The hard thing is to write it without adding any rationalization, any explanation, any words about God. It is disastrous to speak of God. Yet not to speak of God means that nothing can be said. I mean about this thing. To know that under all these stars which He made (and that is in a way suddenly irrelevant) He is as small as myself and as present as myself and we are both nothing and both lonely. That both God and I are lost. And that this is the beginning of everything. And that I want you in on it. Be lost with the lost stars and fireflies. Maybe you are. Maybe somehow your love has brought this lostness upon us, me and God. Maybe it has all risen out of your own loneliness. Or maybe you have just forgotten us both. How can I say? I have no way of knowing. But I know that there really exists in the world such a thing as freedom, and dear, I want you to have it with me. I want so badly for you to have it with me.
(June 19, 1966)
I finished Sisyphus in a hurry, bored with its systematic aridity. It is inconclusive even in the thought of Camus himself, an essay, a note, a way station, and all that he proclaims in the middle of it about the “ethic of quantity” (finding meaning in the repetition of meaningless acts) is highly ambiguous because what he finds is precisely a hidden quality. Well, that’s that. I turn to something else.
To what? In the sweetness of the mild morning I am reached again by the insistence, the pathos, the loveliness of your love. Something I cannot describe or explain, that seeks me out, that reaches me with its gentle appeal. The message that comes saying “I need you, I love you.” How explain it and how doubt it? What is the use of an ethic and an aridity when this sweetness breaks through everything with another kind of victory? I love you as I always have, and perhaps more than ever in this inexpressible freedom and peace and certainty, on this level where no human force can get between us and no one can prevent us loving one another, not for anything we get out of it but purely because love is love and has been given us by God. And they cannot stop it. God made love, not death. Love is stronger than death. Our love is stronger than their denial of it. It always will be.
It is a strange thing: now that I cannot plan anything, or try anything, or seek in any way to contact you, your presence is more clear, more quiet, more constant, more assured. You are just “here,” as if God were saying: “You don’t need phones and letters any more – you are both dwelling in each others’ hearts, you are present to each other, you can speak without words, just by the mute movement of longing and of love.” You are present to me in a quiet, gentle pathos that is reassuring, appealing, comforting and mysterious all at the same time. That says “I do love you, I am loving you now, I am thinking of you now, I need you now.” And perhaps in your own heart I am present in the same way. That is where I want to be. If I am there, perhaps it explains the peace and the sort of empty, untroubled quiet that surrounds me here, where I seek nothing else, and am in need of nothing but God, and your nearness to me in Him. This solitude is now a thousand times more precious to me. In the monastery I would have to be busy with a dozen trivial and distracting things, acts, gestures, rites that might simply disturb and unsettle my emotions. And for nothing. Here, it is quiet, I am alone, we are alone together. The secret that we have needed has been granted to us, and it is very precious. I hope we will never lose it.
For some reason today I am no longer mad at the New Yorker ads (I have finished the first installment on China and don’t have the second). There was a real good double-spread long poem about a crazy house and it contained these touching lines:
Everyone has left me
except my muse
that good nurse.
She stays in my hand
Like a wild white mouse.
And the italics are in the original too. Dear, never leave me. Have you perhaps found out the art of being that mouse in the hermitage after all? You have been so close all morning, so quiet, so sweet, so gentle and so patient. How could I ever be without you?
I am tired. I only got about four hours sleep last night after all. Too tired to be mad at anything, resentful of anything, or to complain. I will just go down and say Mass, quietly, alone, not concelebrating, for us, for our needs, for our love, for our future, that we may always in some ineffable way be together merely by wanting to be. Perhaps if we are a little patient and stubborn about this magic it will work forever, until we meet in heaven and no more magic will be needed.
This evening in my conference (on the technological culture) I read a bit about some characters who, supported by two foundations, were bugging the last grizzly bears in the west with radios to find out about their lovemaking habits. When I had read this sardonic material I thought I saw some funny looks and some amusement: perhaps more people know my story than I realize. The smiles were in general sympathetic.
A long, silent afternoon, clouds, planes, trees, sun. Then I went down to give my conference, had supper, came back. I have no interest in being down there now that I can no longer use the phone. Wanted several times to call anyway but I knew it would be suicidal. Where is she? What is she thinking? It is terrible not to know what is going on. But apart from that – I don’t care about anything else. I am lonely for her, but that is only a partial loneliness and it does not alter the fact that it is part of a general loneliness that I have chosen. Or that has chosen itself for me. I can never be anything else than solitary. My loneliness is my ordinary climate. That I was allowed to have so many moments of complete accord and harmony and love with another person, with her, was simply extraordinary. I like people, but usually I am tired of being with others after about an hour. That I could be with her for hours and hours and not be tired for an instant of her – it was a miracle, but it did not mean that I was not essentially solitary.
Sunday Evening – Late
Same thing again. Can’t sleep. It makes no difference. I love the aloneness of the night. I have been lying thinking of you. In a way I cannot be without you: you are part of my life itself, and of my very loneliness. I know we are together in our hearts, have been for hours perhaps. Tonight my thoughts and loneliness have been tranquil, not dry and abstract like last night. Just as free, more free. To be alone in a solitude that is with you, though without your bodily presence, is certainly a special kind of freedom: as though we were even free of time and space, and could be together at will in our love, in all its simplicity. As though for me to be, even in lostness and isolation, were necessarily to be with you. I know we are very loved by God. This is a sign of it, really, that he lets us have this strange freedom that is so seemingly natural (because it is pure gift). Yet on the other hand (this was disturbing me last night when I was more tormented at first and more obsessed with your body) I honestly think that we were in a fair way to a kind of relationship in which we could have destroyed each other, if it had gone on without obstacle. Perhaps we still have to be careful of that – being overconfident is not a help. But I know – and have experienced it from the beginning: as long as we take this entirely on His terms and do not try to force our own conditions through, we will never break our hearts. We will be protected and guided. It seems awfully strange to love like this, in this way in which we do not really have much to say about how it will go (though maybe you have got me out of bed just by calling to me in the night) but it is sweet and wonderful, and it is worthy of everything that has happened to us since the beginning. I believe in it, though. It is the only way It is absolutely free of all care, at least for me, I don’t have to figure anything. (Though for a moment I was walking on the porch and heard cars over there on the road, and thought wildly of going off and getting a ride to town … Then what? But that is in me, too, the instinct to suddenly go and not know where or why I am going. But it has been a long time since I have been able to really live like that. The evening at the airport was an exception, a throwback to my natural self, the guy that used to vanish into the heart of France or Germany and just wander.)
You know, don’t you, that the Abbot will never again let me be hospitalized i
n St. Joe’s (Louisville)? Partly because he does not like to pay. But now he has the perfect excuse: danger of a woman. I doubt if he will ever let me go to a hospital in Louisville again, though maybe St. Anthony’s is still open, but he would then extract a solemn promise that I would not let you know etc. In my opinion, all my future hospital days will be in Lexington. Or God knows where. If you ever got a job in Bardstown and he knew it, it would be a disaster.
(June 20, 1966)
Finally got five hours of sleep or so. At the end I was dreaming that I was being hazed by Jesuits, as though in a sort of initiation into a fraternity into which I had no desire to be initiated. I can’t remember details of the dream, only that I seemed to be mixed up with a lot of people with whom I had nothing in common, that they resented me, and that they were trying to ridicule and discredit me. And I was thinking, “How did I get mixed up in all this?”
Solitude as act: the reason no one really understands solitude, or bothers to try to understand it, is that it appears to be nothing but a condition. Something one elects to undergo, like standing under a cold shower. Actually, solitude is a realization, an actualization, even a kind of creation, as well as a liberation of active forces within us, forces that are more than our own, and yet more ours than what appears to be “ours.” As a mere condition, solitude can be passive, inert, and basically unreal: a kind of permanent coma. One has to work at it to keep out of this condition. One has to work actively at solitude, not by putting fences around oneself but by destroying all the fences and throwing away all the disguises and getting down to the naked root of one’s inmost desire, which is the desire of liberty-reality. To be free from the illusion that reality creates when one is out of right relation to it, and to be real in the freedom which reality gives when one is rightly related to it.
Hence the need for discipline, for some kind of technique of integration that keeps body and soul together, harmonizes their powers, brings them into one deep resonance, orients the whole being toward the root of being. The need for a “way.” Presence, invocation, mantram, concentration, emptiness. All these are aspects of a realized solitude. Mere being alone is nothing. Or at least it is only a potential. Sooner or later he who is merely alone either rots or escapes.
The “active life” can in fact be that which is most passive: one is simply driven, carried, batted around, moved. The most desperate illusion and the most common one is just to fling oneself into the mass that is in movement and be carried along with it: to be part of the stream of traffic going nowhere but with a great sense of phony purpose. It is against this that I revolt. Because I revolt, my life at first must take on an aspect of total meaninglessness: the revenge of the social superego. The perception of the absurd. Freedom begins with the full acceptance of the absurd: the willingness to realize and experience one’s life as totally absurd – in relation to the apparent meaning which has been thrown over life by society, by illusion. But the experience of this absurdity is again only a potential. A starting point for a deeper realization: the realization of that root reality in myself and in all life which I do not know and cannot know. This implies the capacity to see that realizing and knowing are not the same. In realization, the reality one grasps, or by which one is grasped, is actualized in oneself and one becomes what one realizes, one is what he realizes. Knowing is just a matter of registering that something is objectively verifiable – whether one bothers to verify it or not. Realization is not verification but isness. For this, solitude is necessary, and solitude itself is the fullness of realization. In solitude I become fully able to realize what I cannot know.
It is for this that I have to give up everything else, have long ago given up everything else. If I could have both solitude and M. (it might be theoretically possible), then I would certainly take both. But as in concrete fact the issue becomes a choice: then I choose both in another form. She will be my love but in this absurd and special way: as part of the “realization” which is solitude. In a funny way this will, I think, give her own life a sort of new reality which it would not otherwise have, even though her way will be different from mine. Yet I think she will remain with me in this strange life of being alone – while grappling with her own strange aloneness in the midst of people. (An aloneness which she fights desperately and in vain.)
What does the lonely and absurd man have to teach others? Simply that being alone and absurd are not things to be feared. But these are precisely the two things that everybody fears: they spend all their time reassuring themselves that they make sense, that they are not ridiculous, that they are acceptable, desirable, valuable and that they will never have to regard themselves as really alone: in other words they plunge into the reassuring stream of illusions which is created by all the other people like themselves. A great common work, a liturgy, in which everyone agrees publicly to say that in these terms everything is real and makes sense. But the terms are not satisfactory. Everybody remains secretly absurd and alone. Only no one dares face the fact. Yet facing this fact is the absolutely essential requirement for beginning to live freely.
My apostolate: to realize that my life is absurd and not to care, to teach others that they do not have to care. But this has not been clear, for in fact I have spent too much time and effort in convincing others and even myself that all this makes sense. My work is in fact invalid in so far as it seems to make sense and in so far as it seems to say that solitude is something to be desired. Of course one has to make some kind of sense: I do not deny that I want to write coherently, in accord with a basic realization. But merely to spell out a logical message, or worse still a sales pitch for something spiritual, something religious, something “interior,” or worse still “monastic” … what a total waste. More than half my life and work have been wasted in this kind of thing.
Camus does not go far enough: he is both too western, too French and too post-Christian. He sets up absurdity as something to be faced with stoic bravery. Hence by implication something fearful. It is not fearful, it is just the ordinary stuff of life. And the life of Sisyphus is not that tragic (as Camus admits, “let us assume that Sisyphus is happy”), but there is still too much lip-smacking over the bitterness and futility of it. Futile? Life is not futile if you simply live it. It remains futile, however, as long as you keep watching yourself live it. And that is the old syndrome: keeping a constant eye on oneself and on one’s life, to make sure that the absurd is not showing, that one has company, that one is justified by the presence and support of all the others.
Note a false solitude can simply stand this on its head: to make sense by proclaiming oneself absurd (a more sophisticated way of evading absurdity) and to be willing to do without the presence of others, provided that one’s solitude is somehow admirable to a select few. These are the subterfuges of the idiot and the charlatan. I hope I am not doing this, but obviously to some extent I am. I will perhaps learn not to.
For all these reasons I am glad of my love for M., which adds a special note of absurdity and therefore of reality to my professed “solitude.” It is in many ways the best thing that could have happened. But I do not value our love for that: what a betrayal that would be! I value it because of her. Her own solitude and uniqueness, in a sense her helpless appeal to my own solitude, and her intuitive acceptance of my absurdity as a value because it is mine: as something of inexhaustible meaning for her. This is the victory over death – and we must keep this alive in each other. Flawed though we are, we are also authentic enough and wounded enough to be intent on this, intent enough to keep it up in the depths of our being. And to learn from this, in a hard way, that infidelity cannot be excused by appeals to the “absurd,” because you can’t have it both ways.
The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word “not absurd.” Yet this self is by definition isolated from other selves, it affirms itself by its egohood, by being “not the others” and b
y being alone.
At this point the beauty of the dilemma and of the joke begins to appear. To be “not the others” is to be “not like the others” and to be unlike the others is to be absurd. But to be like the others is impossible because concealing at all costs one’s aloneness in order not to appear absurd. What then? Do I save my soul by learning to affirm it courageously in the midst of absurdity? By determining to “be alone” in the sense of “standing alone” on the acceptance of my own absurdity? This is not it, only a potential.
One only ceases to be absurd when he ceases to take seriously the affirmation of the self that is unique (even though it is in its own way unique). The uniqueness is not to be taken seriously. To take oneself with unique seriousness is to be absurd. But this is original sin: it cannot be avoided. Salvation becomes then a bitter joke, a gamble with the absurdity of a pure contradiction: rescuing and making sense out of what is not really insecure, as provisional, and as absurd. Try to make what is essentially absurd and provisional, absolute and final, totally unique and serious. What do you get? The pure absurdity of hell. One only ceases then to be absurd when, realizing that everything is absurd when seen in isolation from everything else, meaning and value are sought only in wholeness. The solitary who merely stands apart trying to make sense out of himself is still lost, perhaps worse than the others. The solitary must therefore return to the heart of life and oneness, losing himself not in the massive illusion but simply in the root reality. Where does he encounter this? In the heart of his own absurdity, but only by plunging through the center of his own nothingness and coming out in the All which is the Void and which is if you like the Love of God.
Learning To Love Page 41
