'Our whole eunuch civilisation': The horse in 'St. Mawr' by D. H. Lawrence (1925)

Louise is a married woman who calls herself "the harem type" insofar as she is given to relaxation, "only I never want the men inside the lattice." One day, she spies the stallion St. Mawr, an animal intended to be used as a stud but who reportedly didn't "seem to fancy the mares for some reason," and, "already half in love," she wants to buy him for her husband Rico.

"He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive."

A man warns her:

"...every horse is temperamental, when you come down to it. But this one, it is as if he was a trifle raw somewhere. Touch this raw spot, and there's no answering for him. ... If he was a human being, you'd say something had gone wrong in his life. But with a horse it's not that, exactly. A high-bred animal like St. Mawr needs understanding, and I don't know as anybody has quite got the hang of him. I confess I haven't myself."

Lou sees it:

"Not any raw spot at all. A battle between two worlds. She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico's, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr's world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hippolytus, had known it.

"With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sensitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed.–"Meet him half-way," Lewis said. But half-way across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step. It was a step, she knew, that Rico could never take. She knew it. But she was prepared to sacrifice Rico."

Lou swears that she doesn't want "intimacy," that she is "too tired of it all."

"I love St. Mawr because he isn't intimate. He stands where one can't get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That's the mystery. That great burning life in him, which never is dead. Most men have a deadness in them, that frightens me so, because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St. Mawr, and then think?"

She says: "I want the wonder back again, or I shall die."

St. Mawr becomes a tragic figure. A character named Phoenix reports hearing someone say "cut him – else shoot him. Think they cut him – and if he die, he die." St. Mawr is too old to geld. Lou cannot believe it.

"Do you think it is true?" she asked. "Lewis? Do you think they would try to geld St. Mawr – to make him a gelding?" Lewis looked up at her. There was a faint deadly glimmer of contempt on his face.

"Very likely, Mam," he said.

She was afraid of his cold, uncanny pale eyes, with their uneasy grey dawn of contempt. These two men, with their silent, deadly inner purpose, were not like other men. They seemed like two silent enemies of all the other men she knew. Enemies in the great white camp, disguised as servants, waiting the incalculable opportunity. What the opportunity might be, none knew.

Lou resisted the news: "You know, I can't believe it. I can't believe Sir Henry would want to have St. Mawr mutilated. I believe he'd rather shoot him." The horse's buyer, a Miss Manby, reportedly asked – in Lewis's words – about gelding the difficult animal to "make a horse of him."

Lou watches the horse:

She could see St. Mawr himself, alone as usual, standing with his head up, looking across the fences. He was streaked dark with rain. Beautiful, with his poised head and massive neck and his supple hindquarters. He was neighing to Poppy. Clear on the wet wind came the sound of his bell-like, stallion's calling, that Mrs. Vyner called cruel. It was a strange noise, with a splendour that belonged to another world age. The mean cruelty of Mrs. Vyner's humanitarianism, the barren cruelty of Flora Manby, the eunuch cruelty of Rico. Our whole eunuch civilisation, nasty-minded as eunuchs are, with their kind of sneaking, sterilising cruelty.

Yet even she herself, seeing St. Mawr's conceited march along the fence, could not help addressing him:

'Yes, my boy! If you knew what Miss Flora Manby was preparing for you! She'll sharpen a knife that will settle you.'

Not only the animal and human world, but the plants as well, suffer from this enervation.

"The very apples on the trees looked so shut in, it was impossible to imagine any speck of 'Knowledge' lurking inside them. Good to eat, good to cook, good even for show. But the wild sap of untameable and inexhaustible knowledge – no! Bred out of them. Geldings, even the apples."

She imagines telling Miss Manby:

"...you may have my husband, but not my horse. My husband won't need emasculating, and my horse I won't have you meddle with. I'll preserve one last male thing in the museum of this world, if I can."

She thinks of Lewis:

"In spite of the fact that in actual life, in her world, he was only a groom, almost chétif, with his legs a little bit horsy and bowed; and of no education, saying 'Yes, Mam!' and 'No, Mam!' and accomplishing nothing, simply nothing at all on the face of the earth. Strictly a nonentity."

And yet she has also seen that Lewis inhabits "another world, silent, where each creature is alone in its own aura of silence, the mystery of power: as Lewis had power with St. Mawr, and even with Phoenix."

Quotes about loving the stranger and the 'other'

Nick Shere:

"Terrorist action is only possible for someone who can look at another person, or think of another person, and say honestly, 'This is a person I do not love. This is a person I do not care about. This is someone whose existence in the world does not matter to me.' And, likewise, I would say that it is impossible for someone to act as a terrorist toward someone they can say honestly, 'This is a person I love. This is a person I care about. This is someone whose existence in the world matters to me.' ... Love is our defense against the terrorist within, and a necessary prerequisite for our struggle against the terrorist among us."

Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel:

"Most of our hatred is directed toward strangers. 'I hate that stranger because of this or that.' The funny thing is, strangers, people you have never met, are recognized as being a part of your life when you spend time hating them. The recognition itself comes from your nature of being love. Many years ago, while waiting for a commute train, I once heard a young teen yell out, 'I hate fat people.' I looked around because she was loud. And when her eyes glared at me, I realize she was directing her hatred towards me. And that's how I found out that some people saw me as fat at that time. Of course in the moment of the incident I began to hate the young teen because she was loud and rude. But mostly because she had hurt my feelings, she had tapped into this deep psychic wound I had at that time in my life. And yet, that encounter was an example that in our hating we recognize other living beings as part of our life. The recognition is love itself, but a love that is buried beneath the suffering. Mind you, I am not saying that the words of the young teen were an expression of love. Quite the contrary, her words were a distortion of the love she could not feel for herself. She had to hate me to feel love for herself – even though it was not the deep loving nature of her heart. It was a distortion, twisting in her mind, from her own struggle to remain 'thin,' erasing any kindness towards herself and others."

Daniel Condron:

"Love is an excellent word to receive insight about during meditation. Meditating upon love is the key to a person fulfilling desires of the Self. Love removes the selfishness, the greed, and the taking thoughts and attitudes from a person. In their place, love offers free giving, free and open receiving, caring, concern, friendliness, joy, happiness, abundance, and prosperity. When one is giving freely, without restriction, then the mind and Self are free to receive from the bounties of the Universe. The Universe has no limitations."

Sources

Nick Shere, "Love must guide us on our path to justice and action," Brown Daily Herald, Monday, September 24, 2001.

Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel. Be Love: An Exploration of Our Deepest Desire. Smashwords, 2012.

Daniel Condron, Superconscious Meditation: Kundalini and the Understanding of the Whole Mind. Windyville, Missouri: SOM Publishing, 1998. pp. 4-5.

No limit to the light that we share

The world begins in darkness.

Andrew Taylor:

"I had forgotten how dark it can be in the country. It’s never dark in London. I’ve always been a city-dweller. There were neither stars nor a moon. The torch beam shone directly in front of me, illuminating the surface of the road. It gave off such an inadequate and partial light that it had the paradoxical effect of emphasizing the darkness rather than dispelling it."

When we share the world, it lights up.

Rollo May:

"On this dimension, will enters the picture not as a denial of wish but as an incorporation of wish on a higher level of consciousness. The experiencing of the blue of the sky behind forsythia blossoms on the simple level of awareness and wish may bring delight and the desire to continue or renew the experience; but the realization that I am the person who lives in a world in which flowers are yellow and the sky so brilliant, and that I can even increase my pleasure by sharing this experience with a friend, has profound implications for life, love, death, and the other ultimate problems of human existence."

When it lights up, there is no limit.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world."

Sources

Andrew Taylor. The Leper House. Kindle Single, 2014.

Rollo May. Love and Will. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. p. 267.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wind, Sand and Stars. (1939) Translated into English by Lewis Galantiere. London: The Folio Society, 1990. p. 159.

What is love? Love is everything.

Jay Michaelson:

As has been observed since a seminal 1939 book by Anders Nygren, the Greek word used in the New Testament for love is agape, not eros.

Love is sometimes given because someone deserves it, but sometimes it is given regardless of whether someone deserves it. Both kinds of love are necessary.

Nietzsche wrote: "Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover – what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it can easily deceive as to what is normal in him." A competing view from Fr. Charles Curran is that one can give love regardless of whether the person is deserving of the attention: "[Agape is] the loving concern which is a total giving independent of the lovable qualities of the other." One might imagine that such love does not necessarily bring to light any "exalted," supra-normal qualities – but, on the other hand, it may bring to light some "concealed" qualities.

Nicolas Berdyaev described agape as a love that moves "downward," perhaps meaning toward the more humble and vulnerable.

All love brings new sufferings with it, and at the same time only love conquers suffering. It is divine-human love which conquers. Eros love has endless suffering in it; there is an element of insatiability in it. Love which is agape, the love which moves downward, not upward, does not include infinite craving. For this reason the two sorts of love ought to be combined, otherwise fullness is not attained.

William Ian Miller:

Passionate sexual love seems to set the standard [for the definition of love] – at least for the past eight hundred years in the West it has. Love worth having is Eros with a little philia thrown in; agape is for when you are older and need to do penance for Eros.

Christopher Phillips:

...Socrates, along with most of his fellow Athenians — until the polis entered a period of irreversible decline in his adult years — was informed and inspired by five types of love: eros; storge (familial-type love); xenia (“stranger love”); philia (communal and friendship-based love); and agape (self-sacrificial and even unconditional love). Socrates showed that there were no tidy divides between these forms of love; he acted in the world from the premise that one could not remake oneself, one’s society, one’s universe if one did not harness all these types of love in concert.

The Monks of New Skete:

The ancient Greeks had many different words for what we call love, each word touching on a different aspect of the reality. Agape means the benevolent love of a person as a human being, agapetos is the beloved, agapenor is to love in a strong, virile way, philia is love as friendship and affection, eros is driving, passionate love, imeros is the craving and obsession one has for someone who is present, storge is the love one has for blood relatives, philostorgos is tender love and affection, just to mention some.

The novelist Michael Novak:

‘Love is everything,’ said the old priest slowly. ‘Love purifies, love liberates. It frees men and makes them expand. It is tender because it springs from pain. It enlarges the beloved and the lover. It makes both realize how beautiful they are. It makes them throw their heads back with pride, look into the sky, forget their fears and loneliness and insecurity. Love somebody and see the difference it makes to him. And to you. See the suffering it brings.’ The old man’s voice spoke the words distinctly, slowly, almost laboriously. ‘You can love when you cannot feel. When you cannot think. When you cannot find God, you can always find your fellows. Even in your sleep you can love. Riccardo, you can take love as a star on the darkest nights. It is a borrowed light, not intellectual and clear, but sure and full of harmony. Love, and your life is worth its pain. Do not love, and you run counter to the universe.’

Love sometimes calls in pain rather than harmony between people. But love itself is harmony. It is essential to our universe.

Sources

Jay Michaelson. God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. p. 12.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 163

Fr. Charles Curran, quoted in Michael Dennock's Moral Problems: What Does a Christian Do? Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. p 61.

Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p 84.

William Ian Miller. Faking It. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p 181.

Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 14.

The Monks of New Skete. In the Spirit of Happiness. New York: Little, Brown, and Co. 1999. p 243.

Michael Novak, The Tiber Was Silver, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co, 1961. p. 170.

Projecting our needs onto nature

Do we perceive ourselves as being protected by nature? Or does nature represent something that can all too easily be destroyed? Or something that is ever-changing and into which we dissolve? What beauty is there?

Robert Bly:

What does it mean to say: ‘The Goddess does not love us anymore?’ As more and more species become extinct, as the rainforests burn, and the groundwater is polluted, we feel unprotected. People in the nineteenth century experienced a tremendous sense of unprotection, from lawlessness, from fires or storms or plagues; and yet the net of nature seemed to hold them. Nature, in a way, was the Virgin Mary, who held people on her lap.

But we are people pushed off the lap. The younger generation, by and large, does not feel protected by nature anymore. Most of them are urban, and the urban life is to them part of a death culture.

Chloe Aridjis:

...the message they [clouds] offer: all structures are collapsible. Just look at their own existence, condemned to rootlessness and fragmentation. Each cloud faces death through loss of form, drifting towards its death, some faster than others, destined to self-destruct before it reaches the other end of the horizon. After living in the times I've lived in, you create your own concept of flux. Without sounding too simplistic, meteorology helped me understand–and maybe even cope with–recent history, before and after nineteen-eighty-nine. The fogs of time and all the obfuscation that surrounds them.

Fernando Pessoa:

Who will save me from existence? It isn't death I want, or life: it's the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach. It's the whole weight and pain of this real and impossible universe, of this sky, of this standard borne by some unknown army, of these colours that grow pale in the fictitious air, out of which there emerges in still, electric whiteness the imaginary crescent of the moon, silhouetted by distance and indifference.

Sources

Robert Bly, in Robert Bly and Marion Woodman. The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. p. 110.

Chloe Aridjis. Book of Clouds. New York: Black Cat, 2009. p. 62.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 73.

Nature: Matter or mater?

In which of the two senses – "matter" or mater – are you a "materialist"?

Mark Corner:

[Anthropomorphized images of God] may lead us to undervalue the significance of the impersonal. ... [I wonder] whether there isn't a link between [Western] neglect of the physical environment...and a tendency to relate to God simply as a "person out there", unconnected to anything as "denigrating" as matter.

Pope John Paul II:

Moreover, once all reference to God has been removed, it is not surprising that the meaning of everything else becomes profoundly distorted. Nature itself, from being "mater" (mother), is now reduced to being "matter", and is subjected to every kind of manipulation. This is the direction in which a certain technical and scientific way of thinking, prevalent in present-day culture, appears to be leading when it rejects the very idea that there is a truth of creation which must be acknowledged, or a plan of God for life which must be respected. Something similar happens when concern about the consequences of such a "freedom without law" leads some people to the opposite position of a "law without freedom", as for example in ideologies which consider it unlawful to interfere in any way with nature, practically "divinizing" it. Again, this is a misunderstanding of nature's dependence on the plan of the Creator. Thus it is clear that the loss of contact with God's wise design is the deepest root of modern man's confusion, both when this loss leads to a freedom without rules and when it leaves man in "fear" of his freedom.

By living "as if God did not exist", man not only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also of the mystery of the world and the mystery of his own being.

James Hillman said the matter/mater verbal similarity is "neither a coincidence nor a joke," and Patrick Harpur expanded on this:

...although in one sense materialism represented the successful reduction of Dame Kind to the soulless machinery of matter, in another sense it was itself the successful ambush of rationalism by the ‘mother’ it had spurned — the etymological connection between the Latin mater, mother, and materia, matter, ‘is neither a coincidence nor a joke’.

Susan Griffin:

To be made an object is in itself a humiliation. To be made a thing is to become a being without a will...But to this degradation, the reduction of a whole being with a soul to mere matter, we must add the knowledge that matter itself is despised, and hated in its very essence. We read, for instance, in the phrase 'to feel like shit,' the quintessence of humiliation. For in the pornographic culture, humiliation emanates from the material.

Edward Abbey:

You call me, sir, a rank materialist – sir, I accept the appellation, and I accept with pride, sir, and glory. Never shall this flower of the spirit reject the good earth from which it grows – never shall I live in an alabaster spirit-city, separated from my mother by concrete or gold, by white robes, ineffables, or multicolored sewage and communication systems, not this n-----, no sir!

Or, a third option: measured?

Robert Anton Wilson:

It has often been observed that there is marked similarity between the words for matter in Indo-European languages (Latin materium, French matiere, etc.) and the words for measurement (French metre, English measure, etc.). More interestingly, both groups seem to relate to the words for mother (Latin mater, German mutter, French mere).

Carol S. Pearson:

There is a profound disrespect for human beings in modern life. Business encourages us to think of ourselves as human capital. Advertising appeals to our fears and insecurities to try to get us to buy products we do not need. Too many religious institutions teach people to be good but do not help them know who they are. Too many psychologists see their job as helping people learn to accommodate to what is, not to take their journeys and find out what could be. Too many educational institutions train people to be cogs in the economic machine, rather than educating them about how to be fully human.

Basically, we are viewed as products or commodities, to be either sold to the highest bidder or improved so that eventually we will be more valuable. Neither view respects the human soul or the human mind except as used as an acquisitive tool. As a consequence, people increasingly are disrespectful of themselves. Too many of us seek to fill our emptiness with food, or drink, or drugs, or obsessive and frantic activity. The much-lamented pace of modern life is not inevitable – it is a cover for its emptiness. If we keep in motion, we create the illusion of meaning.

Christopher Phillips:

"Many of the most barbaric acts in human history were carried out by those moved by what they deemed unalloyed, sublime spirituality. Perhaps if their spiritual and sensual sides had been cultivated in tandem, as Socrates modeled and exhorted, they might have acted with more humanity."

Also:

Leah Penniman:

“Enslaved Black folks carried on their earth-based religious traditions, even as they syncretized with white Christianity.” However, “the religion of enslaved Africans did not differentiate material and spiritual reality as sharply as white Christianity did. Spirits inhabit the world alongside people, plants, and animals, rather than transcending it, making humans therefore part of nature.”

Also:

Chris Clarke:

"Interaction within a network including the perspectives of animal and of non-living systems is an essential part of the stability of our world. Yet here Heron follows the experience of Abram (1997), that this interaction [with an object, such as a person gazing on a bowl] can be a ‘reciprocity,’ in being perceived as having the same empathic character as our interactions with other people. ... Participation at this level suggests that we can play a role with other objects in negotiating their appearance, just as in conversation or communion with another person we negotiate our joint way of being."

Clive Barker:

"They had methods of interrogation, he knew, even with dead people. They'd lay him in an ice room and examine him minutely, and when they'd studied him from the outside they'd start looking at his inside, and oh! what things they'd find. They'd saw off the top of his skull and take out his brain; examine it for tumors, slice it thinly like expensive ham, probe at it in a hundred ways to find out the why and how of him. But that wouldn't work, would it? He, of all people, should know that. You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it. No, they'd get nothing from his brain, they'd have to look further than that. They'd have to unzip him from neck to pubis, snip his ribs and fold them back. Only then could they unravel his guts, and rummage in his stomach, and juggle his liver and lights. There, oh yes, there, they'd find plenty to feast their eyes on."

Thomas Moore:

If things have soul, then they can also suffer and become neurotic: such is the nature of soul. Care of the soul therefore entails looking out for things, noticing where and how they are suffering, seeing their neuroses, and nursing them back to health. Robert Sardello suggests that a building have a resident therapist to take care of it in its suffering. He is not talking about care for the human residents, but for the building itself. His suggestion implies that we don't usually concern ourselves with the state of things, and tolerate much more ugliness and neglect in the things of our society than we should endure. We don't seem to realize how much our own pain reflects the diseases of our things.
* * *
Houses are boarded up, windows are smashed, wood is rotting, weeds have grown wild. We behold such a scene and think, the solution is to solve the problem of poverty. But why not feel for the things themselves. We are seeing things in a suffering condition — sick, broken, and dying. The disease before us is our failure in relation to the world. What is it in us that can allow the things of the world to become so distressed and to show so many symptoms without a nursing response from us? What are we doing when we treat things so badly?
* * *
When our citizens spray-paint a trolley or subway or a bridge or a sidewalk, clearly they are not just angry at society. They are raging at things.
* * *
We are also angry at things that we feel no longer serve us. Many of the rusting objects that pollute our city streets are outmoded or no longer functioning tools. If we define a thing only in terms of its function, when it no longer functions we have no feeling for it. We discard it without a proper burial. And yet old things eventually reveal that they hold a great deal of soul. I live among many small old New England farms and frequently see, for example, an old horse-drawn rake sitting beautifully in a pasture, or an old barn leaning into the wind, or the shell of a once stately house transformed now into a splendid ruin. These bits of evidence of past times seem literally to glow with soul.
J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay 'The Necessity for Ruins.' Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption. In other words, our things, like us, have to die. We pretend to make things that will last forever, but we know that everything has a definite lifespan.

Abraham Heschel:

There is no equivalent for the word ‘thing’ in biblical Hebrew. The word ‘davar,’ which in later Hebrew came to denote thing, means in biblical Hebrew: speech; word; message; report; tidings; advice; request; promise; decision; sentence; theme, story; saying, utterance; business, occupation; acts; good deeds; events; way, manner, reason, cause; but never ‘thing.’ Is this a sign of linguistic poverty, or rather than indication of an unwrapped view of the world, of not equating reality (derived from the Latin word res, thing) with thinghood?

Naomi Klein:

Performing and partitioning and projecting are the individual steps that make up the dance of avoidance. What is being avoided? I think it’s our true doppelganger. What Daisy Hildyard calls our “second body,” the one enmeshed with wars and whales, the one benefiting from the genocides of the past and adding our little drops of poison to the great die-offs of the future. The second body that perpetually mines the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences.

Sources

Mark Corner, Does God Exist? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. p. 79

John Paul II. Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life]. Papal Encyclical, Rome, March 25, 1995. Official Vatican English translation. 1.22

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, New York, 1979. p. 69.

Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (2002). Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. p. 54.

Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence, quoted by Starhawk, Truth or Dare, p 163

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p 54

Robert Anton Wilson. Coincidance: A Head Test. (1988) Temple, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1996. p 38.

Carol S. Pearson. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. p. 4.

Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 52.

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023.

Chris Clarke. “Construction and reality: reflections on philosophy and spiritual/psychotic experience.” Printed in Psychosis and Spirituality: Exploring the New Frontier. ed. Isabel Clarke. London and Philadelphia: Whurr, 2001. pp. 156-157.

Clive Barker. The Damnation Game. (1985) New York: Charter Books, 1988. pp. 86-87.

Thomas Moore. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. (1992) New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. pp. 272-3, 273-274, 274, 275.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Thinking out of the box

“There are no right answers to wrong questions,” said Ursula K. LeGuin. If our questions are wrong, there is a need to alter the entire framework of the way we investigate the world. Hayden Carruth wrote: “William Blake once remarked that he had to create his own system of thought in order to avoid being enslaved by those of others, and Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”

Sometimes the "wrong questions" are promoted with the intention of suppressing the thought of others. Sometimes they have this effect accidentally, originating only out of the vanity of philosophers. Rollo May: "The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written – the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige."

Getting out of the box and helping others to do so is hard work. After all, as a Yiddish proverb had it: "Not everyone is happy with his appearance, but all are happy with their brains!" We must remember it starts with thinking differently. "We are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try," as Donna Haraway put it, "to strike up noninnocent conversations."

Sources

Ursula K. LeGuin, quoted in The Village Voice, quoted in The Week, June 7, 2013, p. 19.

Hayden Carruth's introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 69.

Yiddish Proverb. Quoted by Rabbi Nilton Bonder. The Kabbalah of Envy: Transforming Hatred, Anger, and other Negative Emotions. Boston: Shambhala, 1997. p. 40.

Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective." Feminist Studies, 14:575-99, p 593-94. Quoted in "Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology" by Karen J. Warren and Jim Cheney, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, ed. Karen J. Warren, Indiana University Press, 1996. p 257.

Image

Crazy quilt in support of President Cleveland and Vice President Thomas Hendricks (American, 1880s). Public domain. From FolkArtMuseum.org and Wikimedia Commons.