effortlessly along the rubbery ribbons of the pathways. “People should live at the pace of the Sioux,” she would say. We surprised animals, a bird, a roe deer. A snake slithered away. The man of antiquity—muscles of chiseled marble and vacant eyes—saw such animal appearances as the apparition of a god.

“It’s injured and can’t run away, she’s spotted it, it’s going to die.” For months I heard phrases like this. That evening, it was a spider—“a wolf spider,” she informed me—had come upon a longhorn beetle behind a frond of fern. “She’s going to inject it with a lethal dose, she’s going to devour it.” Like Munier, she knew such things. Who had instilled these insights into her? It was the wisdom of the ancients. A knowledge of nature flourishes in certain creatures who have never studied it. They are seers, they perceive the intricate structure of things while scientists are focused on a single part of the edifice.

She would read the hedgerows. She understood birds and insects. When the beachgrass blossomed, she would say, “It is the orison of the flower to its god the sun.” She would save ants that got swept away by a stream, snails caught in brambles, birds with broken wings. Faced with a scarab beetle, she would say: “It is a heraldic element, it deserves our respect, it is at one with nature.” One day, in Paris, a sparrow landed on her head and I wondered whether I was worthy of this woman whom birds chose as a perch. She was a priestess; I followed her.

We lived in the forests at night. She had a stud farm in Landes that spanned a dozen hectares on the western slopes of a dirt track whose deep rut seemed to her the guarantee of a covert life. On the outskirts of the forest, she had built a pine cabin. A large pond was the principal axis of the property. There, mallard ducks rested, and horses came to drink. All around, dense grasses drilled through the sand trampled by the animals. All of the comforts of the cabin: a stove, some books, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, all the necessities for making coffee, and an awning under which to drink it, and a tack room that smelled of pine resin. This kingdom was guarded by a sharp-eared Beauceron sheepdog, twitchy as the trigger on a Beretta 92, but friendly to those who were polite. He would have ripped the throat out of an intruder. I managed to escape with my life.

Sometimes, we would sit on the dunes. The ocean raged and pounded, while the waves crashed, indefatigable. “There must be some ancient quarrel between the sea and the land.” I used to say such things, she did not listen.

Nose buried in her hair, which smelled of boxwood, I allowed her to spin out her theories. Man had appeared on earth some millions of years ago. He had arrived uninvited, after the table had been set, the forests unfurled, the beasts frolicking. The Neolithic revolution, like all revolutions, fomented the Terror. Man declared himself head of the politburo of all living things, hoisted himself to the top rung of the ladder and made up screeds of dogma to legitimize his dominion. All in defense of the same cause: himself. “Man is God’s hangover!” I would say. She did not like these pronouncements. She accused me of launching damp squibs.

•   •   •It was she who first introduced me to the idea I explained to Léo amid the sand dunes of Tibet. Animals, plants, single-cell life forms and the neocortex are all fractals of the same poem. She talked to me about the primordial soup: four and a half billion years ago, a principal matter had existed, churning in the waters. The whole antedated the parts. From this prebiotic broth, something emerged. A separation occurred, leading to a branching of organic forms of increasing complexity. She worshipped all living things as a shard of the mirror. She would pick up a fox’s tooth, a heron’s feather, a cuttlefish bone, and whisper as she contemplated each shard: “We proceed from the Same.”

Kneeling in the dunes, she would say: “She is going back to find the column, she was drawn to the sap of the stonecrop, the others missed it.”

This time it was an ant rejoining its column after a detour via a patch of stonecrop. Where did she get her infinite tenderness for the minutiae of animal life? “From their willingness to do things properly,” she would say, “their preciseness. Humans aren’t conscientious.”

In summer, the sky was clear. The wind churned the sea, a cloud appeared from the eddies. The air was warm, the sea wild, the sand soft. On the beach, human bodies lay supine. French people had grown fat. Too much screen time? Since the sixties, societies had spent their lives sitting. Since the cybernetic mutation, images flickered in front of motionless bodies.

An airplane would fly past trailing a banner advertising an online dating site. “Imagine the pilot flying over the beach and seeing his wife lying next to some guy she met on that site,” I would say.

She was staring at the gulls surfing the wind, riding the crest, framed by the sunlight.

We would walk back to the cabin along smooth paths. Her hair now smelled of candle wax. To her, the rustle of the trees was filled with meaning. The leaves were an alphabet. “Birds don’t sing out of vanity,” she would say. “They sing patriotic anthems or serenades: this is my home; I love you.” We would arrive back at the cabin and she would uncork a wine from the Loire, of sands and mists. I drank greedily, the red venom swelling my veins. I could feel night welling inside me. A barn owl screeched. “I know that owl, it lives around here, the spirit of night, the commander-in-chief of dead trees.” This was one of her obsessions: re-creating a classification of living creatures, not according to Linnaean taxonomy, but according to a transversal taxonomy bringing together plants and animals according to their disposition. Thus, there was the spirit of voracity (shared by sharks and the carnivorous plants), the spirit of cooperation (a quality shared by jumping spiders and kangaroos), the spirit of longevity (the hallmark of the tortoise or the sequoia), of concealment (exemplified by the chameleon and the stick insect). It did not matter that these creatures did not belong to the same biological phylum so long as they shared the same skills. Hence, she concluded, a cuckoo and a flukeworm, through their opportunism and their intimate knowledge of their victims, were more closely related to each other than to certain members of the same family. To her, the living world was a panoply of stratagems, for war, for love and for locomotion.

She would go out to stable the horses. Unhurried, clear and precise, she was a Pre-Raphaelite vision as she walked beneath the moon, followed by her cat, by a goose, by horses with no halters, by her dog. All that was missing beneath the starry vault was a leopard. They glided through the darkness, heads held high, without a rustle or a sound, without touching, perfectly aligned and perfectly distanced, knowing where they were headed. An orderly troop. The animals stirred like springs at the slightest movement by their mistress. She was a sister of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she believed in God, she would have joined an order of poverty and death, a mystical nocturnal sisterhood that communicated with God without clerical intercession. In fact, her communion with the animals was a prayer.

I lost her. She rejected me because I refused to give myself over body and soul to the love of nature. We would have lived in a demesne, in the deep forest, a cabin or a ruin, devoted to the contemplation of animals. The dream dissolved and I watched her walk away as softly as she had come, flanked by her animals, into the forest of the night. I went on my way, I traveled far and wide, leaping from plane to train, going from conference to conference, bleating (in a self-important tone) that humankind would do well to stop rushing around the globe. I rushed around the globe and each time I encountered an animal, it was her vanished face I saw. I followed her everywhere. When Munier first talked to me about the snow leopard on the banks of the Moselle, he could not know that he was suggesting that I go and find her.

If I were to encounter the animal, my only love would appear, embodied in the snow leopard. I offered up all my apparitions to her ravaged memory.

From: The Art of Patience

By Sylvian Tesson

Introduction to Germanys War The Origins, Aftermath Atrocities of World War II by John Wear

Hermann Goering was right...

Introduction • War Is Hell

My father was a pilot in 50 bombing missions for the U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II. When I was a boy I asked him if he had killed anyone during the war. He replied, “I hope I didn’t kill anyone.” In regard to his participation in the Normandy invasion, he said: “You cannot imagine how big of an operation that was. People on the ground were being killed!” My father repeatedly stated he hated war and that “War is hell.” He also expressed his opinion that the Germans had fought extraordinarily hard during the war.

I have always wondered how wars have continuously existed throughout history when virtually everyone agrees with my father that “War is hell.” In regard to the origin of World War II, a fascinating discussion occurred during the Nuremberg trials between American psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. On the evening of April 18, 1946, in Goering’s jail cell, Dr. Gilbert expressed his belief that the common people are not very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction. Goering responded:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.[1] Dr. Gilbert told Goering that there is one difference. Gilbert said: “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”

Goering responded: “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”[2]

Hermann Goering was speaking the truth to Dr. Gilbert. The common people of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan and all other countries in the world were strongly against war. World War II was instigated only because the leaders of some countries had wanted war and brought the people to their bidding. The question is: Which countries had leaders who wanted to bring about World War II?

Dr. Gilbert stated that the leaders of Germany were the ones who had wanted war.3 Goering emphatically denied that he and Adolf Hitler had wanted war. Most historians would agree with Dr. Gilbert’s statement and reject Goering’s denial as self-serving, absurd, and irresponsible. However, as we will discuss in Part 1 of this book, the historical record clearly shows that Goering was right. Hitler had wanted to free Germany from the Treaty of Versailles, but had never wanted to plunge Germany into World War II.

This book discusses the origins, aftermath, and atrocities of World War II from a German perspective. It is in essence Germany’s side of the story. This book is designed to counteract the one-sided bias of establishment historians against Germany in regard to World War II. Most establishment historians, for example, state that it is self-evident that Adolf Hitler and Germany started World War II. However, an objective review of the origins of World War II reveals that the Allied leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain were primarily responsible for starting and prolonging the war.

Part I of this book documents that: 1) Adolf Hitler was forced to invade the Soviet Union to preempt a Soviet takeover of Europe; 2) U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt repeatedly told the American public he was committed to peace while making every effort to involve the United States in war; and 3) Germany was forced to fight Great Britain even though Hitler had always wanted peace with Britain and regarded the two countries as natural allies. The leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain were all committed to the complete destruction of Germany. The

Allied leaders purposely sacrificed the lives of tens of millions of people and practiced uncivilized warfare to accomplish their goal.

The Allies also intentionally allowed the Soviet Union to gain control of Eastern Europe. Thus, a war allegedly fought for freedom and democracy turned into a totalitarian nightmare for the people of the Eastern European nations.

Part II of this book reports the Allied mass murder of the German people after the end of World War II. Although denied by almost all historians, the Western Allies murdered approximately 1 million German prisoners of war through intentional starvation and exposure to the elements. The Allies also carried out the largest forced population transfer in history by expelling approximately 16 million ethnic Germans from their homes after the end of the war. Probably a minimum 2.1 million of these German expellees died in what was supposed to be an “orderly and humane” expulsion. Finally, the Allies murdered millions of additional Germans through starvation after the end of World War II.

Allied soldiers also raped an estimated 2 million German women during and after World War II. This represents more rapes against a defeated enemy than any other war in history. The Allies conducted a brutal denazification program designed to make the German people feel guilty about their war effort. Hundreds of German scientists were also compelled to emigrate by the victors, and German patents, technological advances, and other property were confiscated by the Allies. Millions of Germans were also sent to the Soviet Union and other Allied nations to be used as slave labor. Large numbers of these German slave laborers did not survive their captivity. The Allied postwar treatment of Germany is surely one of the most criminal, murderous, and unreported atrocities in world history.

The real and alleged atrocities committed by Germany during World War II are discussed in Part III of this book. Germany engaged in vicious anti-partisan activity and conducted an extensive euthanasia program against its own people during the war. Illegal medical experimentation and executions were also committed by Germany in its concentration camps. However, National Socialist Germany did not have a policy of genocide against the Jewish people during the war. Although hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and other natural causes in the German concentration camps, Germany did not murder millions of Jews as claimed by most historians.
Also, while almost never reported by establishment historians, the Allies murdered tens of thousands of Germans in former German concentration camps after the end of World War II.

This book does not pretend to be a definitive or comprehensive history of the origins, aftermath and atrocities of World War II. The subject matter is far too broad for one book. Instead, it is written to summarize in an objective manner the highly successful Allied plan to conquer, control, and mass murder the German people. This book also exposes the Allied falsification and exaggeration of German atrocities during World War II. My hope is that this book will open up a debate concerning these historical events and perhaps stimulate others to investigate more deeply into these long-suppressed subjects.

Footnotes

[1] Gilbert, Gustave M., Nuremberg Diary, New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947, p. 278.
[2] Ibid., pp. 278-279.
[3] Ibid., pp. 282, 364.

from the book Germanys War The Origins, Aftermath  Atrocities of World War II by John Wear

Hitler told the truth, Roosevelt lied - In 1940, this was far more than the trusting American public could accept

The Germans seized a mass of documents from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs when they invaded Warsaw in late September 1939. The documents were seized when a German SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular German army. Von Kuensberg’s men took control of the Polish Foreign Ministry just as Ministry officials were in the process of burning incriminating documents.

These documents clearly establish Roosevelt’s crucial role in planning and instigating World War II. They also reveal the forces behind President Roosevelt that pushed for war.[12] Some of the secret Polish documents were first published in the United States as The German White Paper. Probably the most revealing document in the collection is a secret report dated Jan. 12, 1939, by Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to the United States. This report discusses the domestic situation in the United States. I quote Ambassador Potocki’s report in full:

There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible— above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited—this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.

At the present moment most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and National Socialism as the greatest evil and greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with a great many words and with most various calumnies incite the public. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.

It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely eliminated. Soviet Russia, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way that it would seem that the Soviet Union were cooperating with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathies of the American public are completely on the side of Red Spain.

This propaganda, this war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is inevitable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America also must take an active part in order to defend the slogans of liberty and democracy in the world. President Roosevelt was the first one to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose; first he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from difficult and intricate domestic problems, especially from the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors concerning dangers threatening Europe, he wanted to induce the American people to accept an enormous armament program which far exceeds United States defense requirements.

Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is growing worse constantly. The unemployed today already number 12 million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken place. But how long this government aid can be kept up it is difficult to predict today.

The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.

As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever player of politics and a connoisseur of American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation in order to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple.

One needed, on the one hand, to enhance the war menace overhanging the world on account of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by talking about the attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He described it as the capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.

The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German National Socialism is further kindled by the brutal attitude against the Jews in Germany and by the émigré problem. In this action Jewish intellectuals participated; for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and others who are personal friends of Roosevelt. They want the president to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-mongers. These groups, people who want to pose as representatives of “Americanism” and “defenders of democracy” in  the last analysis, are connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.

For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to put the president of the United States at this “ideal” post of champion of human rights, was a clever move. In this manner they created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a mysterious manner.

Roosevelt has been forcing the foundation for vitalizing American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is extremely convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is ever growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending faith and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.[13]

On Jan. 16, 1939, Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry a conversation he had with American Ambassador William Bullitt. Bullitt was in Washington on a brief leave of absence from Paris. Potocki reported that Bullitt stated that the main objectives of the Roosevelt administration were:

“1) The vitalizing foreign policy, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, severely and unambiguously condemns totalitarian countries. 2) The United States preparation for war on sea, land and air which will be carried out at an accelerated speed and will consume the colossal sum of $1.250 million. 3) It is the decided opinion of the president that France and Britain must put an end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not let themselves in for any discussions aiming at any kind of territorial changes. 4) They have the moral assurance that the United States will leave the policy of isolation and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth of money and raw materials at their disposal.”[14]

Juliusz (Jules) Lukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador to France, sent a top secret report from Paris to the Polish Foreign Ministry at the beginning of 58 February 1939. This report outlines the U.S. policy toward Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:

A week ago, the ambassador of the United States, W. Bullitt, returned to Paris after having spent three months holiday in America. Meanwhile, I had two conversations with him which enable me to inform Monsieur Minister on his views regarding the European situation and to give a survey of Washington’s policy….

The international situation is regarded by official quarters as extremely serious and being in danger of armed conflict.

Competent quarters are of the opinion that if war should break out between Britain and France on the one hand and Germany and Italy on the other, and Britain and France should be defeated, the Germans would become dangerous to the realistic interests of the United States on the American continent. For this reason, one can foresee right from the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally after some time had elapsed after the beginning of the war.

Ambassador Bullitt expressed this as follows: “Should war break out we shall certainly not take part in it at the beginning, but we shall end it.”[15]

On March 7, 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent another remarkably perceptive report on Roosevelt’s foreign policy to the Polish government. I quote Potocki’s secret report in full:

The foreign policy of the United States right now concerns not only the government, but the entire American public as well. The most important elements are the public statements of President Roosevelt. In almost every public speech he refers more or less explicitly to the necessity of activating foreign policy against the chaos of views and ideologies in Europe. These statements are picked up by the press and then cleverly filtered into the minds of average Americans in such a way as to strengthen their already formed opinions. The same theme is constantly repeated, namely, the danger of war in Europe and saving the democracies from inundation by enemy fascism. In all of these public statements there is normally only a single theme, that is, the danger from Nazism and Nazi Germany to world peace.

As a result of these speeches, the public is called upon to support rearmament and the spending of enormous sums for the navy and the air force. The unmistakable idea behind this is that in case of an armed conflict the United States cannot stay out but must take an active part in the maneuvers. As a result of the effective speeches of President Roosevelt, which are supported by the press, the American public is today being conscientiously manipulated to hate everything that smacks of totalitarianism and fascism. But it is interesting that the USSR is not included in all of this. The American public considers Russia more in the camp of the democratic states. This was also the case during the Spanish civil war when the so-called Loyalists were regarded as defenders of the democratic idea.

The State Department operates without attracting a great deal of attention, although it is known that Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull and President Roosevelt swear allegiance to the same ideas.
However, Hull shows more reserve than Roosevelt, and he loves to make a distinction between Nazism and Chancellor Hitler on the one hand, and the German people on the other. He considers this form of dictatorial government a temporary “necessary evil.” In contrast, the State Department is unbelievably interested in the USSR and its internal situation and openly worries itself over its weaknesses and decline. The main reason for the United States interest in the Russians is the situation in the Far East. The current government would be glad to see the Red Army emerge as victor in a conflict with Japan. That’s why the sympathies of the government are clearly on the side of China, which recently received considerable financial aid amounting to $25 million.

Eager attention is given to all information from the diplomatic posts as well as to the special emissaries of the president who serve as ambassadors of the United States. The president frequently calls his representatives from abroad to Washington for personal exchanges of views and to give them special information and instructions. The arrival of the envoys and ambassadors is always shrouded in secrecy and very little surfaces in the press about the results of their visits. The State Department also takes care to avoid giving out any kind of information about the course of these interviews.

The practical way in which the president makes foreign policy is most effective. He gives personal instructions to his representatives abroad, most of whom are his personal friends. In this way the United States is led down a dangerous path in world politics with the explicit intention of abandoning the comfortable policy of isolation. The president regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own personal ambition. He listens carefully and happily to his echo in the other capitals of the world. In domestic as well as foreign policy, the Congress of the United States is the only object that stands in the way of the president and his government in carrying out his decisions quickly and ambitiously. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Constitution of the United States gave the highest prerogatives to the American parliament which may criticize or reject the law of the White House.

The foreign policy of President Roosevelt has recently been the subject of intense discussion in the lower house and in the Senate, and this has caused excitement. The so-called Isolationists, of whom there are many in both houses, have come out strongly against the president. The representatives and the senators were especially upset over the remarks of the president, which were published in the press, in which he said that the borders of the United States lie on the Rhine. But President Roosevelt is a superb political player and understands completely the power of the American parliament. He has his own people there, and he knows how to withdraw from an uncomfortable situation at the right moment.

Very intelligently and cleverly he ties together the question of foreign policy with the issues of American rearmament. He particularly stresses the necessity of spending enormous sums in order to maintain a defensive peace. He says specifically that the United States is not arming in order to intervene or to go to the aid of England or France in case of war, but because of the need to show strength and military preparedness in case of an armed conict in Europe. In his view this conflict is becoming ever more acute and is completely unavoidable.

Since the issue is presented this way, the houses of Congress have no cause to object. To the contrary, the houses accepted an armament program of more than 1 billion dollars. (The normal budget is $550 million, the emergency $552 million.). However, under the cloak of a rearmament policy, FDR continues to push forward his foreign policy, which unofficially shows the world that in case of war the United States will come out on the side of the democratic states with all military and financial power.

In conclusion it can be said that the technical and moral preparation of the American people for participation in a war—if one should break out in Europe—is proceeding rapidly. It appears that the United States will come to the aid of France and Great Britain with all its resources right from the beginning. However, I know the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the opinion that the possibility that America will enter the war as in 1917 is not great. 

That’s because the majority of the states in the Midwest and West, where the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at all costs. They remember the declaration of the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of unpaid billions which the European states still owe America.[16]

These secret Polish reports were written by top level Polish ambassadors who were not necessarily friendly to Germany. However, they understood the realities of European politics far better than people who made foreign policy in the United States. The Polish ambassadors realized that behind all of their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, the Jewish leaders in the United States who agitated for war against Germany were deceptively advancing their own interests.

There is no question that the secret documents taken from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, “Some months ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic.”[17] William H. Chamberlain wrote, “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[18] Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also stated, “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[19] Edward Raczynski, the Polish ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, conf i rmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on June 20, 1940: “The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Lukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies.”[20] 

The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Lukasiewicz published in 1970 in Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Lukasiewicz was the Polish ambassador to Paris who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. 

Jedrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine, and quoted from several of them.

Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confimed the authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents.[21] 

The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front page headline coverage.[22] 

However, the impact of the released documents was far less than the German government had hoped for. Leading U.S. government officials emphatically denounced the documents as not being authentic. William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador who was especially incriminated by the documents, stated, “I have never made to anyone the statements attributed to me.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounced the documents by stating: “I may say most emphatically that neither I nor any of my associates in the Department of State have ever heard of any such conversations as those alleged, nor do we give them the slightest credence. The statements alleged have not represented in any way at any time the thought or the policy of the American government.”[23] American newspapers stressed these high-level denials in reporting the release of the Polish documents.

These categorical denials by high-level U.S. government officials almost completely eliminated the effect of the secret Polish documents. The vast majority of the American people in 1940 trusted their elected political leaders to tell the truth. If the Polish documents were in fact authentic and 64 genuine, this would mean that President Roosevelt and his representatives had lied to the American public, while the German government told the truth. In 1940, this was far more than the trusting American public could accept.

From: Germany's War The Origins, Aftermath and Atrocities of World War II John Wear

Lord, what have we done that they must sin so!

 In the street, crowds were waiting for those who were marched out of their prisons to remove the barricades. Eager eyes watched from the windows. No one can tell how many turned away in shame and horror—there must have been some, and probably their number was large enough. But the masses in the streets knew what they wanted—and they had come equipped with everything their aroused passions might desire, from hot pitch to garden shears. 

So began a day as evil as any known to history. They were human beings who in the streets and squares* of Prague grabbed Germans—and not only SS men—drenched them with gasoline, strung them up with their feet uppermost, set them on fire, and watched their agony, prolonged by the fact that in their position the rising heat and smoke did not suffocate them. 

They were human beings who tied German men and women together with barbed wire, shot into the bundles, and rolled them down into the Moldau River—who drowned German children in the water troughs in the streets, and threw women and children from the windows. 

* The German author mentions specifically Wenceslaus Square (Vaclavske Namesti, or Wenzelsplatz), Charles Square (Karlovo Namesti, or Karlsplatz), and Rittergasse, or Knights' Lane. (Translator's note.)

They beat every German until he lay still on the ground, forced naked women to remove the barricades, cut the tendons of their heels, and laughed at their writhing. Others they kicked to death. And yet these acts were only a few among many compared to which a simple shooting—like that accorded to the several hundred boys of the Adolf Hitler School—seemed a special privilege. 

This was the beginning. Prague set the example for the entire country, for every town and village throughout Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland where there were Germans. A tidal wave of torture and rape, murder and expulsion rose up in May of 1945 and ebbed through months and years until the last German had fled the country or died in prison—all but those few who, expropriated and disenfranchised, were retained because of some irreplaceable ex-pert knowledge. 

Later generations may judge these events no worse than the destruction or expulsion of the Jews of Germany. They may find that the destruction of the political freedom of the Czechs, and the horror of Lidice, called for such an explosion of hatred and revenge. And they must not forget the millions of Czechs who stood apart—who had to fear that they themselves might fall victim to the aroused masses if they said a single word of decency; nor the thousands and thousands of Czechs who even in the darkest days of the storm helped German refugees on their flight with food and clothing. 

We of this generation cannot hope to achieve a full understanding. The best we may hope is that these events did not implant in some hearts a still more cruel hatred and desire for revenge. 

In the evening of May 20, Pastor Karl Seifert and some elderly peasants were standing on the banks of the Elbe River, about fifteen miles upstream from the city of Dresden. The Soviet occupation commander of their little Saxonian village had given them permission to bury the corpses that the river cast ashore here day after day. 

They came floating down from Czechoslovakia, women and children and old men and soldiers. Thousands floated past— but for those who were stranded here, the pastor and his men opened a grave, and buried them and said a prayer. 

The river had brought the bundles tied with barbed wire, and corpses that had lost their tongues, their eyes, their breasts. But this evening, the river brought a wooden bedstead, floating like a raft, to which a family, children and all, had been nailed with long spikes. The men pulled the spikes out of the children's hands, and the pastor tried to say to him-self the words he had said so often in his heart when the horror seemed too great: "Lord, what have we done that they must sin so!" But tonight the words would not come. 

All he could say was: "Lord, have mercy on their souls !"

From: Defeat in the East

Russia Conquers—January to May 1945 by Juergen Thorwald

From: The Myth of Male Power.

 THE PMS DEFENSE (“MY BODY. NO CHOICE”)

 In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12

 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested.

 In the 1970s, then, feminists were saying, “My body, my choice.” By the ‘80s and ‘90s, they were saying, “ ‘My body, my choice’ if that increases my freedom to kill,” and “ ‘My body, no choice’ if that increases my freedom to kill.”

Ms. magazine justified these contradictions with, “Well, each woman is different.”15 True. But PMS as a legal defense for murder is sexism against women waiting to happen. Why? If a woman could murder while under the influence of PMS, couldn’t she be a reckless driver while under the influence . . . and if she doesn’t know when she is under the influence, doesn’t this become a reason not to let women drive? We are back to women as children.

 The “hormones affect some women more than others” excuse allows one woman to apply for an executive position and say, “Hire me—PMS doesn’t affect me,” while another murders and says, “Free me—PMS affects me.” It also allows a woman to get a job as an executive, murder later, and say, with legal clout, “Free me—PMS just started affecting me.” If raging hormones continue to be a legal defense for females who murder, it will soon be a legitimate question for female employment. Discrimination for women begets discrimination against women.

 The PMS Defense also paves the way for the TP Defense—the Testosterone Poisoning Defense. If women can murder and claim PMS, why can’t men rape and claim testosterone poisoning? The solution? Punish the crime—with female or male hormones as only a minor mitigating factor.

 III. THE HUSBAND DEFENSE

 The film I Love You to Death was based on the true story of a woman who tried to kill her husband when she discovered he had been unfaithful. She and her mom tried to poison him, then hired muggers to beat him and shoot him through the head. A fluke led to their being caught and sent to jail. Miraculously, the husband survived.

 The husband’s first response? Soon after he recovered, he informed authorities that he would not press charges. His second response? He defended his wife’s attempts to kill him. He felt so guilty being sexually “unfaithful” that he thanked his wife! He then reproposed to her. She verbally abused him, then accepted.

I Love You to Death was a true story produced as a comedy. Imagine the protests if a true story of a husband attempting to murder his wife was produced as a comedy.

 Is this Husband Defense an isolated example? No. You won’t believe this one. . . . The headline summarizes it: “Woman Who Shot Mate 5 Times Gets Probation.”16

 When Jennifer Eidenschink and her husband, Steven, separated, Jennifer bought a gun. She invited Steven over to remove a deer head from the wall, and then, while his hands were occupied, she unloaded all eight shots from her .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol.17 Five shots entered him—three in the abdomen.

 Steven, an athlete, suffered irreparable nerve damage and a permanent limp that would prevent him from playing the sports that meant so much to him. Jennifer said he had abused her. But because Steven survived, he was able to present evidence that made her acknowledge she was lying.18 The Dane County Court of Wisconsin did not sentence her to a single day in jail or prison . . . just counseling and two and one half weeks of voluntary service. For attempted murder. The judge was influenced by two things: the children’s needs for their mother, and Steven’s testimony on his wife’s behalf.19 But that’s only the beginning. . . .

 When Steven recovered, he moved back in with his wife—just like in the movie! Oh yes, the state did order Jennifer to pay $22,000 for her husband’s medical bills. But Jennifer was not working. Guess who paid his wife’s bill for shooting him?

 It’s easy to think, “Oh, my God, they deserve each other!” But something else is going on here. I call this the Husband Defense because I have yet to hear of a wife providing the legal defense for a husband who premeditated her murder.

 The Husband Defense is quintessential learned helplessness. When women display even a fraction of this learned helplessness, we recognize it not only as a disease but as a disease that overpowers her to such a degree that it can now be used as a defense to kill a man and go free. When a man experiences this learned helplessness, he can never use it to get away with trying to kill her, only to defend her for trying to kill him. It works like this . . .

From: The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell 

Lombroso on intelligence in women

Compared to male intelligence, female intelligence is deficient primarily in creative power.

Genius

This deficiency reveals itself immediately in the absence of female geniuses. There is no lack of names of illustrious women: in poetry, Sappho, Corinna, Telesilla, Browning, David John, Gauthier, Ackermann; in literature, Eliot, Sand, Stern, DeStael in art, Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraino, Sirani; in science, Sommerville, Royer, Tarnowsky, Germain. Yet it is clear that we are far from the greatness of male geniuses such as Shakespeare, Balzac, Aristotle, Newton, Michelangelo. With respect to the frequency of geniuses in the two sexes, the man’s superiority is widely recognized as immense.

Some, such as Sagnol,h attribute this inferiority to social conditions, especially to enforced ignorance in which woman is held and her lack of opportunity for intellectual labor. But women’s ignorance is not in fact as general as some think. In the 1500s in Italy and in the first century of the Roman Empire, upper-class women received the same education as men; and in the French aristocracy of the last century, women were well educated and attended lectures by Lavoisier, Cuvier, and so on, and so on. Yet even under these favorable conditions no genius appeared. As for environmental difficulties, these did not impede Browning or Sommerville from emerging; and they are by no means as large as those that an impoverished male genius encounters. Yet from males of the lower classes geniuses emerge more often than from women, even women of the wealthy classes.

Moreover, as I have already demonstrated,51 women of genius frequently have masculine appearances. Female genius can be explained as Darwin explained the coloration of certain female birds that resemble the males of their species: by a confusion of secondary sexual characteristics produced by a mismatch of paternal and maternal heredity. One need only look at pictures of women of genius of our day to realize that they seem to be men in disguise.

Lack of Originality/Monotony

While woman is barred from creating great things by her lack of genius, she is also less adapted than man to the minor productions at which average men succeed. This is due to her lack of originality, which is overdeveloped in the man of genius and found in more modest proportions in the average man. In fact, women have no particular talent for any art, science, or profession. They write, paint, embroider, sing; they move from dressmaking to millinery to being florists, good at everything and at nothing; but only rarely do they carry the stamp of true origi nality in any branch of work. This is the effect of a lesser differentiation in their brain functioning.

Automatic Types of Intelligence

Woman’s lack of creative power is definitively demonstrated by the distinctly automatic nature of her most typical form of intelligence. This is her intuition, which is specifically adapted to discovering the feelings and thoughts of people. “Women,” writes Spencer, “have another ability that is susceptible to cultivation and development: that of quickly perceiving the mental state of the people who surround them. Generally this particular gift consists of a true intuition which is not based on any specific logic” (op. cit.).52 Intuition is psychological and a type of instinct; it also appears, though less strongly, in children and in animals such as the dog. It calls up from the well of hereditary unconsciousness images that are pleasing or repulsive according to their associations with the experiences of her ancestors.

Logical Sentiments

All this demonstrates that female intelligence is deficient in creative power. This phenomenon can be clarified by studying what Wundt calls the logical sentiments: those which accompany the processes of thinking and knowing, agreement and contradiction.53

The criterion for truth is different in women and men. Because women are more suggestible, they often believe things simply through their own suggestion or that of others, and thus they have little need to see and touch before believing. From this follows their quickness to believe in miracles and their openness to religious proselytizing.

In the American West, women were admitted to juries, but the law allowing this had to be abrogated since the jurors judged on the basis of feeling rather than evidence (A. Barine, Revue des Deux Mondes, giugno 1883).54In girls’ boarding schools intellectual tasks that are too demanding and abstract produce amenorrhea, hysteria, and nervousness (Dujardin-Beaumetz). “Women in general,” writes Lafitte, “seem more struck by facts than by rules and more by specific ideas than by general concepts. A book by a woman, even by DeStael [sic] or Eliot,55 will always be more beautiful in its details than its totality. The female intelligence is concrete, that of man abstract.”i

This explains why women have acquired farne as travel writers and students of manners, topics for which the first requirement is to give specific and telling details; we see this in the works of Pfeiffer, DeStael [sic], Montaigue, Madame Adam, and so on, and so on. It is a sign of inferiority because abstraction is the highest grade of mental development. Animals, as Romanes observes, think in images.56

Diligence

Woman has more patience than man, as the types of work in which she engages demonstrates. Since the dawn of civilization weaving has been almost exclusively (except in Egypt) women’s work; and it is well known how much patience weaving required before the invention of the automated loom. Work with pearls and diamonds, as well as the manufacture of certain musical and surgical instruments which require a great deal of patience and delicacy, is completely in the hands of women (A. Kuliscioff, Il monopolio dell’uomo, Milano, 1890)57 Lace making and embroidery, highly painstaking forms of work, have become symbols of femininity. Only women are employed in the production of lace and in the French Gobelins tapestry factory.

That women are more patient explains their great numbers in modern industry, where we now have machines that require little from their operators in terms of muscular strength but rather continuous surveillance and patience. For the same reason women often do better than men in factory work; where work is piecework, the wife and daughters often carry home more earnings than the father and brothers (Kuliscioff, op. cit.). The professions in which woman does better than man are also those that require great patience, for example, elementary school teaching, for which women have been found preferable to men in Milan, England, and America.

Savage women manifest this same superiority in patience, sometimes even more clearly.

These observations might seem to contradict Darwin, who claims that men have more patience than women. But women’s patience is an effect of her lesser sensibility and lower degree of cortical excitability, which lower her need for stimulation. Hers is not the type of patience that flows from great potency in the inhibitory centers, a power that enabled Darwin, for example, to spend years accumulating proofs for his miraculous discovery. In this respect man is superior. In fact, Vogt observed that his female students were attentive in class but highly incompetent at homework. Man has perseverance, woman has patience; and her patience is more that of the camel than of the man of genius.

Causes

It is indisputable that the inferior development of women’s intelligence is partially caused by the physical inertia that men have imposed on her. But it would be an error to label this a man-made cause because the inferiority is also natural and because it reflects a general tendency among all animals on the evolutionary scale for males to participate more fully in the struggle for existence. It is mainly the male that fights to defend the species. Furthermore, he must fight other males to conquer the female, even more in the human than the animal world, because the variable of female choice has been almost eliminated. He is now free to select a woman as long as he has absolutely subdued his rivals. Among animals, on the other hand, it sometimes happens that while two males fight, the female flees with a third male who is weaker but more agreeable.

It is not so much work itself as the need to surpass rivals in the same activity that has developed the intelligence of man. This is demonstrated by the fact that among many savages, it is the woman who works (pitching tents, weaving, and so on) while the man fights wars and hunts. Yet that does not make the woman more intelligent.

And to the explanations for men’s intellectual superiority one must add another natural cause—the way men continually change their types of activities and life circumstances. Rarely does the son enter the same profession and under the same conditions as the father. On the other hand, the woman must devote a precious part of her time to the duties of motherhood, which are always the same and therefore do not awaken and nurture the intelligence as does the constant mobility of men. In antiquity as at the present time, most of those who emigrate are men.

Underlying all these other causes is a biological one that serves as the foundation. The intelligence of the male, like his organic structure, has a primitive potentiality greater than that of the female thanks to his lesser role in the reproduction of the species. As I have demonstrated, intelligence varies inversely to fecundity in the entire animal kingdom; there is an antagonism between the reproductive and intellectual functions. Today, the work of reproduction has for the most part devolved onto the woman, and for this biological reason she has been left behind in intellectual development.

In fact, certain female bees, termites, and ants have acquired a superiority of intelligence over other females of the species by giving up sex. The queen, in contrast, is fecund and stupid. Moreover, as savages step by step become civilized, their females grow less fecund. Women of high intelligence, as Wirey noted, are often sterile.

It is amazing, then, that woman is not even less intelligent than she is. One can explain this only by agreeing with Darwin that a part of the male’s acquired intelligence must be transmitted to women. Otherwise, the gap would be even greater.

Certainly greater participation in the collective life of society would raise woman’s intelligence. In fact, such participation is already the case in the most evolved races, as in England and North America, where most literary and artistic journalism is now entrusted solely to women.

From: Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

by Cesare Lombroso

Seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens

 

Munier showed the children a print of a photograph he had taken a year earlier.

In the foreground, a falcon the color of leather perched on a lichen-speckled boulder. Behind, slightly to the left, hidden by the curve of the rockface and invisible to the unsuspecting glance, the eyes of a snow leopard staring straight at the photographer. The animal’s head merged so completely with the rock that it took a moment for the eye to make it out. Munier had his lens focused on the falcon’s plumage, utterly unaware that the leopard was watching him. It was only when studying his prints two months later that he noticed its presence. The infallible naturalist had let himself be duped. When he first showed me the photo, I had seen only the bird and my friend had to point to the leopard before I noticed what my eye would never have detected unprompted, since it sought only to detect an immediate presence. Once seen, I was struck by the presence of the animal every time I saw the photograph. The indistinguishable had become the obvious. The image concealed a valuable lesson. In nature, we are constantly being watched. Our eyes, on the other hand, are drawn to what is simple, they confirm what we already know. A child, being less conditioned than an adult, catches the mysteries of backgrounds and of hidden presences.

Our little Tibetan friends were not taken in. The fingers instantly pointed to the leopard. “Sa’u!” they shrieked. Not because their life in the mountains had honed their vision, but because their child’s eyes were not drawn to certainty. They explored the peripheries of the real.

Definition of the artist’s gaze: seeing big cats hidden behind ordinary screens.

From: Tesson, Sylvain

Title: The art of patience: seeking the snow leopard in Tibet

Maze and labyrinth - a significant difference

 Labyrinth walking has figured in rituals and religions from Iceland to Sri Lanka, from Tunisia to Sumatra, from India to Brazil.

In common parlance the words maze and labyrinth tend to be interchangeable – however, there’s a significant difference. Whereas a maze contains multiple paths and dead ends, and therefore many opportunities for getting lost, the labyrinth contains just one path. By taking it you inevitably get to the center. In a maze you encounter high walls or hedges that conceal the path and the pattern. Labyrinths generally have no walls, no concealment. They’re marked out on the ground in two dimensions, in earth, sand, or tile. If you chose, you could walk straight across to the center, avoiding the marked path completely, although naturally this is frowned upon by serious labyrinth walkers. Walking around a maze is a form of puzzle solving – walking around a labyrinth is a spiritual exercise. The notion that there’s only one true path is of course attractive to believers. You cannot get lost in a true labyrinth.

Virginia Westbury, author of Labyrinths: Ancient Paths of Wisdom and Peace, asked the many labyrinth walkers she encountered what they thought labyrinths were ‘for’. The replies she got included ‘meditation, celebration, spiritual connection, talking to God, talking to spirits, self-exploration, healing, sensing ‘energy’ wisdom, worship, divination, inner peace, forgiveness, transformation and communicating with others’. Is there nothing a labyrinth can’t do?

There are Christian labyrinths inside the French cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Amiens. The one at Chartres is the oldest, dating from the early thirteenth century. These are pavement labyrinths, set into the cathedral floors, and the original symbolic intentions have largely been lost. It seems they may have been as much concerned with seasonal rituals as with prayer walking, but we do know that in the eighteenth century pilgrims would walk around these labyrinths on bended knee while praying, as a penance.

There are currently a number of prisons in the United States that have installed labyrinths in their exercise yards. A few years ago the authorities at Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California, spent three thousand dollars on a portable version, a purple labyrinth painted on canvas, ninety feet across. It was unrolled from time to time and prisoners walked its path.

Prisoners reported feeling calm and at peace having walked it, though Cynthia Montague, one of the jail’s chaplains, reckoned its chief function was metaphoric. The labyrinth walk was about getting and staying on track, returning to the narrow if not the straight. Montague said, ‘If you accidentally step off the path and go onto a different part of the path, you might find yourself heading back out. But you’re allowed to start over again and keep at it’.

The most famous of all labyrinth walkers must surely be Theseus, who walked into the labyrinth in Crete to slay the minotaur. In order to avoid getting lost he used Ariadne’s ball of golden thread to trace his steps. This means, of course, that he was actually in a maze rather than a true labyrinth.

Instead of a golden thread, Hansel and Gretel tried leaving a trail of bread crumbs to stop themselves from getting lost, although you could argue that they were not so much lost as abandoned by their father. And in fact they did perform considerable walking feats. The Grimms’ fairy tale has them dumped in the middle of the forest and then ‘walking all day and all night’ to get home.

From: Geoff Nicholson

The Lost Art of Walking

The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism

Ought one really to walk alone?

 Ought one really to walk alone? Nietzsche, Thoreau and Rousseau are not alone in thinking so. Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.

However, complete solitude is not absolutely essential. You can be with up to three or four … with no more than that, you can still walk without talking. Everyone walks at  their own speed, slight gaps build up, and the leader can turn around from time to time, pause for a moment, call ‘Everything all right?’ in a detached, automatic, almost indifferent way. The reply might be a wave of the hand. Hands on hips, the others may await the slowest; then they will start again, and the order changes. The rhythms come and go, crossing one another. Going at your own pace doesn’t mean walking in an absolutely uniform, regular manner; the body is not a machine. It allows itself slight relaxations or moments of affirmative joy. So with up to three or four people, walking allows these moments of shared solitude. For solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.

With more than four companions, the party becomes a colony, an army on the march. Shouts, whistles, people go from one to another, wait for each other, form groups which soon become clans. Everyone boasts about their equipment. When it’s time to eat, they want you to ‘taste this’, they produce culinary treats, outbid each other … It’s hell. No longer simple or austere: a piece of society transplanted to the mountains. People start making comparisons. With five or more, it’s impossible to share solitude.

So it’s best to walk alone, except that one is never entirely alone. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.’ To be buried in Nature is perpetually distracting. Everything talks to you, greets you, demands your attention: trees, flowers, the colour of the roads. The sigh of the wind, the buzzing of insects, the babble of streams, the impact of your feet on the ground: a whole rustling murmur  that responds to your presence. Rain, too. A light and gentle rain is a steady accompaniment, a murmur you listen to, with its intonations, outbursts, pauses: the distinct plopping of drops splashing on stone, the long melodious weave of sheets of rain falling steadily.

It’s impossible to be alone when walking, with so many things under our gaze which are given to us through the inalienable grasp of contemplation. The intoxication of the promontory when, after a struggle, we have reached the rocky point and sat down, and when the prospect, the landscape is given to us at last. All those fields, houses, forests, paths, all ours, for us. We have mastered all that by our ascent, and it only remains to rejoice in that mastery.

*

Silences

Thoreau observed repeatedly that silence usually taught him more than the company of others.

Just as there are several solitudes, so there are several silences.

One always walks in silence. Once you have left streets, populated roads, public spaces (all that speed, jostling and clamour, the clatter of thousands of footsteps, the white noise of shouts and murmurs, snatches of words, the rumble and whir of engines), silence is retrieved, initially as a transparency. All is calm, expectant and at rest. You are out of the world’s chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds.

There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy.

Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun. Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow.

There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly.

There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.

 Lastly, there’s the unique silence of night. If, owing to nightfall, when the lodging is still too far, you have chosen to sleep under the stars, taken trouble to find a good place, warmed yourself and eaten, you fall asleep quickly and easily. But then there always comes that moment of awakening, after several hours of slumber, still in the fastness of the night. The eyes open abruptly as if seized by the depth of the silence. Any shifting to ease your limbs, the rustle of your sleeping bag, assume enormous proportions. So what is it that woke you? The very sound of silence?

In a chapter entitled ‘A Night Among the Pines’, Stevenson mentions this sudden-awakening phenomenon, placing it around two in the morning and seeing it as affecting, at the same moment, all living beings asleep outside. He views it as a minor cosmic mystery: could it be a tremor of the earth running through our bodies? A moment of acceleration in the night? An invisible dew originating in the stars? At any rate it is a startling moment, in which the silence can be heard physically as music, or rather it is the moment when, lifting your head, you hear quite distinctly the music of the spheres.

What is called ‘silence’ in walking is, in the first place, the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness like couch-grass. Chatter deafens: it turns everything into nonsense, intoxicates you, makes you lose your head. It is always there on all sides, overflowing, running everywhere, in all directions.

 But above all, silence is the dissipation of our language. Everything, in this world of work, leisure, activity, reproduction and consumption of things, everything has its function, its place, its utility, and a specific word that corresponds to it. Likewise our grammar reproduces our sequencings of action, our laborious grasp of things, our fuss and bustle. Always doing, producing, forever busying ourselves. Our language is tailored to the conventions of fabricated things, predictable gestures, normalized behaviours, received attitudes. Artifices adapted to one another: language is caught in the everyday construction of the world, participates in it, belongs to the same order of things as pictures and numbers and lists – order, injunction, synthesis, decision, report, code. Language is an instruction slip, a price list. In the silence of a walk, when you end up losing the use of words because by then you are doing nothing but walk (and here one should beware of those expedition guides who recode, detail, inform, punctuate the walk with names and explanations – the relief, the types of rock, the slopes, the names of plants and their virtues – to give the impression that everything visible has a name, that there is a grammar for everything that can be felt), in that silence you hear better, because you are finally hearing what has no vocation to be retranslated, recoded, reformatted.

‘Before speaking, a man should see.’

The only words remaining to the walker are barely mutterings, words he catches himself saying (‘Come on, come on, come on’, ‘That’s it, ‘Oh, all right’, ‘There it is, there it is’), words hung like garlands on the fleeting seconds, commonplace, words not to say anything but to punctuate the silence with a supplementary vibration, just to hear his own echo. 

From: A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros

Cayce and reincarnation

 While his reading background was surprisingly comprehensive, he evidently preferred works with a philosophical flavor, I was decidedly impressed. He was well informed regarding the subjects in which I was interested. Hazel and I were fascinated; the time was flying by.

And then the roof fell in.

Abruptly, and without warning, he swung into a ridiculous subject: reincarnation! For a few minutes I continued to listen; I wanted to make sure whether he could possibly be serious. He was. Reincarnation—oh no!

How could this intelligent-looking man, apparently normal in every other respect, be talking in earnest about a subject so preposterous!

Interrupting Weston, I reminded him that it was growing very late; it was time for Hazel and me to get back to town. I wasted no time in getting out of there, practically pulling Hazel with me.

All the way home I kept muttering words like… and he seemed so intelligent… just can’t tell by looking at someone… have to be more careful in the future….” Hazel paid no attention; she was fast asleep by the time we rolled into our driveway.

About a month later business brought Weston to Pueblo again, but I contrived to be “just too busy” to see him that day.

He very likely sensed that I was avoiding him. And simple deduction would have disclosed that the reason was his reincarnation rantings. He couldn’t have failed to observe that I had been intensely interested until he had slipped into the you-have-lived before-and-will-live-again theme.

I suppose it was because he was aware of my reason for dodging him that he sent me two books. I had heard of neither. One was called There Is a River, by Thomas Sugrue, and the other, Many Mansions, by Dr. Gina Cerminara. I noticed that both were concerned with a man named Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey), who had died only a few years before (1945).

Although I didn’t know it then, picking up those books was a signal for the beginning of a new phase in my life. It was an act that ultimately forced me to dig into fields that I had always regarded as ridiculously out of bounds.

The books started off so sensibly and interestingly that, for a while at least, my attention was diverted from where they were leading me. Edgar Cayce’s story, as it began, was not so very different from thousands of others who had lived at the same time. He was born on a farm near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877. Although he had little formal education—having gotten only as far as the ninth grade in a country school—there was one book he had mastered: the Bible. He reread the Bible every year.

He didn’t take to the farm, so while still in his teens, he moved to town and worked at various sales jobs from stationery to insurance. Up to this point, then, we still have a conventional pattern: A devout Christian farm boy goes to the city and struggles to earn his living at whatever job he can find. But here the Cayce story shifts abruptly.

A severe attack of laryngitis when Cayce was twenty-one finally resulted in the loss of his voice. All medication was ineffective; he just couldn’t talk. This depressing condition cut short his saleswork and kept him at home for several months, where he brooded over his apparently incurable ailment. Finally, however, he went to work as a photographer’s apprentice, a job that would not be so demanding on his voice.

Then one night a traveling hypnotist came to the town. He heard about Cayce’s condition and offered to attempt a cure through hypnosis. Cayce was willing, and while under hypnosis it was proved that he could speak perfectly. But as soon as he was awakened he reverted to the former condition and couldn’t talk. Again and again the hypnotist tried, not forgetting to employ the post-hypnotic suggestion that Cayce would be able to speak nor mally after he awakened, but to no avail. Cayce could talk while in a trance, not afterward.

The professional hypnotist moved on to his next engagement. The following day, however, a local resident, an amateur hypnotist named Al Layne, who had witnessed the whole affair, came to offer a suggestion: If Cayce could talk while under trance, then why not go into a trance once more and this time, if Cayce could still speak normally while in such a state, let him try to describe the nature of his affliction? Perhaps he could give some clue as to the root of the trouble, some indication or sensation that would identify the cause.

Because all other remedies had failed, Cayce was ready to try almost anything. He went into a trance, then was asked to explain his vocal difficulty, which he did. These were his words:

“Yes, we can see the body. In the normal physical state this body is unable to speak due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cord, produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

Layne made the suggestion outlined by Cayce—that is, he told the sleeping Cayce that circulation to the vocal cords would increase and the condition would thus be removed. Cayce’s chest and throat turned pink, finally scarlet. Several minutes later he said, “It’s all right now. The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal and that after that, the body awaken.”

Layne followed instructions. Cayce awakened; he spoke normally for the first time in many months.

Layne was delighted. Soon he came up with another idea. If Cayce could diagnose for himself, there was a bare possibility that he might be able to do the same thing for the young hypnotist, Layne, who had long suffered from stomach trouble. Agreeing to the experiment, Cayce again went under hypnosis; this time he diagnosed Layne’s ailments and told him what to do about it, recommending certain drugs, diet, and exercise.

Following these directions, Layne improved remarkably within a few weeks. He bubbled with excitement. Not only was he getting well, but he was certain that Cayce possessed a rare gift. When in a hypnotic trance Cayce spoke like a physician, using accurate physiological and medical terminology. In both these cases, furthermore, his prescriptions had included measures which, although overlooked in prior medical examinations, had been surprisingly successful.

Layne, therefore, was eager to determine whether they could help others who were suffering from poor health. Cayce, though, was not so easily persuaded. In the first place he knew nothing about medicine, had never read a single book on the subject. He couldn’t understand how this stuff could be pouring out of him. (Keep in mind that Cayce had total amnesia for the entire period of the trance; he had to be told what he had said after awakening.) Furthermore, success in his own case might have been accidental; and Layne’s improvement, he reasoned, might possibly be attributed to imagination. And since Cayce apparently had no control over what he said while in a trance, he might give directions that would be harmful rather than helpful.

But Layne’s exuberance would not be quashed. Playing upon Cayce’s natural desire to help others—young Cayce had always wanted to be a preacher and was thwarted by financial circumstances—Layne finally inveigled a promise to attempt a few experiments. Cayce wanted it firmly understood, however, that this would be an effort to help only those who requested, and genuinely needed, assistance.

He made it quite clear, furthermore, that he would accept no money or payment of any kind.

Thereupon were launched the approximately thirty thousand “health readings” of Edgar Cayce. This title was applied by Layne, who was now having all of Cayce’s trance utterances recorded verbatim. Very soon it had become plain that the strange faculty of the “sleeping doctor” was most uncanny, indeed.

Oddest of all was the fact that the person requesting the reading need not even be present. It was learned that it was possible to conduct readings at a distance provided Cayce was given the exact name of the person and his location at the time the reading was made. If a person, for instance, were living in an apartment in New York City, he could request a Cayce health reading by giving no more than his address, his name, and a statement that he would be in his apartment at, say, 2:00 P.M. on a certain date.

At the appointed time Cayce would loosen his tie, take off his shoes, and lie down on a couch. Having already learned to place himself in a trance, he would close his eyes and move his clasped hands, palms upward, over his forehead. Then, apparently receiving some subconscious flash, he would move his hands down and cross them over his solar plexus. After he had taken several deep breaths, his eyes would begin to flicker, indicating that he was slipping into a trance state. At this point Layne (or Mrs. Cayce or some other person) would read the following statement, which had been adopted as the standard opening:

“You will now have before you [individual’s name], who is located at [street, address, town, state]. You will go over this body carefully, examine it thoroughly, and tell me the conditions you find at the present time, giving the cause of existing conditions; also suggestions for the help and relief of this body. You will answer questions as I ask them.”

Within a few minutes Cayce would begin to speak. Ordinarily he would begin, “Yes, we have the body,” and he would continue describing the person, diagnosing the ailment, and recommending steps that should be taken for relief. When it is realized that the letter requesting the reading included none of the person’s symptoms, nor even a hint of any sort, this bizarre talent grows even more electrifying.

It is interesting to note that in the event the person asking for the reading was not at the designated location, Cayce would say, “We don’t find him. The body is not here.” At other times he would voluntarily give a detailed description of the room, often making such comments as, “Big dog in the corner… The body is just leaving now—going down in the elevator… We find the mother praying.”

Most important, however, was the fact that sick people were getting well after Cayce’s diagnoses; cures were effected, moreover, even with cases which had been regarded as incurable. A young girl in Alabama, for instance, had been committed to a mental institution as hopelessly demented. A later Cayce reading, however, disclosed the curious fact that an impacted wisdom tooth was impinging upon a nerve in the brain. The slumbering diagnostician suggested that the tooth be extracted. Subsequent dental surgery confirmed the reading, and the girl made a complete return to sanity.

One of the most famous and widely investigated cases was that of little Aime Dietrich of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The child’s mind had failed to develop since an attack of grippe at the age of two; she was, furthermore, seized with convulsions every day by the time she was five. Numerous specialists had been consulted, and the last one had assured the anguished parents that the child was the victim of a rare brain disease which must invariably prove fatal.

Not completely reconciled to their tragedy, the parents turned to Edgar Cayce as a last resort. The humble, uneducated photographer’s apprentice was almost too timid to step in where famous physicians had failed. Nevertheless, he did respond to the Dietrich summons, and the outcome is well-documented history.

While in a trance Cayce said that just before the child’s grippe attack she had fallen from a carriage and that the grippe germs had settled in the injured area; this had caused all the trouble. He stated that a return to normality could be made through certain osteopathic adjustments.

The girl’s mother then remembered the fall from the carriage but she didn’t understand how this could possibly have any bearing on the case. In any event, the adjustments were made, and for the first time in three years the girl began to show signs of recovering. Later the father gave the following testimony before a notary public:

At this period our attention was called to Mr. Edgar Cayce, who was asked to diagnose her case. By autosuggestion he went into a sleep and diagnosed her case as one of congestion at the base of the brain, stating also minor details. He outlined to Dr. A. C. Layne how to proceed to cure her. Dr. Layne treated her accordingly every day for three weeks, using Mr. Cayce occasionally to follow up the treatments as results developed. Her mind began to clear up about the eighth day and within three months she was in perfect health, and is so to this day. The case can be verified by many of the best citizens of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. 

Subscribed and sworn before me this eighth day of October, 1910. (Signed) D. H. Dietrich, Gerrig Raidt, Notary Public, Hamilton County, Ohio. 

As the cases accumulated, many doctors became interested in the miracle man of Virginia Beach. Some began to use him for diagnosing their own most puzzling cases. One doctor in Delaware, who had utilized Cayce’s talents for years, attested that the diagnostic accuracy had been better than ninety per cent. A New York doctor agreed with this, and was even inclined to raise this figure.

It should not be inferred from this, however, that Cayce had a perfect batting average. He had his share of strike-outs. There were readings which failed to match the situation, diagnoses which did not seem to fit the case, instances of off-the-target performance. Overall, though, his record was phenomenal.

Remembering that the two books had been sent to me by Val Weston, I was wondering, as I started reading the first one, why he wanted me to know about the medical clairvoyance of Edgar Cayce. As I continued to read, however, Weston’s motive became obvious. It seems that Cayce finally focused his incredible ability upon another problem. And the latter clearly was the matter to which Weston was directing my attention.

It was in the third chapter of Many Mansions that I first read the absorbing account of how Edgar Cayce happened to plunge into reincarnation. Perhaps the best manner in which to share with the reader some of the impact that struck me at that time is to borrow from those same passages in Many Mansions. The book’s author, Dr. Gina Cerminara, entitles her third chapter “An Answer to the Riddles of Life,” which begins:

For twenty years of humanitarian activity, Edgar Cayce’s clairvoyance showed itself to be reliable in literally thousands of instances. One feels the need of reminding oneself of this fact when coming to the next development in his strange career.

At first his powers of perception had been directed inward, to the hidden places of the human body. Not until many years passed did it occur to anyone that these powers might also be directed outward, to the universe itself, to the relationship of man and the universe, and to the problems of human destiny. It happened in the following way.

Arthur Lammers, a well-to-do printer of Dayton, Ohio, had heard about Cayce through a business associate, and his interest was sufficiently roused for him to take a special trip down to Selma, Alabama, where Cayce was living at the time, to watch him work. Lammers had no health problem of his own, but he was convinced, after several days’ observation of readings, that Cayce’s clairvoyance was authentic. A well-informed, intellectually alert man, he began to think that a mind able to perceive realities unavailable to normal sight should be able to shed light on problems of more universal significance than the functioning of a sick man’s liver or the intricacies of his digestive tract. Which philosophic system, for example, came closest to the truth? What was the purpose, if any, of man’s existence? Was there any truth in the doctrine of immortality? If so, what happened to man after death? Could Cayce’s clairvoyance give answers to questions like these?

Cayce didn’t know. Abstract questions concerning ultimate matters had never crossed his mind. The religion he had been taught in church he accepted without question; speculation as to its truth in comparison with philosophy, science, or the teachings of other religions was foreign to his thinking. It was only because of his generous desire to help suffering people that he had continued to go into a sleep so unorthodox. Lammers was the first person who saw other possibilities in the faculty besides the curing of disease, and Cayce’s imagination was stirred. The readings had seldom failed to answer any question put to them; there seemed no reason why they should not answer Lammers’ questions.

Consequently Cayce accepted Lammers’ invitation to visit him in Dayton in order to determine what the readings had to say about these philosophical inquiries. It was decided, since Lammers had recently become curious as to whether there could be any truth in astrology, to ask the sleeping Cayce for Lammers’ horoscope.

The subsequent reading indicated that the answers to Lammers’ queries were not a matter of astrology; it was implied, for instance, that certain qualities and tendencies of Lammers had not been the result of a particular sign of the zodiac. Instead—and here comes the revelation that burst upon me with atomic force—these factors could be more specifically attributed, stated the reading, to a previous lifetime on earth, when “he was once a monk.”

Oh, oh! There it was again, I said to myself. When the persistent Weston perceived that I was unwilling to listen to his reincarnation rhapsody, he had attempted to implant his propaganda by sending me a book. Well, I wouldn’t be trapped. Muttering imprecations, I shoved the book aside. This stuff is not for me, I kept assuring myself.

To Hazel I raged against reincarnation, the book, and even Cayce himself. But Hazel scarcely looked up from her own reading; she merely remarked something to the effect that I would be getting back to the book again sooner or later and that I might as well pick it up now. I did.

Taking up where I had left off, I was glad to learn, at least, that Cayce had also found himself in consternation. He simply did not understand this reincarnation business. He was afraid at first that it might be anti-Christian. As to this part of the Cayce story, let’s refer again to Many Mansions:

Cayce’s inner turmoil is not difficult to understand. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of strict, orthodox Christianity, with no instruction in the teachings of the great world religions other than his own. At that time, therefore, he was unaware for the most part of the many profound points of similarity between his faith and other faiths, and had had no opportunity to appreciate the ethical and spiritual light which burns in lamps other than that of his own form of Christianity. He was particularly uninformed with regard to that cardinal teaching of Hinduism and Buddhism—reincarnation.

The Search for Bridey Murphy 

by Morey Bernstein 

The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard ...

 Preface

I had met him one Easter day, at a screening of his film about the Abyssinian wolf. He had spoken to me about the elusiveness of animals and of the supreme virtue: patience. He had told me about his life as a wildlife photographer, and explained the technique of lying in wait. It was a delicate and rarefied art that involved hiding in the wild and waiting for an animal that could not be guaranteed to appear. There was a strong chance of coming away empty-handed. This acceptance of uncertainty seemed to me to be very noble—and by the same token anti-modern.

Could I, who loved to run like the wind over lowlands and highlands, manage to spend hours, silent and utterly still?

Lying among the nettles, I obeyed Munier’s precepts: not a movement, not a sound. I could breathe; this was the only vulgar reflex permitted. In cities, I had grown accustomed to prattling about anything and everything. The most difficult thing was saying nothing. Cigars were prohibited. “We’ll smoke later, down by the river,” Munier had said, “it will be night and fog!” The prospect of lighting a Havana on the banks of the Moselle made it easier to endure the position of prostrate watcher.

Life was exploding. The birds in the trees streaked the night sky, they did not shatter the magic of the place, did not disturb the order of things, they belonged to this world. This was beauty. A hundred meters away, the river flowed. Swarms of dragonflies hovered over the surface, predatory. On the western bank, a hobby falcon was diving. Its flight was hieratic, precise, deadly—a Stuka.

This was not the time to allow myself to be distracted: two adult badgers were emerging from the sett.

Until it grew dark, all was a mixture of grace, of drollery, of authority. Would the badgers give a signal? Four heads appeared, and the shadows darted from the tunnels. The twilight games had begun. We were posted ten meters away, and the animals were oblivious to our presence. The badger cubs tussled, scrabbled up the embankment, rolled into the ditch, nipped at each other’s necks and got a clout from an adult, determined to restore a semblance of order to the night circus. The black pelts daubed with three stripes of ivory would disappear into the undergrowth only to reappear further on. The animals were preparing to forage in the fields and on the riverbanks. They were warming up for the night ahead.

From time to time, one of the badgers would wander close to our hide, snuffling the ground with its long snout, then turning to face us. The dark bands set with coal-black eyes sketched out melancholy smears. They were still on the move; we could make out the powerful plantigrade paws turned inward. In the French clay, their claws left small bear-like tracks that a certain lumbering race of humans, in its wisdom, identified as the tracks of “vermin.”

It was the first time I had ever been so still, hoping for an encounter. I scarcely recognized myself. Until now, from the Yakutia to Seine-et-Oise, I had run, adhering to three principles:

The unexpected does not pay house calls, it must be sought out everywhere. 

Movement enhances inspiration. 

Boredom runs less swiftly than a man in a hurry. 

In short, I convinced myself that there was a link between distance and the importance of an event. I thought of stillness as a dress rehearsal for death. In deference to my mother, resting in the family tomb on the banks of the Seine, I roved about frenetically—the mountains on Saturday, the seaside on Sunday—without paying attention to what was going on around me. How do journeys spanning thousands of kilometers lead one day to lying in the tall grass with your chin propped on the edge of a ditch?

Next to me, Vincent Munier was taking photographs of the badgers. The mass of muscle beneath his camouflage clothes blended into the vegetation, but his profile was still visible in the half-light. His face, all sharp edges and long ridges, seemed to be sculpted for issuing orders; he had a nose that Asians mocked, a carved chin and soft eyes. A gentle giant.

He had talked to me about his childhood, his father taking him to a hide beneath a spruce tree to witness the flight of the king—the capercaillie; the father teaching the son the promise of silence; the son discovering the rewards of nights spent lying on the frozen ground; the father explaining that the appearance of an animal is the greatest gift life can give to those who love it; the son setting up his own hides, discovering the secrets of the world unaided, learning to frame a nighthawk taking wing; the father discovering the son’s artistic photographs. Munier, lying next to me, had been born in the mists of the Vosges. He had become the greatest wildlife photographer of his time. His peerless photographs of wolves, bears and cranes were sold in New York galleries.

“Tesson, I’m taking you to the forest to see badgers,” he had said to me, and I had accepted, because no one refuses an invitation from an artist in his studio. He did not know that Tesson meant “badger” in Old French. The word is still common in the vernacular of western France and Picardy. It originated as a deformation of the Greek taxis, from which we get the words “taxonomy,” the science of classifying animals, and “taxidermy,” the art of stuffing animals (since man likes to skin the things he has just named). On the topographical maps of France, there are tessonières, the name given to the bucolic sites of mass culls. For, in the countryside, the badger was despised and ruthlessly destroyed. It was accused of digging up the soil, of damaging hedges. It was smoked out, it was killed. Did the badger deserve the relentless fury of men? It was a secretive animal, creature of night and solitude. It favored an inconspicuous life, ruled over the shadows, did not suffer visitors. It knew tranquility was something to be defended. It left its sett at night and returned at dawn. How could man tolerate the existence of a totem to discretion, making a virtue of distance and an honor of silence? Zoologists described the badger as “monogamous and sedentary.” If etymology connected me to the animal, I did not conform to its nature.

•   •   •Night fell, the animals disappeared into the undergrowth, there was a general rustling. Munier must have noticed my joy. I considered these few hours as one of the best nights of my life. I had just encountered a clan of living creatures that was utterly sovereign. They did not struggle to escape their condition. We headed back to the road via the riverbank. In my pocket, the cigars were crushed.

“There’s an animal in Tibet that I’ve been tracking for six years,” said Munier. “It lives up in the high plateaus. You can spend a long time in a hide just to catch a glimpse of one. I’m going back this winter; come with me.”

“What is it?”

“The snow leopard,” he said.

“I thought it had disappeared,” I said.

“That’s what it wants you to think.”

*

In the distance beyond the pass, wolves howled at the setting sun.

“They’re singing,” Munier insisted. “There are at least eight of them.”

How could he possibly know? I could hear only a lone lament. Munier gave a howl. Ten minutes later, a wolf answered. So began what I think of as the most beautiful conversations between living creatures certain never to meet. “Why did we drift apart?” Munier was howling. “What do you want from me?” replied the wolf.

Munier would sing. A wolf would respond. Munier would fall silent, the wolf would start again. Then, suddenly, one of the wolves appeared on the highest pass. Munier sang a last lament and the wolf dashed down the slope heading in our direction. Having been weaned on medieval literature—the fables of the Beast of Gévaudan, the Arthurian cycle—I was not exactly thrilled to see a wolf hurtling toward us. I reassured myself by glancing at Munier, who looked about as worried as an Air France flight attendant in a pocket of turbulence.

“He’ll stop dead before he gets to us,” he whispered a moment before the wolf froze some fifty meters away.

It turned aside and padded in a wide circle, its muzzle turned toward us, unsettling the yaks. The herd moved further up the slopes, alarmed by the presence of the wolf. The tragedy of life in the herd: never a moment’s peace. The wolf disappeared; we scanned the valley, the yaks had now reached the crest, night was drawing in; we did not see the wolf again, it had melted away.

*

Munier told me about the first photograph he ever took, at the age of twelve: a roe deer in the Vosges. “Oh! nobility! Oh! true and simple beauty!” was the prayer offered by the young Ernest Renan as he surveyed the ruins of Athens. For Munier, that first encounter was his night spent on the Acropolis.

“That day, I shaped my destiny: to see animals. To wait for them.”

Since that night, he had spent more time crouching behind bushes than sitting at school desks. His father did not force him. He never passed his baccalauréat, and earned a living working on building sites until his work as a photographer was recognized.

Scientists were scornful. Munier approached nature as an artist. His work was of little interest to statisticians, the servants of the number. I had met my fair share of number crunchers. They ringed hummingbirds and disemboweled seagulls to take samples of bile. The numbers added up. Where was the poetry? Nowhere. Did their work contribute to the sum of knowledge? Not necessarily. Science masked its limitations behind petabytes of digital data. The process of tallying the world claimed to advance science. It was pretentious.

Munier, for his part, paid tribute only to beauty. He celebrated the grace of the wolf, the elegance of the crane, the perfection of the bear. His photographs belong to art, not to mathematics.

“Your detractors would rather model the digestive system of a tiger than own a Delacroix,” I told him. In the late nineteenth century, Eugène Labiche foresaw the absurdity of the age of science: “Statistics, Madame, is a modern positive science. It shines a light on the most impenetrable facts. Recently, for example, thanks to laborious research, we have managed to calculate the exact number of widows who crossed the Pont-Neuf in the year 1860.”

“A yak is a lord,” replied Munier. “What do I care whether he’s ruminated twelve times this morning!”

Munier constantly seemed to be nurturing a melancholy. He never raised his voice for fear of startling the snowfinches.

*

Mediocrity

Another morning spent on the dusty slopes. The sixth. This sand had once been a mountain that was molded by rivers. These stones held secrets that stretched back. The air throttled all movement. The sky was steel blue as an anvil. Frost lay like lace over the sand. A Tibetan gazelle stood, eating snow, with delicate movements.

Suddenly, a wild donkey—a kiang—appeared. The animal stopped, warily. Munier pressed an eye to the telescopic sight. It looked almost as though he were hunting. Neither Munier nor I have the heart of a killer. Why destroy an animal more powerful and better adapted than oneself? The hunter kills twice. He kills a living creature, and, in himself, he kills the spite he feels at being less powerful than the wolf, less agile than the antelope. Bang! the shot rings out. “At last,” says the hunter’s wife.

Pity the poor hunter; it is unfair to be pot-bellied when you are surrounded by creatures as taut as a drawn bow.

The wild donkey did not leave. Had we not seen it arrive, we could have mistaken it for a statue carved from sand.

We were looking down on the bed of the frozen river, some five kilometers from our camp, and I was talking about a letter I had received some years earlier from Monsieur de B—feathered hat and velvet tailcoat—the president of the French Federation of Huntsmen, in response to an article I had written lambasting hunters. In it, he accused me of being a moccasin-wearing urbanite with no sense of tragedy, someone who strolled through gardens, maudlin about field mice and terrified by the clack of a breechblock. A pansy, I guess. As I read the letter, having just arrived back from a trek in the mountains of Afghanistan, my first thought was that it was a pity that the word “hunter” lumped together men who eviscerated woolly mammoths with spears and a gentleman with a double chin who fired grapeshot at obese pheasants between the cognac and the camembert. Using the same word to define contradictory concepts does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the world.

From The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard 

by Sylvian Tesson