“Water always finds the path of least resistance. It flows. You never see square turns on a river. There’s always a curvature. I think life’s like that, too… So you could say that I believe in things being predestined. How could I not? When I think of my life, I feel as though I’ve always been given the absolute right circumstances to help create who I am. If I hadn’t grown up in Hawaii… surrounded by the era’s greatest surfers throughout my childhood, I don’t know where I would have ended up. And I don’t want to know. I’m grateful for all of the twists and turns of fate that have brought me here.
My spiritual beliefs have helped me walk the path that I knew I needed to be on. I’ve been reading the Bible since I was 16, when I first discovered it (through a girl I was dating — how else?). I’ve always found something golden and truthful in its pages. […]
I believe that our imagination is our connection to higher knowledge. It’s the most formidable tool that we have, an amazing source of inspiration. And then, of course, there’s the world we live in, which is no slouch in that area, either. What we’ve been given here is precious: majestic in its smallest details and its grandest spectacles. Anytime you feel like you’re in danger of forgetting that, I recommend taking a good look at a 50-foot wave. Anyone who can be around something that powerful and not feel humbled has some serious analyzing to do. You can’t deny the spritual world when you’re staring into its eyes.”
“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.
When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:
which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…
If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…
In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”
Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.
Let me ask a little more philosophical question. I’d really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics, which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all you’re left with is a ferocious human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or a prophet in these areas from both brothers.
Christopher Hitchens: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.
Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine, all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. That’s why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they asked, was I an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasn’t really much of one at all.
They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that he’d written most of his antireligious books in a state of syphilitic paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own — (laughter) — more recent work — I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.
Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equally true to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think it’s a very, very strong instance of it.
If I don’t get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isn’t that, it’s usually The Brothers Karamazov issue instead. I forget which brother it is, maybe it’s Smerdyakov. It doesn’t matter. He says, if there’s no God, then surely everything is possible — thinkable.
Everyone understands the question when it’s put like that. But is it not also the case that with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human society and the human psyche — you might say, soul — whatever attitude we take to humanness or the transcendent.
Peter Hitchens: First of all, just a small objection to that.
It seems to me that the Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, of show trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.
There is even in the jibe against Judas — “the poor ye have always with you” — the first skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.
But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset Maugham’s book, Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides — and this is an Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage — decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, “This is a moment of enormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before, and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. I’m free.”
What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. I’m just as capable of following moral rules as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.
Why aren’t they more pleased they’re liberated and why don’t they exult more about it? Perhaps because they don’t want to spread the idea too widely and have too many people joining in.
__________
From the Pew Forum’s roundtable conversation with brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, on the question of Can Civilization Survive Without God?.
Mark Twain claimed that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once, and still retain the ability to function. That said, I think both Hitchens brothers are right on this point.
This entire Pew transcript is worth reading. So often in discussions like this, the prompts do nothing to constrain interlocutors’ answers, serving instead as runways for flights into digression or monologue. The questioner cited above could have simply asked, “Do we need faith to moderate human will?” But that wouldn’t have been as restrictive. Instead, by citing Nietzsche (and thus inviting further reference to his work), and locating him within the context of a broader philosophy, the question takes on color and context.
The Pew roundtable is great for that reason; all the questions are similarly sharp and provocative. One of my bosses, Michael Barone, also asks a question further into the discussion.
Watch a preview of these two titans in conversation below.
Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?
As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.
My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar. It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.
In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)
And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?
It would appear, in keeping up with this blog, that I mean to place (or post) everything on an equal plane. After all, each of these collections of words are published on the same site, in a similar format, with a parallel description, and are then replaced — in the next day or so — by something mirroring that style.
But there is a hierarchy, and among the pantheon of passages that I set down here, there are very few that actually rise to the level of the openings of the Book of Ecclesiastes and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Sterns Eliot’s “The Rock”. As it turns out, T.S. Eliot is essentially echoing the words of Ecclesiastes. Yet that fact does, nicely enough, only serve to bolster the messages of each, which seem to crystallize several descriptors of human life: brevity, transience, vanity.
(It’s worth recalling that King Solomon, the wealthiest and wisest man in Jerusalem, is the speaker in Ecclesiastes.)
Ecclesiastes 1-2:17
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
3 What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun? 4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever. 5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose. 6 The wind goes toward the south,
And turns around to the north;
The wind whirls about continually,
And comes again on its circuit. 7 All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again. 8 All things are full of labor;
Man cannot express it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after.
12 I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. 14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
And what is lacking cannot be numbered.
16 I communed with my heart, saying, “Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.” 17 And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.
18 For in much wisdom is much grief,
And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
1 I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure”; but surely, this also was vanity. 2 I said of laughter—“Madness!”; and of mirth, “What does it accomplish?” 3 I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine, while guiding my heart with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.
4 I made my works great, I built myself houses, and planted myself vineyards. 5 I made myself gardens and orchards, and I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 6 I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the grove. 7 I acquired male and female servants, and had servants born in my house. Yes, I had greater possessions of herds and flocks than all who were in Jerusalem before me. 8 I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the special treasures of kings and of the provinces. I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men, and musical instruments of all kinds.
9 So I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me.
10 Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them.
I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure,
For my heart rejoiced in all my labor;
And this was my reward from all my labor. 11 Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done
And on the labor in which I had toiled;
And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun.
12 Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly;
For what can the man do who succeeds the king?— Only what he has already done. 13 Then I saw that wisdom excels folly
As light excels darkness. 14 The wise man’s eyes are in his head,
But the fool walks in darkness.
Yet I myself perceived
That the same event happens to them all.
15 So I said in my heart,
“As it happens to the fool,
It also happens to me,
And why was I then more wise?”
Then I said in my heart,
“This also is vanity.” 16 For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever,
Since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come.
And how does a wise man die?
As the fool!
17 Therefore I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me, for all is vanity and grasping for the wind.
The opening of Eliot’s “The Rock”
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
For better or for worse, I map my Dad’s psyche and personal history onto that of Solomon in Ecclesiastes. It’s a long and somewhat convoluted story to explain why my mind would approach my father’s personal history in this way, but much of it probably has to do with his improbable achievements (as well as the sheer range of experiences and endeavors which have made up the fabric of his life). Most sons admire their fathers, sure, but I can promise you my dad is different.
As always, Ecclesiastes is posted in the real crème de la crème of Bibilical translations, The New King James. Go donate your Living Bible to charity and throw away your copy of The Message; God doesn’t speak in the same jargon as the Kardashians.
The first photo was taken several days ago at my ranch; the other photos were taken in Ireland, several years ago.
If you grew up going to church, you already know Psalm 139. Even if you didn’t, parts of it are floating around your brain. It is a favorite of pro-life people, because it talks about God recognizing us in the womb, taking care of us, and knowing how we’ll turn out. (It is also—I’d bet money on this—the source of our hundred-year-old American expression “search me.”)
Psalm 139 gets my vote for being the most beautiful of the psalms in the King James version. The other day I happened to read it in French and it left me cold—it conjured up surveillance—whereas the high-low diction of the King James translators sings and is intimate, because you would only sing this way to a God you loved: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me.” It’s like an advertisement for the English language.
An old boss of mine used to claim that the most seductive words are not “I love you,” but “I understand you.” Surely a deep need is expressed by the line, “Thou knowest my downsitting and my uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.” That fantasy, of someone who knows your every move—who sees the entire picture—and looks out for you all the same, may be pernicious or childish. But how do we outgrow it? To hear the poem, anyhow, is to feel the problem.
1 O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. 2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising,
thou understandest my thought afar off. 3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down,
and art acquainted with all my ways. 4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. 5 Thou hast beset me behind and before,
and laid thine hand upon me. 6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high, I cannot attain unto it. 7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 9If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 10 Even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me. 11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me;
even the night shall be light about me. 12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;
but the night shineth as the day:
the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 13 For thou hast possessed my reins:
thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. 14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are thy works;
and that my soul knoweth right well. 15 My substance was not hid from thee,
when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect;
and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned,
when as yet there was none of them. 17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!
How great is the sum of them! 18If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:
when I awake, I am still with thee. 19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God:
depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. 20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. 21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?
And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred:
I count them mine enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart:
try me, and know my thoughts: 24 And see if there be any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
__________
Lorin Stein’s article Psalm 139, published yesterday in the Paris Review.
The picture was taken several days ago on the road leading to my ranch.
Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull’s cup.
Consider the first time you conceived of justice, engendered mercy, brought parity into being, coaxed liberty like a marten from its den to uncoil its limber spine in a sunny clearing, how you understood the inheritance of first principles, the legacy of noble thought, and built a city like a forest in the forest, and erected temples like thunderheads.
Consider, as if it were penicillin or the speed of light, the discovery of another’s hands, his oval field of vision, her muscular back and hips, his nerve-jarred neck and shoulders, her bleeding gums and dry elbows and knees, his baldness and cauterized skin cancers, her lucid and forgiving gaze, his healing touch, her mind like a prairie. Consider the first knowledge of otherness. How it felt.
Consider what you were meant to be in the egg, in your parents’ arms, under a sky full of stars.
Now imagine what I have to say when I learn of your enterprising viciousness, the discipline with which one of you turns another into a robot or a parasite or a maniac or a body strapped to a chair. Imagine what I have to say.
Do the impossible. Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed, goodness to what you have poisoned, trust to those you have betrayed.
Bless each other with the heart and soul, the hand and eye, the head and foot, the lips, tongue, and teeth, the inner ear and the outer ear, the flesh and spirit, the brain and bowels, the blood and lymph, the heel and toe, the muscle and bone, the waist and hips, the chest and shoulders, the whole body, clothed and naked, young and old, aging and growing up.
I send you this not knowing if you will receive it, or if having received it, you will read it, or if having read it, you will know that it contains my blessing.
As more informed readers will know, Jarman is a Christian; and as Christian readers will understand, the title “If I Were Paul” is a reference to a certain Saul of Tarsus.
In this poem, Jarman is Paul the Apostle speaking through the voice of a poet. The words are a poetic distillation of what Paul was trying to say in his letters to the churches of Phillipi, Corinth, and Collosae.
The opening five sentences each begin with the command to “consider,” calling us to reflect on the numinous beauty and fragility of our lives. In this, he is the contemplative conscience of Paul. Jarman then makes the abrupt transition to Paul as a figure of authority — “imagine what I have to say” — and channels all of Paul’s mind into condemning, in a striking phrase, the “enterprising viciousness” of those in the early churches. His call to “do the impossible” is the central command of Christian dogma: live and forgive like Jesus Christ.
The final sentence of the poem is absolutely essential to its message. For in the first century, Paul had no guarantee that his letters, which required considerable time and effort to pen, would actually be delivered to those in the various Mediterranean churches to whom he was writing. So Paul sent them not knowing if they were ever to reach their destination. More still, the limits of words, especially written ones, demand that tone is extremely difficult to convey.
Thus Paul was unsure all the more. He felt what fathers and mothers feel in disciplining their children, the uncertainty of knowing whether one’s lofty standards and strict condemnations will actually be received for what they are: a blessing.
The pictures were taken at the Western “Wailing” Wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The folded papers are prayers traditionally placed into its cracks.
__________
Update — I sent Jarman a message with a link to this post and he was nice enough to write back:
Dear John,
Thank you for this more than generous and sympathetic reading of my poem, “If I were Paul.” If I were to add anything, it would be that my aim was to sound like a contemporary Paul. Though you rightly, I think, hear the tone of the first century Paul, speaking to the early churches, my hope is that I could talk to a contemporary audience in that tone, and also one that might not be exclusively Christian. My best regards to your aunt, a wonderful painter and person.
