I am of a mind and time of life when reading no longer counts as much. No, I am not counting on my personal literary treasure trove to last forever, drawing upon old memories of fabulous words and remarkable pages. I find it more intensely meaningful to grasp my life from moment to moment free of the written word, other people’s smarts. Living is not to be learned from books. Living has to be lived and learned from second to second. Memory is not living; recall is just a mnemonic device. I struggle to put away books and to go long stretches without reading them because they lose in comparision with a rigorous effort to attend to the moment. Krishnamurti has affected me in this. So this little essay is a remembrance of things and thoughts past.
I will share influences with a comment here or there as I wander about my inner library. Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things opens with a short essay, “The Significance of Education,” which is a dynamic and scathing indictment of what is taught. It is the kind of essay I’d give to a student of education and after he is through, I’d tell him to stop studying teaching and get a life. The Flight of the Eagle is a treatise (wrong word) about seeing, the difference, if any, between the observer and the observed. And finally, reader, I’d suggest you read The Awakening of Intelligence, of life’s questions done through dialogue in several European cities over the years. Krishnamurti was a remarkable human being and he writes with telling insight. If you play safe, stay away; if you want him to embroil you into life, stay close. Not for the weak-hearted.
A friend of Krishnamurti was Nikos Kazantzakis — all the great minds get to know one another. Three books that melted my mind — The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis and Report to Greco. The writing is luxuriant but not ornate; the great issues for each of us are explored and examined. Kazantzakis’ injunction, “Reach what you cannot,” has been my guiding light. I often cite him in my writings. The man’s mind is a transcendental pomegranate, bejeweled with insight and feeling. Above all, he makes you feel! He wrote most of his novels in his seventies and long before that he wrote two volumes in verse describing the further adventures of Ulysses, and by all accounts, he equaled Homer. I am indebted to him as a writer.
Other writers float before me — Buber’s I and Thou which is a religious existential syrup that draws you into the chocolate depths below; Sartre’s The Flies which to my mind is the clearest statement of atheistic existentialism and a terrific play. The appeal of existentialism was made in my twenties and I still am charged by its vigor and bravery in facing the stony silences of life and death. “Existence precedes essence.” You bet, it does! Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” is still intellectually thrilling. When a Nazi is pulling out your fingernails and church is not there, when god is not there, when significant other is not there, there is only you, and if you can fall deeply into that you will emerge stronger and freer; you will have defined yourself. You will be inner-directed. You will not escape from your freedom; and you will scare the shit out of your local Obama, Mc Cain and Hillary supporters.
I’ve enjoyed Mailer who puts his balls against the wall, who takes risks. He is very free and open in his writing. I recall reading in the dull Fifties The Naked and the Dead. Mailer had to substitute “fug” for fuck in order to get it published; at sixteen and naive I couldn’t make head nor tail of the word. At 16 I also read Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, and I could not grasp the content but I did learn that Julian Sorel was a “parvenu,” and that one word has stayed with me for decades. I relished and enjoyed Swift’s misanthropic masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. Not many people know that Yahoo comes from that book, those lustful and licentious living groins beating their tummies for heavy-hitting sex. And Swift has Gulliver reject his own rescue from the sea as a masterful statement of how corrupt and forlorn we are as a species; after all, he wrote “A Modest Proposal,” a tract which suggests that we eat little Irish babies so we can save capitalistically. Not a few yahoos thought he was serious — or was he? In New York City, the commune of satire and sarcasm, he’d asked the deli master, “Is it fresh?”
In middle age I reread The Nigger of the Narcissus. It lost its initial hold, not its power. When I first read it I knew I was in a room with a genius, not only a literary one. He knew men. He knew their minds. The book, if it had Freud’s name under the title, might very well serve as the master’s statement about group psychology. And while I’m on Freud, his Moses and Monotheism and Leonardo Davinci are brilliant excursions into anthropology, history and literary criticism. One hasn’t read psychohistory until you read a short essay that Freud wrote about Moses holding the decalogue; within a few pages he bombards your mind with sound conjecture, history, analysis all within that prose of his that winds about you. Seek it out. (In fact, psychohistory began with this essay.)
Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey is forever fabulous, poetic and science-driven in a palatable and often mystical brew. This is a man who was involved in the unearthing of a mummy and then leapt into the vault and held the mummy close to him as the Egyptian day began to close, because he wanted to sense what it was like to experience this as if it were 3,000 years ago. This is a mensch! His mind was capable of communicating to the reader in wonderful prose the passage of millenia. Mysticism is hard to get across, but Saint Exupery’s small book, Wind, Sand and Stars, I hope I have that right, is a meditative series of short essays about flying over the Saharan wastes, often at night. The moods are intense and the questions posed are for all of us.
I read in my twenties Canetti’s Crowds and Power which to my mind is the greatest sociological and anthropological work of the Twentieth century, by a novelist who also won the Nobel Price. One chapter is worth the price of admission, “The Self-Destruction of the Xhosas.” It is an uncanny work of science driven by the engine of a literary mind. What better introduction to real cognition and intellect.
I will close and come back with more at another moment.
Leave a Reply