The Path of the Warrior

Perceval arrives at the Grail Castle, to be greeted by the Fisher King. From a 1330 CE manuscript of Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, BnF Français 12577, fol. 18v.

Have you ever felt tired of fighting for something you strongly believe in and from which you will not benefit in any concrete way, but which in return will bring you tons of controversies, attacks, and blame? This is a feeling common to many idealists, poets, philosophers, and even ordinary people who simply love their country, its culture, and identity, and want a better, brighter future for themselves and their families—conservatives usually refer to these people as “patriots,” because they “put their country first.” Well, I’ve always thought that what keeps you from giving up is not as much the hatred or despise of the enemy, which these days is more powerful and treacherous than ever, as it is the love for what you believe in. “The true soldier,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Hate and contempt can bring only more hate and contempt, while Love not only never fails, as Paul the Apostle reminds us, but it never ceases to be constructive and creative.

Love is the foundation of everything good and worthwhile, and therefore not only of peace, harmony, and unity, but also of division, disagreement, and war, of any kind—including the political, ideological, and cultural ones—when there is no honorable and just alternative to it, as well as to division and disagreement. I myself am at war, a cultural, philosophical, and political one, as my readers and social media followers know very well, but I don’t hate anybody. We all know that many politically engaged people hate their opponents, often without even understanding them, their beliefs, and their values. Nothing more aberrant, politically speaking. Again, I don’t hate my opponents, but I definitely hate what they stand for, and this just because I understand them. It is a complete reversal of perspective. As it is explained in the Bhagavad-gita, the way of the warrior is that of those who are “situated in the mode of goodness,” who neither “hate inauspicious work,” that is the unavoidable harshness of war, nor are “attached to auspicious work,” namely personal benefits of any kind for themselves (or their friends, relatives, and loved ones). It is not an easy path, nor is it a free one, that’s for sure.

That being said, and bearing in mind that what is at stake in today’s world is nothing less than the future of Western civilization as we know it, our traditional values and moral standards, the principles upon which our democracies are based, especially the worldview behind the architecture of the U.S. Constitution, let’s get a little bit more into the matter of how our engagement in whatever fight—especially in the above mentioned one, which is particularly subtle, and consequently insidious—has to be managed.

Let me say first that in my view this is something that must be approached sideways, like a crab. War and peace—and fight and surrender, struggle and cooperation, etc.—are not primary phenomena, basis phenomena, that explain themselves but are secondary and dependent upon various determining factors. What comes first is that we are, we exist, as human beings, and that we think. And what and how we think is the fundamental issue and the single most determining factor of who we are. Everything else, no matter how important, comes later. One of the most relevant insights on this aspect of the problem is from Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” Besides being a self-admonishment, this quote explains what the mind is all about.

Bust of Marcus Aurelius
Glyptothek Munich

The great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher also gave us the following advice: “Honor that which is greatest in the world—that on whose business all things are employed and by whom they are governed. And honor what is greatest in yourself: the part that shares its nature with that power. All things—in you as well—are employed about its business, and your life is governed by it.” Now, if you honor something, you esteem it as being precious, and therefore you are inescapably inclined to devote no small part of your time and thoughts to it and to immerse yourself in the contemplation of its beauty and greatness. And that’s exactly what you need to allow yourself to reach your full potential and be your very best. Think big, think high, and you’ll become what you are meant to be. You’ll become yourself. If you think small, you get small, if you think big, you get big. Paraphrasing a famous quote from 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, we should stop thinking so small, because we are the universe in ecstatic motion. But if we stop thinking small, we’ll also start acting big. As the full original quote from Rumi reads,

Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

Jalal al-din Rumi 

The path of the warrior consists exactly in this—that you put your mind and heart where they truly belong, in the heart of the universe, and that you put your actions where your heart and mind are. We are where we belong, we are the universe in ecstatic motion. Setting your life on fire means finding your true self, understanding who you are. Surrounding yourselves with people who can see the greatness within you and who fan your flames may be of great help, but that’s not a conditio sine qua non in my judgment, you can do it alone as well.

Finally, a word on “the enemy,” that is, those without whom this book would never have been written—and the earth would not be the earth… Warriors must know their enemy—their mindsets, their tactics, their strategies, their strengths, and more importantly, their weaknesses—before they get into battle position. Vaste programme, as war hero and former French President Charles de Gaulle was fond of saying, especially if we think that the enemy I am referring to is, metaphorically speaking, what we call evil... Fortunately, British philosopher and writer Roger Scruton provided us with a great insight into this matter (A Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London 2006, pp. 176-177):

[W]e distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. The bad person is like you or me, only worse. He belongs in the community even if he behaves badly towards it. We can reason with him, improve him, come to terms with him and, in the end, accept him. He is made, like us, from the 'crooked timber of humanity'.

There is a certain kind of person who is bad but not bad in that simple and comprehensible way – and he provides a paradigm of evil, and a justification for our use of the word. The kind of person I have in mind is one who does not belong in the community, even if he resides within its territory. His bad behaviour may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with him will be, on his part, a pretence. There is, in him, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and even if we think of him as human, his faults are not of the normal, remediable, human variety, but have another and more metaphysical origin. He is a visitor from another sphere, an incarnation of the Devil. Even his charm – and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming – is only further proof of his Otherness. He is, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that he seeks to destroy.

That characterization of evil is summarized in the famous line that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint (I am the spirit that forever negates).

This is a preview of the introduction (or maybe the first chapter) of my next book, which is in progress.

Farewell, Sir Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton died last Sunday after a six-month battle with cancer. His death is a terrible, grievous loss and a huge blow to the cultural life of the Western world. His intellectual and spiritual legacy ranges far beyond the limits of political philosophy to include both the elevated realms of religion, aesthetics, and history of art and architecture and the more concrete concerns of social justice, economic growth, environmentalism, etc. As a matter of fact, Scruton’s conservatism was a vision of modern Western life as a condition of profound spiritual alienation. For example, as Michael Severance recalled a couple of days ago on the Acton Institute blog, he thought that contemporary Western civilization had virtually foregone its dedication to true forms of beauty... In fact, unlike in previous centuries, in these days art follows disturbing patterns inspired by the artists’ own navel-gazing proclivities for randomness, egoism, superficiality or mere practicality. This was the very source of ugliness that repulsed Sir Roger, since “such bad art—if one could even call it art—did not reflect the depth and breadth of the human spirit. True art forms should and could attempt to imitate God’s creative genius with man’s highest aesthetic expressions.” In his famous and wonderful BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters, he spoke bluntly about “the uglification of man’s own natural artistic ecosystem,” that is, neighborhoods and workplaces being erected and maintained by those who he vilified as vandals of the arts. “Everywhere you turn,” he explained, “there is ugliness and mutilation. The offices and bus station have been abandoned; the only things at home here are the pigeons fouling the pavements. Everything has been vandalized but we shouldn’t blame the vandals. [They were] built by vandals and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

Roger Scruton also saw the decline of faith and morals as the regrettable consequence of modernity, the result of the Enlightenment privileging of scientific knowledge over religious and moral truth. As he once wrote (“The Sacred and the Secular”), ‘I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.’ Not by chance, perhaps none, in modern times, has done more to defend a vision of the West as a Christian civilization—which of course, along with other factors, brought him powerful enemies and some troubles, especially in the final phase of his life. And that’s exactly what I want to talk about here: how his enemies tried to get rid of him (without success, or with partial success). This is my way to pay a humble tribute to an extraordinary man of intellect and a great warrior of the spirit who was never afraid to be unapologetically himself and to pay the price for his convictions.

In November 2018 his fiercest opponents tried and failed to remove him from his role as the chairman of the UK Government’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission. But they succeeded a few months later, in April 2019, under false pretenses. What happened can be summarized as follow. Sir Roger gave an interview to the New Statesman. George Eaton, the left-wing magazine’s deputy editor, who personally conducted the interview, included this summary paragraph: ‘His sacking was unsuccessfully demanded by Labour MPs and others on account of his past remarks on Hungarian Jews (part of a “Soros empire”), Islamophobia (a “propaganda word”) and homosexuality (“not normal”).’ Eaton also summarized another part of his interview this way: ‘Perhaps most remarkably, he commented of the rise of China: “They’re creating robots out of their own people… each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.”’ In addition, he thought it best to tweet this: ‘In an NS interview, the government adviser and philosopher Roger Scruton has made a series of outrageous remarks. On Hungarian Jews: “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.”’ And soon after the interviewee was sacked as a Tory government adviser, Eaton posted to his Instagram account a picture of himself swigging from a bottle of champagne, to celebrate the fate of ‘the right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton’.

As a matter of fact, however, if Scruton said that Islamophobia is ‘a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’, he was perfectly right. And if he also said that ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts’, he told the plain truth. Furthermore, please note that in the interview, he didn’t mention that Soros was a Jew: he referred merely to Soros’s activities in Hungary. In this regard, it’s worth noting that in, a 2013 lecture, ‘The Need for Nations’, Scruton specifically criticized Hungarian anti-Semitism, and noted that ‘indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarian and Jews’. Yet Eaton falsely presented Scruton’s words as an anti-Semitic comment.

As for the Chinese thing, did Scruton actually refer to the Chinese people as a whole? It seems unlikely. The full Scruton quote is: ‘They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing’. He was clearly talking about the tyrannical Chinese government. Therefore, the only thing “outrageous” about this quote is the way it was edited. Of course, Eaton claims that he merely edited the quote ‘for reasons of space in print edition’…

As concerns Scruton’s alleged homophobia here is how he himself put it the day after the sacking in an article for The Spectator, in which he defended himself against ‘an unscrupulous collection of out of context remarks, some of them merely words designed to accuse me of thought-crimes’: ‘Apparently, I once wrote that homosexuality is “not normal,” but nobody has told me where, or why that is a particularly offensive thing to say. Red hair too is not normal, nor is decency among left-wing journalists. In Sexual Desire (1986), I argued that homosexuality is different from heterosexuality, but not in itself a perversion. And I tried to explain the negative response that many people have towards homosexual relations in other terms.’ In any case, however, according to Britain’s most prominent living philosopher, the term homophobia itself, as much as Islamophobia, is a word ‘designed to close all debate about a matter in which only one view is now deemed permissible.’

Be it as it may, in that spring of our discontent, such intellectual dishonesty reached its goal. In fact, a few hours after Eaton’s misquoting and misrepresenting a lifelong defender of free speech who was risking his life behind the Iron Curtain before Eaton was even born, the Government announced Roger Scruton’s sacking—later on, Scruton obtained an apology from the New Statesman and was reappointed to the government commission from which he had been sacked, but the damage was done.

In Roger Scruton’s words, this whole thing taught us that Britain was entering ‘a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes. We are being cowed into abject conformity around a dubious set of official doctrines and told to adopt a world view that we cannot examine for fear of being publicly humiliated by the censors.’ As a result, he concluded, ‘This world view might lead to a new and liberated social order; or it might lead to the social and spiritual destruction of our country. How shall we know, if we are too afraid to discuss it?’

Melanie Phillips was definitely right when she wrote that the attempt to make Scruton into a social pariah encapsulates the ‘vicious and socially suicidal ignorance and cultural sectarianism currently rampant in British society’. His demonization, she said, ‘has displayed ignorance and malice in equal measure along with a chilling totalitarianism directed at anyone who expresses true conservative values – decent, traditional western values shared by millions.’ The only way to respond to such vicious behavior, she concluded, ‘is to treat it with contempt and support Scruton to the hilt. And yet here is a Conservative government actually joining the witch-hunt. This contemptible party, unwilling to defend either the independence of the country or its bedrock values of truthfulness, fairness and moral decency, really, really doesn’t deserve ever to hold office again.’

Thank God, unlike the UK Conservative Party, Sir Roger never gave up. As Niall Ferguson recently recalled, back in the days of the Cold War a small but courageous group of Western academics did what they could to expose the wickedness of communism and to support political and religious dissidents in the Soviet sphere of influence. Well, a member of that group was Roger Scruton:

During the 1980s he travelled to communist-controlled Czechoslovakia to assist an underground education network run by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin. In 1985, during a trip to Brno, Scruton was arrested and expelled.
A philosopher of international renown, a prolific author, a composer and a polymath, Scruton has one of the most powerful minds I have encountered. But he is one of those rare thinkers who seek to change the world as well as to understand and explain it. There was a time when those qualities were venerated. In 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit by its then president Vaclav Havel, himself a former dissident. A knighthood came in 2016. And last year he was appointed chairman of the government’s commission on buildings.

Yet, almost immediately after that, the attacks from the left began: The campaign against Sir Roger culminated in the publication of the above mentioned cynical hit-piece in the New Statesman. Thus, Ferguson goes on,

a direct descendant of the illiberal, egalitarian ideology that once suppressed free speech in eastern Europe is now shutting down debate in the West. For those, like Scruton, who once helped Czech dissidents to get degrees in theology from Cambridge, the irony is bitter indeed.

But Sir Roger never gave up in the face of adversity. He was more than a scholar and a philosopher, he was also a fighter and a gentleman. Summing up his 2019 in The Spectator, he wrote:

During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health. But much more was given back: by Douglas Murray’s generous defence, by the friends who rallied behind him, by the rheumatologist who saved my life and by the doctor to whose care I am now entrusted. Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

Farewell, Sir Roger Scruton. We will miss you terribly.

Part of this note is drawn from an article I wrote for Atlantico magazine. It appeared in the April 15, 2019 issue under the title “The Spring of Our Discontent: The Case for Scruton.”

Happy Thanksgiving Week!

November is in its last week, and December is fast approaching bringing with it my beloved cold winter months, which, by the way, is perhaps the main reason why I so much love this time of the year—of course, in addition to the wonderful colors of fall and the magic of the falling leaves. This very morning I was just thinking about how, in many respects, the world around us seems to be falling apart as leaves fall in autumn, and everything seems on the verge of a spectacular implosion. This immediately brought to my mind a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke titled “Autumn,” which I searched for on Google—instead of in my overcrowded library—and quickly found. In the poem, however, the twilight feeling is tempered by the surrender to the Divine contained in the last two lines:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling

away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.

And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

The re-reading was delightful and pleasant, but even more so was… the search! In fact, I had the chance to stumble upon some very beautiful poems I had completely forgotten or didn’t know about earlier. One of them is a real pearl. It’s from Rilke’s Vergers (Orchards), his late book of poetry written in French—after the turmoil surrounding World War I, the great Bohemian-Austrian poet seemed for a while to renounce all things German, and embrace, in his own words, the “dear borrowed language”… Biographer Donald Prater writes that “he compared French to ‘a beautiful vine-ripened over the centuries’ and cultivated according to well-defined laws: a language with a clarity and sureness which his own was far from having achieved” (D. Prater, A Ringing Glass, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 363).

Here is the short poem in both the original French and an English translation (by A. Poulin):

Sur le soupir de l’amie

toute la nuit se soulève,

une caresse brève

parcourt le ciel ébloui.

C’est comme si dans l’univers

une force élémentaire

redevenait la mère

de tout amour qui se perd.

The whole night rests 

upon a lover’s sigh, 

a brief caress 

crosses the dazzled sky. 

As if in the universe 

an elemental power

again became the mother

of all love being lost.

What a gem, isn’t it? Thanks, Fall, for yet another wonderful gift! As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for the above-mentioned Google search for Rilke’s “Autumn,” I probably would never have known about this little masterpiece. Even though we all know that nothing happens by chance. Never has, never will. Happy Thanksgiving Week!

An Ode to November

Who said November is a sad month? It actually isn’t so bad. Au contraire. It can be such a beautiful time of the year, at least as long as it’s not raining all day every day! November is not only the month of harvest and thanksgiving, a month to remind us to be thankful for the many positive things happening in our life, it is also a time when great things can happen, and often do happen, as I myself can testify—I could tell you of that November day when heaven and earth merged and became one, but I won’t...

At the same time, however, it would be useless, if not impossible, to deny that there’s something melancholic about this month and autumn in general, as Ernest Dowson’s poem “Autumnal” suggests:

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.

Yet, sometimes melancholy—a rather underrated state—is okay. Feeling melancholy isn’t an illness or even a problem, it’s a particular species of sadness that arises when we’re open to the fact that life isn’t a Disney movie, no matter how badly we’d like to be princes or princesses, and that failures and disappointments, including the most painful ones, are part of the human condition. Melancholy is wisdom, it helps us grow. Melancholy is beauty. As Charles Baudelaire once put it, “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” Or, in Edgar Allan Poe’s words, “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”

In another of his poems, Dowson wonderfully expresses a melancholic attitude towards life, or what we could call a November feel. The title of the poem—which is a line from one of Horace’s odes—is in Latin, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” and means, roughly, “the shortness of life forbids us long hopes.”

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

What an ode to the most mysterious time of the year!

Let's Be Fair with Ourselves

Detail of victorian stained glass church window
 in Fringford depicting King David, the author
of the psalms in the Old testament
with a hand harp

There are people who master the art of tearing their lives into confetti-sized pieces and starting all over again. I don’t know whether I would be able to do that, nor do I know whether I would actually like to. What I am certain about is that life is never black and white, never a simple question of right or wrong, true or false. Life is a continuum—not an either/or, nor a series of episodes or a straight line, but a circle, where the opening and the conclusion finally meet at the same point. Therefore, as a general rule there’s no need for radical and fundamental changes in your life, lifestyles, and attitudes, or to dramatically subvert your system of human relations. Contradictions are, after all, not only the propulsive moments of the Hegelian dialectic, as all students of philosophy know, but also the soul of humanity and the substance of who we are. They are what make each of us unique. Let’s not despise human nature and what makes it what it is! Let’s be fair with ourselves and towards our fellow human beings, and may we always say with the psalmist, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honour.” (Ps. 8:4-5, KJV)

October

October isn’t just a month, it’s a feeling. It’s a state of mind and a celebration of everyday beauty. In fact, there’s no better month of the year than October to enjoy the splendors of nature, with the leaves turning colors into beautiful shades of red, gold and orange, whether you head off for a proper weekend vacation to get the full effect of the Fall foliage or you’re driving home down a street lined with trees that are all turned into different colors—a very good reminder of just how beautiful nature can be after a long hot summer of plain green everywhere.

Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery was so right when she proclaimed her love for this wonderful month. “October was a beautiful month at Green Gables,” she wrote in her famous novel Anne of Green Gables, ”when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths. Anne reveled in the world of color about her. ‘Oh, Marilla,’ she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill—several thrills? I’m going to decorate my room with them.’”

At the same time, however, this month is somehow a messenger of death—though one wrapped in the colors of nostalgic happiness—and rebirth. In truth, it happens that before the first November frosts start, October admonishes us on the necessity of taking up the incoming challenge of winter, the most Yin of the seasons, according to the Taoist school of thought. As a matter of fact, in winter, when the earth lies dormant and nature appears frozen and dead, we’re called to look into our depths, to reconnect to our inner being, to befriend the darkness within us and around us. This means, interiorly speaking, that while winter is at the same time the season of rest and reflection and the most challenging time of the year, autumn in general and October, in particular, is the time of the year when something old ends—in a blaze of glory—and something new is brewing and about to begin. In other words, it’s true that, as Robert Frost puts it, nothing, especially that which is perfect and beautiful, can last forever:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Still, for every death there is a birth, for every ending there is a new beginning. “Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.” (Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte)

Oh Shenandoah

Charles Deas' The Trapper and his Family (1845) depicts a voyageur and his Native American wife and children

It has fairly been said that songs are the language of the heart, and speak the sentiments of the soul, in familiar verse. It can also be said that folk songs, for their part, are the soul of folk literature and folk culture, they are the expression in the idiom of the people of their joys and sorrows, their patriotism, their zest for life, and the simple pleasures of a country life. Perhaps even more so, folk songs can often show a part of a country usually unnoticed, ignored or hidden by official representations and day-to-day activity. They are “the true classics of the people, and form the foundation on which a national love of music can be built up,” as the British Board of Education put it in their “Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers” (1923).

All the above may serve as introduction to the subject of this post, namely a traditional American folk song known as “Oh Shenandoah,” also called simply “Shenandoah” or “Across the Wide Missouri.” Like many Europeans of my generation, I first came across this song thanks to the soundtrack of the 1965 Civil War movie, Shenandoah, starring Jimmy Stewart, one of the greatest Hollywood stars of all time. I saw the movie back in the 80s and enjoyed it a lot, including, but not especially, the soundtrack. Later on, I heard some good renditions of the song—including those of Tom Waits & Keith Richards, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Emmylou Harris. But what made me truly fall in love with the song was Bruce Springsteen’s stunning version of “Shenandoah,” to whose rolling cadences he did full justice on his 2006 Seeger Sessions album.



What this song is all about? As the Library of Congress’s Song of America Project puts it, the origins of “Shenandoah” are not so easily deciphered:

Like many folksongs, it is impossible to determine exactly when the song was composed, yet it probably did not originate later than the Civil War. In any case, by the nineteenth century, “Shenandoah” had achieved widespread popularity, both on land and at sea.

American folklorist Alan Lomax suggested that “Shenandoah” was a sea-shanty and that the “composers” quite possibly were French-Canadian voyageurs. Sea shanties were work songs used by sailors to coordinate the efforts of completing chores such as raising the ship’s anchor or hauling ropes. The formal structure of a shanty is simple: it consists of a solo lead that alternates with a boisterous chorus. With the sweeping melodic line of its familiar refrain, “Shenandoah” is the very nature of a sea shanty; indeed, the song’s first appearance in print was in an article by William L. Alden, titled “Sailor Songs,” that was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1882).

As unclear as is the song’s origin, so is the definitive interpretation of its text. Some believe that the song refers to the river of the same name. Others suggest that it is of Native American origin, for it tells the tale of Sally, the daughter of the Indian Chief Shenandoah, who is courted for seven years by a white Missouri river trader. Regardless of these textual discrepancies, “Shenandoah” remains an American classic.

As an example of the difficulties in interpretation of the text, in one version of the song’s lyrics—there are several—we read “Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you,” which could refer to the sound of a running river, but could also mean a woman’s voice; another version says, “Oh Shenandoah, I hear you calling.” Maybe, as a music blogger fairly noted, the love affair between the fur trader and the Indian maiden gradually morphed into a longing for a river and its valley…

As David Cheal insightfully noted in an October 9, 2017, Financial Times article, the song is

a sea shanty, a logging song, a fur traders’ ballad. It’s pronounced “Shanandore”. Actually, that should be “Shenan-doh-ah”. It’s about a fur trapper who falls in love with a Native American chief’s daughter. It’s about the wide Missouri river. In fact, it’s called “Across the Wide Missouri”. Actually, it’s not about the Missouri at all — it’s about “This world of misery”. “Shenandoah” is all of these things, and none of them. It’s an enigma, inside a mystery, wrapped in a gorgeous melody. Generations of schoolchildren in the US and elsewhere have grown up singing it, and some of the world’s great popular singers have been drawn to it.

Most of all, however, as John and Alan Lomax pointed out in their book Best Loved American Folk Songs, what makes the beauty and appeal of the song is the fact that

[t]he melody has the roll and surge and freedom of a tall ship sweeping along before a trade wind. The sonorous succession of long vowels and soft and liquid consonants blend perfectly with the romantic air. The lines are a call from the homeland to the sailor wandering far out across the seas, a call not from a sweetheart, a house, or even a town, but from the land itself, its rivers and its familiar and loved hills.

As for the lyrics, I’d say that it’s not so much about their literal meaning—or lack of it—as it is about the nostalgia and the sense of loss they convey to us. Maybe such a poignant feeling is the key to penetrating the mystery of this song. After all, to compose a song or a symphony, as well as to write a novel or a poem is to inhabit a dream, a dream that sometimes takes place in its very own dreamscape, even more so when it comes to traditional folk songs, myths, legends, and fairy tales. Actually, dreams matter, myths matter. We in modern Western societies think that “myth” and “legend” are practically synonyms for “untrue.” But there is a more profound sense in which myths, legends, and even dreams can be very true. Quite often, myths and legends, along with folk tales and traditional folk songs, express not only our most intimate feelings and longings but also our innermost sense of reality, the sense of nostalgia for what was and what could have been, if not our hope that someday, somehow, we will reach our Promised Land. Humans need myths because they need dreams. That’s also why “Oh Shenandoah” matters.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away you rolling river.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

Oh Shenandoah,

I love your daughter,

Away, you rolling river.

For her I'd cross

Your roaming waters,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

'Tis seven years

since last I've seen you,

Away, you rolling river.

'Tis seven years

since last I've seen you,

Away, we're bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to hear you,

Away, you rolling river.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to hear you,

Away, we're bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to hear you,

Far away, you rolling river.

Oh Shenandoah,

Just to be near you,

Far away, far away.

'Cross the wide Missouri.

A Kiss Is just a Kiss

This morning, as sometimes happens to all of us, I woke up with a song playing in my head, the typical case in which you ask yourself, “Why the hell is this song playing in my ears? Why now? And why this one specifically?” The song—an old and very famous one—speaks about the time going by “no matter what the future brings” and a kiss which is just a kiss, a sigh which is just a sigh… After asking myself those questions for a while, the mystery was somewhat cleared up. In fact, unusually, I was able to recall the dream I had just before waking up. A strange dream—but then which one isn’t? And stranger still, I could recall it! What was it about? Well, the dream’s background was a love affair—a very complicated one for a variety of reasons—I had in a previous life. She was my angel, my inspiration… I loved her and I knew she loved me back. But what we both wanted and hoped for never happened. How much I just wanted to take her in my arms! How much I wanted to kiss her! But I never did. Okay, that’s the dream’s background, but what did exactly happen in the dream? Well, besides a few irrelevant details, we… finally kissed! And that was wonderful. So wonderful that I didn’t pay attention to the fact that she had a light cold! I mean, maybe not the best of the best, but memorable nonetheless. After all, perfection is not of this world, and there is always room for further improvement. Maybe in the next life.

You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / A sigh is just a sigh / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by / And when two lovers woo / They still say “I love you” / On that you can rely / No matter what the future brings / As time goes by [...]

“As Time Goes by” by Herman Hupfeld (1931).
(The song became most famous in 1942
when part of it was sung by the character Sam
in the movie Casablanca).

R.I.P. Peter Fonda

If I hadn’t read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—among many other novels set in the U.S.—and seen Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider, I probably wouldn’t have undertaken my pilgrimage to America in my early thirties and wouldn’t have fallen in love with her… I mean the real America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” not the country narrated by both Jack and Peter. You know, they call it heterogony of ends: while consciously pursuing your particular ends, you have unconsciously served wider ends, or if you prefer, I was like Columbus, who thinking he was going to China discovered a new world. Therefore, willing or unwilling, I owe them both a debt of gratitude. Kerouac died in 1969, the same year as Woodstock (!) and that Easy Rider came out. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. And yesterday, exactly 50 years later, he died at the age of 79.

What about the movie? Well, since I’m not particularly adept at talking about films with the minimum competency requirements, it is my pleasure to give the floor to someone who knows more than I do. This is how Mark Bannerman concluded his article on ABC News (August 17, 2019):

Some 50 years on, there are those that see it as a curious film; a kind of period piece. For others it's the story that matters, a story that has crucial relevance today. Forget the bikes and the hippies and see it instead as an allegory of America. Two guys doing a questionable business deal, using it to fund their search for experience and meaning only to find the deal they did took them on a road leading nowhere.
In so many ways it challenges everything that America rests on.
Towards the end of the film Peter Fonda's character looks back on their journey and says simply: “We blew it.”
Asked about this just before his death, the actor said the line of script was intended for all generations, then added this pointed comment.
“Go look out the window and tell me we haven't blown it.”

Not my cup of tea, to be honest. But no hard feelings on my part. May the ground be light to you, Peter.

About Being Right or Wrong

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right—especially when one is right.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

To put it with tongue in cheek, we might say that Nietzsche is definitely right. But to be honest we should admit that the sentence would be even more right—though much less intriguing and thought-provoking—if it sounded like this instead: “It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right—especially when one is wrong.” Let’s just think this through for a minute. How many of us suffer from an inflated sense of infallibility? And how few are those who are not afraid to admit their wrongdoing? The truth is that it takes tremendous fortitude to utter the words, “I was wrong and you were right.” The general rule is that people have not such strength of heart and soul. I was no exception to this rule until I was rudely awakened by the reality of my own weakness and fallibility. It was at that very moment, however, that my inner nobility triumphed over my inner demons and inadequacies. It was as if I had finally reached my promised land, though with a bitter taste in my mouth. I was free, at last, but we all know that freedom, in every sense of the word, is not free nor a birthright, but won at a great price.

Why I Won't Delete My Social Media Accounts

A couple of days ago a good Facebook friend of mine asked me my thoughts on a couple of interviews released by Jaron Lanier. An American computer scientist who is considered by many to be one of the central figures in the history of immersive virtual reality, Lanier has now ascended to guru status in tech circles, issuing warnings about a digital world he helped make. In the interviews, like in his latest book—Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)—he talks about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google and how the tech and social media giants are using algorithms to record data about their users and to shape how we see the world and what we’re shown online. In particular, he contends that sites like Facebook and Twitter are dopamine farms that are reprogramming how you think and feel. He says they’re also causing political instability, and are changing the global economy for the worse.

At first, I thought I could write down a quick reply in the comment section, but then again I thought that the matter is too serious to be taken lightly, I mean I didn’t want to get off lightly. Therefore I realized it was worth writing a blog post at least. And here I am. Let me first say that I’m no expert on the subject here, even though last year, intrigued by a couple of reviews, I had a quick read of the above-mentioned book. (I also had the opportunity to read something about James Williams, yet another guru of computer science, a former Google product strategist who became a philosopher at the University of Oxford and whose research addresses the philosophy and ethics of attention and persuasion—in harsh opposition to the giant of the I-tech and on the same wavelength with Lanier, he argues that digital technologies privilege our impulses over our intentions, and are gradually diminishing our ability to engage with the issues we most care about.)

But let’s now get into some of the most fundamental and relevant concepts of Lanier’s thought. Take for instance the well-known concept of random reinforcement—addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come. Well, Lanier puts it like this:

When the algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction. The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments; it’s a cat-and-mouse game based on pure math. Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.

Roughly speaking, the reasons for freeing ourselves from social media include their tendency to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to spend too much time isolating ourselves and disconnecting from the real world in order to maintain the perception of being connected, to twist our relationship with the truth, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads, and to make politics terrifying. In other words, they bring out the worst in us. More specifically, here are “the ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now” (and the titles of the chapters of the book) in a nutshell:

1. You are losing your free will. Social media has become a space where everyone is posting for likes and comments…

• Sean Parker, first president of Facebook: “We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever....It’s a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology....The inventors, creators -- it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people -- understood this consciously. And we did it anyway...it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other...It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
• Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.... No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem -- this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem... I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen...So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”

2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times. In this chapter, Lanier introduces an acronym under which all social media’s ills can be umbrellaed: “BUMMER” or “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” The Bummer machine is made up of six parts, indexed by the following mnemonic: A for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy; B for Butting into everyone’s lives; C for Cramming content down people’s throats; D for Directing people’s behaviours in the sneakiest way possible; E for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else; and F for Fake mobs and Faker society.
3. Social media is making you into an asshole. Meeting your inner troll, etc. This might be one of the most compelling reasons for either quitting or never joining social media.
4. Social media is undermining truth. Myths and lies spread across the internet like wildfire…
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless. Because it strips it of context.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy. “If you don’t see the dark ads, the ambient whispers, the cold-hearted memes and the ridicule-filled customized feed that someone else sees, that person will just seem crazy to you. And that is our new Bummer world. We seem crazy to each other because Bummer is robbing us of our theories of one another’s minds.” Hence the explosion of nastiness, a great blossoming of “assholes.”
7. Social media is making you unhappy. The author states that due to targeted advertisements, if you look up something unhappy you will start seeing ads similar to that search and will create an even greater sense of sadness…
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity. The reason BUMMER is a huge issue is because the internet is free. Lanier thinks that if each user pays a small fee, advertisers will not be targeting audiences and people can live in greater harmony online…
9. Social media is making politics impossible. “There are so few independent news sites, and they’re precious … Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.“ But above all, BUMMER may have no party affiliation but, as stated before, is pro-asshole.
10. Social media hates your soul. A couple of quotes:

• “Usually Google has had a way of coming up with the creepier statements, but Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that ‘every single person has a sense of purpose and community’. A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.”
• “When you use BUMMER, you implicitly accept a new spiritual framework. It is like the EULA agreement—the user agreement—that you clicked “OK” on without reading. You have agreed to change something intimate about your relationship with your soul. If you use BUMMER, you have probably, to some degree, statistically speaking, effectively renounced what you might think is your religion, even if that religion is atheism. You have been inducted into a new spiritual framework.”

What shall I say about this book? Well, if I’m being honest, ever since I read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now the first definition that comes to my mind when I think of Lanier is exaggerated. Don’t get me wrong, I think the book is interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe nothing really new—these or similar ideas have been debated for some years now—but a good summary and exploration of the big personal and broader societal problems associated with social media. Despite his critical approach to the whole social media thing, however, Lanier has not lost hope. Speaking in general terms, that is, without specific reference to social networks, he thinks that “we can definitely make better interaction devices than we have.” As he told Wired in 2017, “there are lots of displays and sensors yet to be built. There’s so much to improve. But I love that. […] We’re in a perilous time. But I really believe in the human capacity for increased creativity and intelligence and wisdom, and I think if we present the tech in such a way that people have an ability to really see it and master it, they’ll rise to the occasion.”

As for social networks, he argues that If users rebel, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have an incentive to change for the better. “Whoever you are,” he explains in the book, “I hope you have options to explore what your life might be, especially if you are young. You need to make sure your own brain, and your own life, isn’t in a rut. Maybe you can go explore wilderness or learn a new skill. Take risks. But whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing: detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say? Note that I didn’t name this book Arguments for Deleting Your Social media Accounts Right Now and Keeping Them Deleted Forever. After you experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide.”

Put down this way, it would seem a rather moderate and balanced approach. But this is only one side of the story. The other is the depiction of a dark future and an even worse future based on the systematic amplification and exaggeration of issues that are real but not that dramatic. To say nothing about the contradiction in which the author finds himself: he explains how social media is making America tribal, but at the same time he goes out of his way to add extraneous content attacking Republicans. He attacks president Trump for his alleged addiction to tweeting, while ignoring those who gang up on him using bot networks and troll factories. Unfortunately, the obsession with politics turns an otherwise interesting book into a partisan attack. He starts his book nicely—with a metaphor comparing cats and dogs to social media users to show a divide between those who use social media and those who don’t—and he ends up just another unashamedly biased political commentator.

In any case, if we were to follow what seems to be the logic of his reasoning, we should also stop reading books and newspapers, watching television, using email, etc. In reality, every progress brings with it negative side effects, new challenges but also new opportunities. Every innovation carries both advantages and unpredictability, both desired and unintended collateral effects. Social media is just a tool, and like most tools, it can be used well or horribly or anywhere in between. It is not social media that “makes politics impossible,” nor is it politics that makes social media awful. Both social media and politics are tools. Paraphrasing the NRA saying (“It’s not guns that kill people it’s people that kill people”), it’s not social media that makes people into assh*les, it’s assh*les that make social media a sh*tty place.

Everything Rare for the Rare

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. […] In the end, things must be as they are and have always been—the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.


~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

As everyone knows, Friedrich Nietzsche wasn’t the most humble man on earth, nor was he a prophet of democracy and an advocate of the principle of equality of all men and universal brotherhood. That is also why the above-quoted fragment from his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil should not come as any surprise to anyone.

On no account, however, should the quote lead us to conclude that there is no truth in those rather dismissive words. In fact, upon closer inspection, such brutal honesty is widely justified by the differences among human beings. To put it simply (and to make it more simple than it actually is), being equal before the law with equal rights for all doesn’t mean being the same. Analogously, equality in the sight of God does not imply that there should be no distinction on the basis of skill and qualities or on any other basis. Actually, the real implication of equality, from both a political and, at least to some extent, a religious point of view, is the equality of opportunity. That’s why the differences between individuals cannot be ignored and/or denied in the name of and on behalf of the principle of equality. Therefore, in the light of the above, Nietzsche’s words are far less controversial than what they may seem at first glance.

But let’s now focus on some concrete situations to which Nietzsche’s statement may apply. Take, for instance, the case of two persons in love or in a relationship of some sort. One enjoys the company of open-minded, intellectually refined and stimulating friends, the other usually feels comfortable with Manichean and intellectually crude people. Or take a guy who thinks big and one who only cares about little things—well, how hard could it be for them to get along with each other and, what is more, to deeply and completely appreciate each other? Unfortunately, in both cases, there are people with different priorities, mindsets, and perspectives. Or take the case of a couple in which one is a profound guy, while the other is a nice but rather superficial person. How could they love each other for a long time, if not until death and beyond?

In reality, the possible combinations of sensitivities, characters, expectations, priorities, individual stories, etc. are nearly infinite. There’s no way to predict whether a friendship can survive whatever difference of opinion, taste, mindset, worldview, etc., or whether two lovers can really take their relationship to the highest level notwithstanding (or maybe because of) their differences.

Despite what Nietzsche seems to think, however, Love—in all of its many forms—will always have the final say. Omnia vincit Amor.

Love Is the Key

To love another is something
like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

~ Anne Sexton, “Admonitions to a Special Person” (1974), from Last Poems

Not so long ago, a couple of years back on a typical gloomy Milan day, I had a pretty interesting talk with a Benedictine monk—an old friend and a very inspiring man—on the nature and practice of prayer.

A scholar of both Western and Eastern philosophies, religions and meditative practices, he explained me that prayer, in order to be genuine and of any real value, must fulfill three conditions: Beauty, Goodness, and Love. Beauty is what the apostle calls (1 Peter 3:3-4) a gentle and quiet spirit: “It is not fancy hair, gold jewelry, or fine clothes that should make you beautiful. No, your beauty should come from within you—the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. This beauty will never disappear, and it is worth very much to God.”

Goodness is virtue and holiness in action. In Paul’s words (Galatians 5:22-23) is a “fruit of the Spirit”—“fruit,” here, means “beneficial results,” the good things that come from the Spirit’s indwelling. In other words, goodness is a moral characteristic of a Spirit-filled person.

The first in Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit is Love. “Prayer does not depend upon words,” my Benedictine friend said, “love is the foundation of all prayer because God Himself is love.”

Beauty, Goodness, and above all, LOVE—these are what prayer is all about. Selfless prayers, filled with compassion for all creation, are beautiful and enlightening. They are made out of the essence itself of Beauty. But, as we learn from Plato’s Symposium, Beauty is the object of every Love’s yearning, and a life gazing upon and pursuing this Beauty is the best life one can lead...

The memory of that conversation, or, still better, of the theology lesson I received from the monk, came back to my mind a few days ago when I stumbled across the above-quoted verses from Anne Sexton’s beautiful poem entitled “Admonitions to a Special Person.”

The poet’s comparison between love and prayer is not only evocative and even moving in an understated way, but also philosophically and theologically correct. The same, to some extent, goes for the “falling into the arms” of prayer because of the victory of belief over disbelief.

As far as I can tell, the idea of love/prayer embraced by the poet includes—or should include—love in all its declensions, from profane love to sacred, from erotic/carnal love to spiritual/esoteric love, from love for other human beings to love for things and places. Of course, there is something Dantesque about this, something reminiscent of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante put it to define God in the last verse of the Divine Comedy. The stars, the planets, the universe as a whole are not governed by a blind force. In all and above all there is the Spirit of God.

Tempus Fugit

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.

(Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour)

~ Vergil, Georgicon,  Book 3

We should cherish the moments we have with the ones we love. Our time upon this earth is not infinite, neither is it actually that long, and we know we are almost always blind to how fast time goes by. In this regard, it is true that speech is silver and silence is golden, but I think that the right words at the right moment matter, and always will.

Therefore my philosophy on this matter can be summarized as follows:

1. Never pass up the occasion to tell someone how much they mean to you.
2. Never miss an opportunity to say something kind to someone you love.
3. Never waste a chance to say “I love you” to someone you really love, because in the blink of an eye, everything can change, and you may never know when you may not have that chance again.

But none of this would be possible without one basic prerequisite, which is also an effective way to describe what love is all about: the courage of one’s tenderness. It’s D. H. Lawrence’s definition of love as “having the courage of your tenderness.” Love invites one to have the courage to show oneself as one is, including one’s own tenderness and fragility. Therefore, the list should be recompiled as follows:

1. Never be afraid to show your feelings.
2. Never pass up the occasion to tell someone how much they mean to you.
3. Never miss an opportunity to say something kind to someone you love.
4. Never waste a chance to say “I love you” to someone you really love, because in the blink of an eye, everything can change, and you may never know when you may not have that chance again.

Integrity

They say integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching, even when it may work to your disadvantage, and this obviously because wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it, and right is right, even if no one is doing it. This simply means that integrity—besides being the moral excellence that the modern world most needs—is a very difficult virtue to practice. It has way more false fans than true ones, and more true enemies than real friends. Personal integrity requires that the person invariably act in accordance with his values. Of course, this is clearly an ideal standard rather than an achievable state. Sometimes having personal integrity means you will taste failure temporarily. As Winston Churchill once said, “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” In other words, integrity is a continuous challenge and a never-ending struggle against ourselves and the world around us.

Actually, as Job rhetorically once asked (Job 7:1), Nonne militia est vita hominis super terram? (“Isn’t man’s life upon the earth a military campaign?”). Or, as Seneca put it (Epistle 96 to Lucilius), Vivere militare est (“To live is to fight”). Maybe, in a time when peace is often confused with passivity—and war is almost always associated only and exclusively with death, terror, cruelty, and destruction—I guess we’d better rethink this whole matter and to rediscover the positive aspects of the concepts of fight, struggle and war. After all, there are unjust wars, but also just wars, there are bad fights and good fights… Let’s not forget Paul’s words (2 Timothy 4:6-8):

For I am already being offered, and the time of my departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day; and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved his appearing.

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!


~ William Shakespeare, King Henry IV,  Part 1

Have you ever experienced the power of telling the truth? Well, the fact is that, nowadays, no one expects you to speak the truth, they simply think that you are part of the “Big Lie” that underlies the Western culture on so many levels, but when you speak the plain truth out loud the energy that carries your spoken words to the ears of a listener is of a particular vibration, or frequency. This is the frequency of truth, and the universe is behind you. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness” (Harvard Divinity Address). Of course, sometimes you need to tell a little white lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, or, say, to get yourself the timeout you need…, but speaking the truth should be something like a minimum requirement of decency, which should be inculcated from the childhood. Obviously, reality is different, and when you speak the truth you must expect the worst and assume that it will happen. Yet, nothing will be the same afterwards. As if a curtain had fallen. As in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Prepare to Submerge Yourself in Silence

Someone—maybe from an atheistic point of view—once said, “Faith isn’t a virtue, it’s the glorification of voluntary ignorance.” Well, no truer words were ever written or spoken. Read this St. Ephrem the Syrian’s sermon on Faith if you don’t believe that’s the case—and prepare to submerge yourself in Silence…

The sea is mighty. If you want to fathom it, you will be overwhelmed by the force of its waves. One wave can sweep you away and dash you against a cliff. Suffice it, oh feeble being, to be able to trade in a boat. Faith is better for you than a boat on the sea. The boat, in fact, is guided by a rudder, but the tide can sink it. Your faith cannot sink, if your will does not wish it so. How desirable for the sailor to be able to manage the sea as he likes! He thinks in one way; the sea acts in another manner. Only Our Lord held sway over the sea, so that it became silent and stopped raging.
He also gave you the power to dominate a sea and calm it. Mightier than the sea is arguing and disputing is more violent than the waves. If the wind of inquiry rages in your mind, reprimand it and calm its billows! The storm tosses the sea about; your quibbles perturb your mind. Our Lord issues an order, the wind dies down and the boat slips peacefully through the sea. Control and bridle inquiry and your faith will be at peace!
The creatures, whose use you know, should convince you of that. For instance, you are unable to relinquish a drink, even if you collapse at the spring. Having drunk from springs you do not surely think you have taken them all in. You also fail before the sun and yet you are not deprived of its light. By the fact that it comes down to you (with its rays), you do not desire to reach its height. Although the air is quite extensive for you, a little bit of it provides you with life. Although it is your pledge, you ignore how great its mass is.
You receive from creatures their limited help and service and leave their vast unknown treasures in the chest. Do not disdain what is less nor long for that which is more. Let these creatures of the Creator instruct you about the Creator Himself: you should boldly ask His help and shy away from sophistry about Him. Accept the life of divine Majesty, but do not probe it! Love the Father’s goodness, but do not scrutinize His essence! Yearn after and love the Son’s blessedness, but do not inquire about his eternal birth! Long for the presence of the Holy Spirit, but do not try to fathom Him! The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are registered by their names. Ponder their names and do not mull over their content! If you want to scrutinize their essence, you are lost; if you believe in the name, you are safe. Let the Father’s name be a limit for you; do not surpass it trying to plumb His nature! Let the Son’s name be a wall for you; do not try to scale it to scrutinize His generation! Let the Holy Spirit’s name be for you a hedge; do not enter in order to understand! These names will be a limit for you and with them stop every investigation. You have heard the names and their reality. Turn to the commandments! You have perceived the laws and the commandments. Turn now to your way of living! You have accomplished it perfectly, then turn to the promises! Do not neglect the commandments to apply yourself to what is not prescribed! You have heard the truth in manifested realities, do not go astray in the case of hidden things! Truth is proclaimed in few words, do not search it with lengthy probes! Save your effort by being silent, O frail being!

Under the Linden Tree

Have you ever enjoyed the smell of linden trees in late spring to early summer? Sweet, heady, totally overwhelming with their aroma, in the Northeast of Italy these majestic trees—also known as lime trees (though with no connection to the fruit) or basswoods—usually blossom between the end of May and the beginning of June. Every time it’s the same wonderful olfactive experience. Only God knows how much I love this time of the year! The scent is so strong that you can smell it hundreds of yards away—actually, the odor is more pronounced further from the source! As soon as you get out or open the windows to let in the light of the day or the cool air of the night, the gentle and pervasive smell of linden trees spreads everywhere and reigns supreme. It’s something magical, it’s a kind of urban miracle that transforms the town into a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a fairy-tale.

Walther von der Vogelweide

Not for nothing in China, the linden is named the tree of forgetfulness because its energy is soft, gentle and it offers the sensation of warmth and peace. It’s also interesting that in the Hellenic period of Egypt, the masks of the sarcophagus of Fayoum were made of linden wood—which proves the sacred nature of this tree since ancient times—and that in the mythology of Ancient Rome, it was a symbol of marital love and fidelity in the couple. In turn, in Slavic mythology the linden was considered a sacred tree—in Polish folklore, the belief still exists that the linden tree planted in front of a house protects the family from the evil spirits…—while the Germans considered it as a sacred tree of the lovers because it had the capacity to give fertility and prosperity.

The linden tree also appears as a romantic symbol in medieval poetry. For example, there is a medieval love poem called Unter der Linden (“Under the Lime Tree”), which is one of Walther von der Vogelweide’s best-known pieces. In it, a naïve, common-class girl rejoices in her love experience under the linden tree, the crushed flowers still showing the place where the couple had lain. I’m quoting it because I think this is an appropriate way to celebrate the linden tree.

1. Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tándaradéi,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.

2. I came to meet him
At the green:
There was my truelove come before.
Such was I greeted —
Heaven's Queen! —
That I am glad for evermore.
Had he kisses? A thousand some:
Tándaradéi,
See how red my mouth's become.

3. There he had fashioned
For luxury
A bed from every kind of flower.
It sets to laughing
Delightedly
Whoever comes upon that bower;
By the roses well one may,
Tándaradéi,
Mark the spot my head once lay.

4. If any knew
He lay with me
(May God forbid!), for shame I'd die.
What did he do?
May none but he
Ever be sure of that — and I,
And one extremely tiny bird,
Tándaradéi,
Who will, I think, not say a word.

[Modern English translation by Raymond Oliver]