Vintage Reading (25 page)

The experiment worked.
Death Be Not Proud
is not just the clinical record of the doctors’ failure to restore a sick boy to health. It is a report on a great experiment in which the stream of vibrant “data” that was Johnny’s personality and intellect sadly, prematurely, stopped.

____________

From the Old Testament

The work of literature that is
Ecclesiastes
has blessed our culture with at least two book titles—Ernest Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, and
Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart. Quotation compendiums abound with its poetic riches. The words of a popular song from the 1960s, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” are taken directly from what is perhaps its most lyrical passage, beginning: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven ...”

“Koheleth,” its would-be author, is actually a transliteration from Hebrew of a word that in Greek became “Ecclesiastes,” and which means a preacher who addresses a public assembly. Though traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, who lived in the 10th century B.C., Ecclesiastes almost certainly dates from much later, perhaps as recently as 200 B.C.

Apparently admitted to full Scriptural standing only in 100 A.D. at the Synod of Jamnia, Ecclesiastes has been termed “the most heretical book of the third century B.C.” Heretical, perhaps, in that there’s so little explicitly religious about it. Indeed, some scholars see, in certain almost formulaic references to God, the hand of a pious post-Koheleth figure who sought to make it more explicitly God-fearing.

Ecclesiastes’
spiritual content would seem to bear as much kinship to the Eastern philosophical tradition, with its stress on the futility of worldly desires, as to orthodox Judaism or traditional Christianity. It worries more about this life than the next. Even as it emphasizes the inevitability of death, it extols the ordinary pleasures of daily living.

Indeed, it invests with a cloak of wisdom what many do quite naturally: “Enjoy life with the wife whom though lovest all the days of thy vanity; for
that is thy portion in life, and in thy labour where though labourest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand attaineth to do by thy strength, that do; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, wither though goest.”

Its recurring admonition, “all is vanity and striving after wind,” is delivered with the relentlessness of a meditational mantra. Or perhaps, with the same power with which modern advertising drives home a single, simple message over and over again, embellished from time to time, but in the end always the same:
Life is short. All our strivings are for nothing. Death awaits us all.

Pessimistic? In a sense. One’s hopes and dreams, one’s labors, one’s accumulations of knowledge or wealth—all amount to but a “striving after wind.”

Yet the idea is freeing, too. For in dashing prospects of some Grand Theme to life,
Ecclesiastes
enriches
little
themes—marriage, children, work.
Eat, drink and be merry?
Why you heard it first in
Ecclesiastes
: “So I commend mirth,” writes Koheleth, “that a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry, and that this should accompany him in his labour all the days of his life which God hath given him.”

So there’s something oddly comforting about the seemingly grim message of
Ecclesiastes
: While humankind’s daily struggle may count for nothing in the end,

The earth abideth forever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,

And hastest to his place where he ariseth,

The wind goeth toward the south,

And turneth unto the north;

It turneth about continually in its circuit.

...

That which hath been is that which shall be,

And that which hath being done is that which shall be done;

And there is nothing new under the heavens.

Churchgoers, and their non-Christian counterparts, often need little prompting to dip into their Old or New Testaments. But non-believers today—it was not so true in years past—will sometimes read everything in sight before turning to the Bible, choosing to spurn the conventional wisdom that sees in it much wisdom and beauty.

Ecclesiastes
proves the conventional wisdom right. “It was a wise providence,” an interpreter has written of Koheleth, “that gave this man’s work a place in scripture.”

____________

By James Hilton
First published in 1933

Half a century ago, with publication of James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
, a new word began its absorption into the English language.
Shangri-La
, says the dictionary today, means “an imaginary, remote paradise on earth.” Hilton pictures a far-off world (yet here, on our planet), peopled with “aliens” endowed with mysterious powers (yet who look just like us). The effect is that of science fiction, only without the science.

Lost Horizon
is set in the Far East, following one of the native revolts that periodically rocked Britain’s colonial empire. Four Westerners are being airlifted out of pillaged Baskul, India, when one of them, glimpsing the pilot, becomes suspicious. Later, he looks out the window and instead of seeing spread beneath him the airport at Peshawar, their destination, sees “an opaque mist, veiling an immense, sun-brown desolation.” Later comes the bared revolver, the unscheduled landing and refueling, renewed flight ...

Ultimately, they crash in a valley hidden high in Tibet, icy mountain peaks of unspeakable beauty rising around them. The pilot dies, and they are left, alone, huddled against howling winds. Soon they meet a group of stocky Tibetans in sheepskins bearing an elderly Chinese in a sedan chair, Chang, whose impeccable English is laced with Shakespeare. Chang and the Tibetans escort the four of them across the valley to the lamasery known as Shangri-La.

A benign theocracy of lamas, most of them versed in music, literature, and the arts, Shangri-La reveres moderation above all. “We rule with moderate strictness,” Chang tells them, “and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think I can claim that our people are moderately sober,
moderately chaste, and moderately honest.”

Of the four Westerners the author brings to Shangri-La, three qualify as little more than stock characters. There’s Miss Brinklow, the missionary worker, single-minded in her faith and oozing disdain for “native” ways. And Barnard, a plain-talking American apparently on oil company business, his speech littered with “I reckons” and “gees.” And young, pink-cheeked Mallinson—blunt, impetuous, lacking in grace, impatient of Eastern impassivity.

The best developed of the four is Conway, a former Oxford don and now an officer in Britain’s consular service. One foot in the world of action and power, the other in that of quiet and contemplation, Conway has just helped negotiate the safe release of 80 Westerners from Baskul— an act exciting young Mallinson’s admiration. Yet now, in Shangri-La, the other side of Conway’s personality emerges. Relaxed about their predicament, he actually seems to enjoy his luxurious captivity. Mallinson is incensed. Why doesn’t Conway want to leave this crazy, godforsaken place?

For a reader buffeted by the storms of modern life, it hardly seems surprising. Sheltered from the wind and isolated from the cares of the world, Shangri-La looks down upon a verdant valley, up to towering, mountain peaks. Its library is stocked with the finest literature of both West and East. Its moderation-in-all-things ethic extends even to sex. The food is well prepared, Chang’s conversation always lively, the bathing facilities luxurious.

Indeed, presumably stuck there for only two months—when an expedition from the outside will presumably guide them back out—three of the four travelers sink comfortably into their new lives, reluctant to leave, ever. Mallinson, alone among them, does not. His nervous hankering to be gone from the place never diminishes. “There’s something dark and evil about it,” he says of Shangri-La.

And though that sentiment comes from the least attractive of the characters—one easy to write off as inflexible, immature, and mired in the trivialities of the world outside—the reader’s feelings about Shangri-La take a subtle turn. As do, for that matter, Conway’s, whose private conversations
with the High Lama have revealed to him many of Shangri-La’s mysteries.

In all the subsequent action, that fleeting doubt is never erased. Is there something ugly and unnatural in life up here, away from the cares of the world? And is there something noble and good, after all, in Western striving? Those haunting questions make
Lost Horizon
more provocative by far than the one-dimensional Message novel it might otherwise have become.

(“Song of God”)

________

Sanskrit poem probably written between 500 and 200 B.C.

For what is held up as Hinduism’s most sacred text, it begins inauspiciously enough. The warrior Arjuna stands upon the field of battle, on the even of the fighting. He is stricken with fear, disconsolate at the prospect of the many lives sure to be lost, many from his family. “Life goes from my limbs,” he wails, “and my mouth is sear and dry; a trembling overcomes my body, and my hair shudders in horror.”

Whereupon the deity Krishna asks: “Whence this lifeless dejection, Arjuna, in this hour, the hour of trial? Strong men know not despair, Arjuna, for this wins neither heaven nor earth. Fall not into degrading weakness, for this becomes not a man who is a man.”

Is this how the
Bhagavad Gita
reveals the great Krishna, god of the Hindus? As a macho god who, far from urging peace and reconciliation, encourages the coming slaughter?

Even Arjuna is bothered: “Why does thou enjoin upon me the terrible action of war? My mind is in confusion because in thy words I find contradictions.”

But Krishna is no god of war. Something else is going on here, something alien to western sensibilities. For Krishna is saying, It doesn’t matter. Do not hold out against the inevitable battle. Do not rail at events. Do not strive to overturn them. “Action is greater than inaction; perform therefore thy task in life.”

The battle will be terrible? Men will die? Arjuna may die? None of this matters, counsels Krishna. “Weapons cannot hurt the Spirit and fire can never burn him. Untouched is he by drenching waters, untouched is he by parching
winds.” Life and death are but worldly preoccupations. The body does not count, the senses are an illusion. “From the world of the senses, Arjuna, comes heat and comes cold, and pleasure and pain. They come and they go; they are transient. Arise above them, strong soul.” Spirit is all.

Employing surprisingly linear, almost “scientific” logic, Krishna outlines just how worldly strivings lead to sorrow: “When a man dwells on the pleasures of sense, attraction for them arises in him. From attraction arises desire, the lust of possession, and this leads to passion, anger,” ultimately to confusion of mind, loss of reason, destruction.

For Krishna, the ascetic diet, the sexual orgy, working too hard or working not at all, all equally reflect disharmony. “A harmony in eating and resting, in sleeping and keeping awake; a perfection in whatever one does. This is the Yoga that gives peace from all pain.” Balance, evenness, calm.

The visible world around us, says Krishna, is illusion. Distinctions meaningful to us—light and darkness, beginnings and ends—all are but manifestations of the same One. “I am the cleverness of the gambler’s dice,” says Krishna. “I am the beauty of all things beautiful. I am victory and the struggle for victory. I am the goodness of those who are good.” All is but a single radiance. Victory and defeat. Life and death. Why strive for one or the other?

“He who feels neither excitement nor repulsion, who complains not and lusts not for things; who is beyond good and evil, and who has love—he is dear to me,” says Krishna.

Echoes can be heard here of, for example, the New Testament; but mostly all this stands wildly distant from the Western emphasis on achievement, expression, energy bent on changing the world—and out of which came Picasso, Einstein and Freud.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” urges Tennyson in “Ulysses.” Everything in the
Bhagavad Gita
argues to the contrary. To cease striving. To seek no more. To yield.

Can the two outlooks be reconciled?

Hardly. Our turbulent inner lives tell of the eternal war between them.

____________

By Elie Wiesel
First published in 1958

That there should be such a genre as “Holocaust literature” is itself a tragedy. So terrible was the murder and madness of the Nazis, on so great a scale their destruction of European Jewry and others, so threatening to faith the enormity of their crimes, that thousands of scholars, journalists and holocaust survivors have struggled to make sense of it. One of the first to do so, in
Night
, was Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jew who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, and who saw most of the residents of his little Transylvanian town, Sighet, including his mother, father, and sister, murdered.

His story starts innocently enough, as a poor man with great, dreaming eyes teaches 13-year-old Wiesel cabbala, Judaism’s mystical tradition. “Then one day they expelled all the foreign Jews from Sighet.” His teacher was one of them. “What can we expect?” says a townsman. “It’s war ...” Nothing out of the ordinary.

Life returns to normal. It is 1942. Outside, in the air over Germany, on the outskirts of Stalingrad, war rages. But in Sighet, all is as it has been. “I continued to devote myself to my studies. By day, the Talmud, at night, the cabbala. My father was occupied with his business and the doings of the community. My grandfather had come to celebrate the New Year with us, so that he could attend the services of the famous rabbi of Borsche. My mother began to think that it was high time to find a suitable young man for Hilda.”