Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (12 page)

And if it has been love at all, it will leave us alone and lost in the world once again when death closes over the relationship, still searching, still disappointed.

At most, there are two ways that can launch us into an experience of real love.

The first is a journey that takes ruthless self-criticism as its base. It means that, however long this relationship lasts, I must regularly ask myself whether or not I am really attending to the other. Do I hear the other and, most of all, do I respond? Have I tried to determine what it is that the other needs from me right now and then, if necessary, negotiate the giving of it? Am I really trying to come out of myself for the sake of the other?

The second consciousness of love is that the world is not a world of one—me. Love makes space for the insights of others, for the opinions of others, for the very separate goals and hopes of others who are also struggling both to be themselves and to enable the one they love to do the same.

As Anna Strong writes, “To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.”

Love is not a mold that makes two people the same person. Love is the dream that enables both of us to be our
own best person—together. Love knows that no one can fill up in us what we lack in ourselves. But coming to live what we know about love for the sake of the other, as well as for ourself, is the one thing that can possibly stop the restless sleep that comes with loneliness.

I am writing this in a tiny stone house at the top of a mountain. The line of sight to the bay below is unmarked by anything of human origin. There are a few sheep curling in and out of the harsh gray boulders that run down to the sea. Nothing else. It is a rare place.

We live in a very full world now and so, reflexively perhaps, cultivate a great, silent fear of the kind of separation a mountain and boulders can bring. We live in a society where houses stand cheek by jowl with other houses and, in apartment buildings, owners are separated from strangers only by one small, dull, gray door. We can drive from one small town to another for miles throughout the country and down the coasts and never know when one ends and the other begins. The major cities of the world and their greater metro areas hold two-thirds of the world’s population. They overflow with people. Tokyo, 37 million;
Delhi, 22 million; Mexico City, 20 million; New York, 20 million; Los Angeles, 14 million; Philadelphia and Houston, 5 million; Taipei, 2 million.

Silence is passé in this world. Isolation is impossible. Even to be on the streets in cities like these is a claustrophobic experience. I was caught in a slowly moving whirlpool of people in a blocks-long market in Taiwan one night. I was jostled along in the flow of the crowd, out of touch with the group with whom I’d come, and a bit panicked by the fact that there was apparently no way out of the moving mass. There were no exits, no crossroads, no boulevards, no lanes of traffic. Nothing but a swirl of anonymous humanity and I was being crushed in it.

No doubt about it. Separation—openness—a sense of physical distance between us, is a foreign phenomenon in this world. In this great mass of humanity in which we all now live like robots in motion, like giant power points tethered to an electronic world, we have learned to fear the thought of isolation. It is the abhorrence of being out of touch, alone, in such a world as this that haunts us. And yet, it may be a sense of void we need most if we ourselves are ever really to be full and fresh of soul again.

Trepidation of the hollow places of life underlies almost all of the agonies of soul with which we struggle. The separations that death brings; the separation that moving from one house, one city, one job brings; the separation from family that leaves us with a sense of total unconnectedness, even in the midst of the mass of stifling humanity. It’s then, when the world is still, that darkness brings a veritable experience of disconnection to haunt us with the
question of whether or not our private little worlds will survive the night. Will life as I know it with all its supports and guides be there for me tomorrow or not?

So full are we of the fullness around us that we miss the fullness of emptiness itself.

So accustomed have we become to the false fullness that comes with noise and the pressure of strange masses of people, the loss of physical space and the mental chaos that comes with unending technological availability, that we have lost our awareness of the gift of disjunction—of a sense of pure selfness—and the genuine fullness of soul it brings.

Separateness, the willingness to live inside ourselves rather than to live off the thoughts and words and chaos and clamor around us, heightens our very awareness of being alive. It brings our senses to the point of dry heat and laser acuity. For the first time, we are free to really see the world in which we live. We can suddenly hear what we have not been able to hear for years—our own thoughts, our personal concerns, our own ideas.

Once we eliminate distractions—idle and empty distractions—we have the opportunity to discover ourselves and all our lacks and limitations, all our strengths and certainties. Now nothing can edit them, nothing can damp them down but ourselves. There’s no one else to either edit them or repress them. There is no one whispering in our ear, tugging at our sleeve, insisting that we edit what we think. There is no one else now but ourselves to warn us against the demonic ideas within us.

Out here alone, we can decide to say aloud what, like
sandpaper, scratches at our souls. Or, we can simply exorcise them all ourselves. Out here in the spiritual-psychological desert alone, no one can deny us the right to determine exactly what they are, these words of mine, that may well shake the neighbors, the system, the family. That may well either cost me or cure me of my rejection of the self for the sake of the approval of others. In the emptiness there is only ourselves and the soft, quiet call of the Godness within us to depend on. It is the moment of maturation.

Separation removes us from the turmoil that blocks out both the unfinished business of the past and our own quiet but undeveloped hopes for the future. It is life in the present, whole and entirely our own. It enables us, finally, to ask and receive an answer to the question we fear more than any other: Who would I be if I ever became myself?

We’re concentrated now and free of spirit. We can finally be whoever we know to really be ourselves—whoever that is and whatever that means. With our souls focused on our own capacity for life and our senses detoxified of the extraneous, there is space now for newness, for I-ness, for the experience of being totally in charge of my own soul. I can attend it and shape it and claim it as my own.

Otherwise, what is there to depend on in the dark of the night when the questions are clearest and the doubts are close by? “Once conform,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. [It] becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

Dulled by the weight of bearing the ideas of others
rather than creating our own, callous to the meaning of them since we have not thought them through, indifferent to the effects of them since we take no personal responsibility for them, we become a mere shadow of a person, a cardboard cutout of the self. And without the experience of our own emptiness, we do not even know that we have allowed ourselves to become a nonperson. Then, at some crucial moment in our own development we are shocked to realize that we have not taken the time to examine the difference between what we say and what we think. Nor do we pursue the question of why we think what we think let alone of why there is a difference between what we think and what we say.

Unfortunately, when the questions come, in the middle of the night, they come to us. There is no one else there to answer them for us. Then we most need the fullness of the self.

“The best things and best people,” the poet Robert Frost wrote, “rise out of their separateness. I’m against an homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”

To think for ourselves, to separate ourselves from the ready-made thoughts around us—at least once a day—is to allow the cream to rise in us.

The first real jolt of it came on the lake. It was a mild evening, the water was still and shimmering. Every once in a while a fish jumped leaving ripple upon ripple for the world to see. Out near the trench where commercial boats trolled for the next day’s catch, I could see a field of small boats settled in to wait with them for the night feeding hours.

Our own boat barely moved in the quiet water. We each sat there in the silence of our selves, comfortable in our own small worlds, staring across the horizon into the declining sun. Every once in a while I heard a single call echo across the lake: “Anything hitting out here?” one voice called. “Yep, the perch,” someone called back. Not another word. Not another sound. The perfect night.

And then suddenly someone shattered the sundown like a world full of glass falling down a mountainside. A
larger boat came thundering down the lake, its outboard motors roaring. But it wasn’t the boat or its wake or the whirr of the motors that broke the night. Up on the bow, three boys sat carrying boom boxes on their shoulders, each of them playing a different piece of hard rock, loud, louder, as loud as it could possibly play. It was the blaring of land-side noise that blasphemed the night. It was the intrusion of one world on another that demonstrated the difference between them.

All that night I heard the sound of the rock beat in my head. All that night I contemplated the place of silence in a world filled with crushing sound.

The world is sopping with sound now. No place is safe from it anymore. It spills out of doorways and down halls and over streets until life itself becomes a cacophony of unrelated sounds. Music plays in doctors’ offices. Televisions and computers vie for attention in the same room. Talk shows invade every office waiting room, every taxicab ride, every airport boarding area, every mall and every restaurant. There is simply no place where a person can go and simply enjoy the silence.

And why should we? What good is the vacuum of solitude and silence?

There is a pathology of noise that drips into the soul in contemporary society until the soul simply disappears under the weight of it. Then there is only the shadow of a person left looking for itself. Sound drowns out thought until all we find within ourselves are questions where the cuttings of answers ought to have begun taking root.

The serenity that comes from solitude, in the silent
companionship of the self, fritters away. I have no memory of it. I only know what it means now to race from one group to another, leaving my unfinished self behind or always, always losing another bit of myself to the volume of undigested ideas around me.

The question that rankles the soul is a threatening one: Yes, yes, the soul says, but, in the end, what do I myself think? In fact, do I still think at all?

At night I search the darkness of my soul for other ways to be alive, for other ways to go through time, for other ways to claim my right to discover myself before I allow myself to be bought and sold again to the loudest groups around. In the dark, I wonder what positions to take, what way to go on an issue. And then I realize that I can’t make any real choices at all on anything until I have the quiet to consider for myself what I would really think about a thing—if I ever did.

It’s in solitude that I decide whether I really like myself or not. It’s easy to practice the fine art of fitting in, of course. What is difficult is to learn how to withhold myself from the dictates of the crowd enough before, unconsciously, I become them instead of me. And without even realizing it.

Solitude acquaints us with ourselves, with what we really think and deeply feel. Or, perhaps, do not feel at all. Then, it gives us the time to ask ourselves whether or not we should feel or think anything about this at all.

There are those, of course, who fear the silence of solitude. They find solitude depressing because they have learned to need noise to save them from themselves. For them, solitude has become a great empty space that is
full of nothing and gives nothing and promises nothing. But for those who practice the leisure that comes with solitude, solitude is a resting place for the soul. It brings respite, repose, quiescence. It allows the quiet that thinking demands.

Solitude enables us to bask in a world without clamor. It renders us capable of hearing the songs within us, of singing the songs within us, of writing the songs within us that wait to be discovered. It welcomes us to the world of contemplation.

“Language,” Paul Tillich wrote, “has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” That is the kind of glory crowds cannot give us but whose clamor does, indeed, in its own way demand the solitude it takes to be heard.

It’s easy to talk about “my life.” But actually that is only half the truth of what it means to be human. My life is actually lived on a teeter-totter poised somewhere between me and them. And therein lies the tension that so commonly troubles us in the deepest darkness of the night. Too often balancing the two—me and them—is an elusive art.

We love to be told that we are social beings, yes, but we also know deep in the core of us that we are not frantically social beings. Not only do we not need to be around people all the time, but we actually like to be alone much of the time. In fact, we often find life most difficult precisely when we are caught in crowds we cannot escape. The average human being—you and I, perhaps—is, in other words, also very private beings, not reclusively withdrawn but genuinely reserved, reflexively reticent, commonly restrained.