I don’t know whether or not I still believe the best of our love was “from God.” How easy it is to deceive myself! Certainly those days in May were marvelous. But ambiguous too, and I was very soon upset by it all.
Basically I am much more ready now to admit that the whole thing was a mistake, a subtle and well-meant seduction to which I too easily and too completely yielded (so much so that she herself was frightened by it at first). This must never happen again. Also it is clearly over. Except for friendship, I hope, and the last communication that may be required to avoid bitterness and bad feeling about it.
Am reading Camus’s L’État de siège [State of Siege]. The whole Plague theme is one of the best and most powerful things in his work. The heart of it. Perhaps there is much wrong with this play, but to me it reads well anyway and I like it. A medieval morality play, hence inevitably naive, rambunctious, untidy, and probably not as controlled as he hoped. I suppose one must overlook faults in it – musical comedy atmosphere of the “leading juveniles” – . Was he having trouble with the color, verve, vitality of it? (Better when his plays are somber – Le Malentendu.) I don’t know. He liked it and I like it. My heart is with Camus. Thought is going to publish “Three Saviors.”
Vietnam. [Eric] Sevareid said it is like using great sledgehammers to kill hornets.
Vietcong need about 87 tons of supplies a day. U.S. 20,000 tons a day. NLF estimated annual budget – 10 million. U.S. (for the war) $15,000,000,000. Each Vietcong killed costs a million dollars (not to mention men we lose!!). We really must be interested in killing people expensively.
November 1, 1966
The wilderness theme in the Bible. Am reading a good book on it by Ulrich Mauser [Christ in the Wilderness (London, 1963)] (in that Protestant series). Terribly fruitful at the moment! I can compare my own life. How evident it becomes now that this whole thing with M. was, in fact, an attempt to escape the demands of my vocation. Not conscious, certainly. But a substitution of human love (and erotic love after all) for a special covenant of loneliness and solitude which is the very heart of my vocation. I did not stand the test at all – but allowed that whole essence to be questioned and tried to change it. And could not see I was doing this. Fortunately God’s grace protected me from the worst errors. My difficult return to my right way is a gift of His grace. But I think I am gradually getting back. Each morning I wake up feeling a little freer (though I don’t remember dreaming of it) – just as last May each morning I awoke a little more captivated. And I now see how much anguish I suffered – but I could not let go! Now thank God, I can. But what will happen if she writes me another love letter. Somehow I don’t think she will. I think it is clear to both of us that the affair is over – and that it has been very silly.
Heavy rain in the morning. Went down in the dark to concelebrate. Came back with the pocket of my rain coat full of eggs and had me a super breakfast. Finished reading Camus’s L’État de siège. It is really lamentable. A disaster. It began OK, and the idea is good enough, but it is mechanical, arbitrary, full of trite moralizing – none of which is redeemed by the fact that “his heart is in the right place” etc. It is just downright bad – the moralizing and melodrama of 18th century bourgeois theater, or 20th century agit prop [pro-Communist propaganda]. All the good ideas go astray. A very sad job. I wonder why? And have an uneasy feeling that my “Edifying Cables” are also bad and false, not in the same precise way, yet perhaps for the same sort of reason. Mechanical irony, habitual prejudices, tired thinking, an imitation of my own vitality. Yet with “Cables” I cannot be sure. Maybe they are really good. Who knows? See what they look like in print. Then it will be too late.
Rain cleared in late morning. I went for a walk to the Lake Knob, with a great sense of new freedom and discovery – and determination never to get caught again by a love affair and not let this one flare up again. Only now do I begin to see the state of the ruins! What an embarrassing mess! And how completely stupid I have been. At the beginning, like a drunken driver going through every red light – and as a matter of fact only really sobering up now, after seven months of it.
Sidi Abdesalam’s visit was certainly a great help. But I can’t in my heart take seriously his statement that I am close to myst[ical] union – I can see an enormous purification is needed. A spirit of repentance won’t hurt! At least I am inclined to that, at any rate. That may not be the height, but it is at least a first step.
November 2, 1966
About four this morning it began to snow. And it turned into a real storm, by evening it was one of the heaviest storms I have ever seen here, though since it was above freezing the snow did not lie as thick as it otherwise might have. But now it is night and still snowing and I think by tomorrow there will be quite a bit of it – and this is only All Souls’ Day! I went down in the dark and snow to say my three masses early (others are not saying the 3 Masses anymore – a few of the older priests are). Came back had breakfast, read some Antonin Artaud on the plague theme (Camus tried to use this but failed imaginatively and otherwise. Artaud’s thesis is a bit far fetched anyway. Plague – Theater).
After dinner I walked out to the woods in the snowstorm. Then back and settled down for the afternoon, let myself be enclosed in the snow and silence, and it has been marvelous. Stayed up here for supper, cooked a mess of rice and it was good. Now everything is perfectly silent except for the wind howling in the dark. The hermitage is marvelous in the snow and night, and I rejoice in it – the gas heater is splendid! Place quiet and cozy, and I am utterly alone. It is a pure delight, I thank God for it! And again I am overcome with embarrassment to think how I have trifled with this grace.
Read some of Etta Gullick’s ms. Introduction to Benet of Canfield. It is on the whole very good. A few poems of Wallace Stevens. Bits on Zen from the new book of Nancy Wilson Ross which she sent me.
Boughs of evergreen out there in the dark cracking under the weight of snow!
November 4, 1966
M. Her little, clear, determined voice coming to me through all the cold and snow, in a letter, saying she has carefully considered it, and she really, powerfully loves me, and she is never going to stop. So definite. I read the letter out there in a field of snow, weeping, looking through hot tears at the icy hills, the frozen wood, where we were Ascension Day. And she is right. Without getting carried away (or wishing that I were not, seeing that I don’t have to be), I have to admit our love as a basic and central truth about which there can be no nonsense. And will have to try somehow to reconcile it with contemplative liberty (after all she explicitly accepts this situation). Foolishly hoped to call her from Billie’s goat barn (that didn’t work) and eating hot dogs with Br. Clement at Billie’s – and driving back through the snow – the day disputed by this impulse, clearly a wrong one!
The fact of passion has to be faced, and I must not let it get too disruptive. The fact of my vocation to a deep mystical life has to be faced – though I am helpless to account for it or cope with it and am in danger of being terribly unfaithful. The fact of M.’s love has to be faced and met with my own most serious gift and trust. God alone can reconcile all that has to be reconciled. I have simply been torn by it. Reduced and walking in the sun and snow and renouncing any hope of quick answers.
In these circumstances, readings on Paradise Lost have been deeply moving and magnificent. At times I have felt that Milton is the one who really knows the world as it is. M. and I are so much, in so many ways, Eve and Adam.
One thing I am grateful for: this thing of having made with her a world of reality that is our own and subsists in and by and for us. A world of love which is the real world – because it is a world of choice, in which we have decided to be essential to each other’s meaning, each other’s grasp of everything else. It is as if we were married.
November 11, 1966. St. Martin
This morning began reading a fine book of George Williams (Harvard), Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought. Must review it.
4 An excellent survey and not without a certain pleasing passion for the wilderness (and for conservation). A fine tying up of Christian sense with modern American problems.
Yesterday – a very good letter from a young married woman in Cincinnati about my “Apology to an Unbeliever,” which is in this month’s Harper’s.5 She appreciated it – and says but she never “hears God.” And what about it? I tried to answer her honestly without falling into seven deadly heresies – and realized the complexity of the problem as I never have before.
The whole question of “hearing God” has become extremely ambiguous. So ambiguous that the very way it is talked of makes some people incapable of “hearing” anything. Their defensive reflex is basically healthy and perhaps more radically religious in some cases than the “faith” of those who “hear.”
I came to this point – in considering the experience, briefly grappling with it.
1. The worst thing I could possibly do would be to simply give an official and “objective” answer. However true, theologically, it would be false in this situation. It would communicate nothing and close the door to all communication. In fact slam the door in her face.
2. Hence I need to be able to stand aside from official positions, and speak as a man on her own level – in order to begin to be true. (At once I can grasp that in the other position one arrogates to himself an authority he does not really have – but which society has given him in a way. A right to tell others to get off – even a right to bully. This is impossible. Must be refuted.)
3. But on the other hand no condescension. One must step down in such a way that one can’t get back “up” – here is where it gets funny – because I after all do not abandon my faith at all.
4. It is really a question of seeing that in some strange way the “faith” has become idolatrous when it is seen only from a certain viewpoint and that without abandoning the faith one has to abandon this idolatrous viewpoint.
5. Which turns out to be that of most believers.
6. So I came at it this way. An honest human question is asked. Instead of giving “God’s official answer” (idolatrous – a refusal to communicate on equal terms) I must in the nakedness and poverty of my human condition give a humble and tentative answer that is guided by the desire to help her see in her own way.
7. This begins with an intuition of an immense value in her which she does not see. (The ground of her being which opens out into God’s infinite love.) Official formulas will make it impossible for her to see this.
8. Yet without gnosticism – or anything – I must use simple words.
9. So trusting in the Spirit whom I don’t know and using words to say only as much as we are capable of seeing together at the moment, I try to speak to her as a Brother.
10. If I do this, then in our honest rapport God himself speaks without anyone being aware (necessarily) of the fact. And I leave the rest to her. Guided of course by what I believe to be his revealed word – which I substantially try to communicate in my own way, i.e. very differently (without perverting it – yet in fact contradicting a certain way of understanding it which seems correct and isn’t).
November 12, 1966
Eliot’s essay “What Is a Classic?” is short, brilliant and absurd. His definition of a Classic is solidly useful, and then he proceeds to make its use impossible except for a few choice spirits – Virgil, Dante, Racine and for no one in English. Perpetual somersaults of logic in order to make sure that this title must be denied Milton precisely because he is such a genius, but also because he does not completely exhaust the possibilities of language – etc.
This is apparently one of the great problems of literary criticism: one can formulate splendid principles – and their use is always contestable unless it is so restrained that it is hardly a use at all. Here more than anywhere else one always has the sense that the opposite to what is said can be convincingly asserted.
Importance of this year’s Chinese paroxysm. In this country it is regarded as another nutty Communist ploy – to harass people. It is probably more – but what? Evidently there is a real passion going into it. A passionate rejection of Soviet revisionism and a desperate resolution to meet any attack from the U.S. Basically the passion seems to be racial – a rejection of white society and its choices – and a determination to do something else. A horrifying communalism – and yet … Who can condemn them, unless he has something else to offer? Same with the Black Power pitch in the U.S. It is nutty, irrational, but its drama is something one has no real reason to complain of because of the infinitely organized muteness and absurdity of the U.S. civilization which surpasses every other facticity. And yet could do so much, if only it weren’t mindless, obtuse, self-deluded, self-complacent – destructive.
Passionate name changing. In the monasteries – people are picking new names (Bernadine to Zachary, Amandus to Roger. Mysterious non-improvements). Naturally those who went to Chile last month have mostly Spanish names – but new Spanish names, not translations. In Chinese – young red guards change names from, for example, “Fragrant Celery” to “Look up to Mao.” All very funny to the West. Speed of emergence of Red Guards in China – a youth movement – became official only last June – turned China upside down in August – September. Mao “joined” them Aug. 18. International outlook may lead to something!!
November 13, 1966
Gelassenheit – letting go – not being encumbered by systems, words, projects. And yet being free in systems, projects. Not trying to get away from all action, all speech, but free, unencumbering “Gelassen” in this or that action. Error of self-conscious contemplatives: to get hung up in a certain kind of non-action which is an imprisonment, a stupor, the opposite of Gelassenheit. Actually quietism is incompatible with true inner freedom. The burden of this stupid and enforced “quiet” – the self sitting heavily on its own head.
Still thinking of K.C. who wrote from Cincinnati. From a certain point of view my letter to her was a scandal. I was in effect saying “Don’t listen for the voice of God, he will not speak to you.” Yet this had to be said. Today, for a certain type of person, to “listen” is to be in a position where hearing is impossible – or deceptive. It is the wrong kind of listening: listening for a limited message, an objective sound, a sensible meaning. Actually one decides one’s life by responding to a word that is not well defined, easily explicable, safely accounted for. One decides to love in the face of an unaccountable void, and from the void comes an unaccountable truth. By this truth one’s existence is sustained in peace – until the truth is too firmly grasped and too clearly accounted for. Then one is relying on words – i.e. on his own understanding and his own ingenuity in interpreting existence and its “signs.” Then one is lost – has to be found once again in the patient Void.
November 14, 1966
Delight. Nathalie Sarraute. Finally reading Portrait d’un inconnu [Portrait of a Man Unknown] which has been lying around for four or five years. Very good. I can’t read novels – only anti-novels. This is expect[ed].
Mass-media. While I yell about them and McLuhan pontificates – the fact is that 75% of the sets in NY are turned off during prime evening time. But that is in NY. Not Bardstown.
November 16, 1966
Great richness for me of the Williams book on Wilderness. So many new areas open up. Material on the American paradise mentality. Its great importance still. Moved by his deep sense of importance, spiritually, of conservationism. So many things click. Strongly tempted to write to him.
A very sweet letter from M. yesterday (F[east] of Dedication). “I am so ‘yours’ you couldn’t get rid of me if you tried …. Even if we wanted to (drop each other) God would somehow bury us together …. (We are) married in a strange way – we are, we really are.” Maybe we both protest a little too much, but I do think our love is deep, real, and lasting. It will have to last in a very strange way! But it will. I accept the fact and see that it is not something I have to struggle to put out of my heart.
Everything will adjust.
Yesterday once again I was going over the whole situation. Should we remain apart? etc. There are moments when it seems utterly wrong to be without her. Yet I know too that, whatever reasonable arguments one might dream up for it, it would be utterly wrong to leave here and drop everything in order to marry her. Neither of us has the strength to stand the pressure this would involve. And we both know it. Yet we love and we can’t help loving in our own poor way.
Renewed purpose on my part. I can’t even consider doing something that would have such disastrous effects for the community and above all for the hermit experiment – and probably for M. and myself too.
In any case I know in my heart that my true call is to solitude with God, however much I may love her. She knows this too.
The objective fact of my vows, more than a juridical obligation. It has deep personal and spiritual roots. I cannot be true to myself if I am not true to so deep a commitment.
Learning To Love Page 21
