This World

“And I thought sitting up awake in the African night that I knew nothing about the soul at all. People were always talking about it and writing of it, but who knew about it? I did not know anyone who knew anything of it nor whether there was such a thing…. Once I had thought my own soul had been blown out of me when I was a boy and then that it had come back in again. But in those days I was very egotistical and I had heard so much talk about the soul and read so much about it that I assumed that I had one. Then I began to think if Miss Mary or G.C. or Ngui or Charo or I had been killed by the lion would our souls have flown off somewhere? I could not believe it and I thought that we would all just have been dead, deader than the lion perhaps, and no one was worrying about his soul….

“But what did this have to do with `In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning?’ Did Miss Mary and GC have souls? They had no religious beliefs as far as I knew. But if people had souls they must have them. Charo was a very devout Muhammadan so we must credit him with a soul. That left only Ngui and me and the lion.” (pp. 172-173)

This long quotation is from True at First Light, a posthumously published work of Ernest Hemingway that was extensively edited (put together, I gather, or rather, culled) by his son Patrick. And that’s what Papa thought, late in his life, about the soul: It couldn’t be proved, it probably didn’t exist, maybe it depended on whether one believed in it or not. Continue reading Society and the soul, and you

9:30 a.m. Sunday March 12, 2006

All right, friends, I am going to be working on the assumption that I am working on a book about guidance – sort of not realizing it – this past 15 years, not to say 40. As Henry sat at Walden accumulating the wisdom and experience that became Walden, he thought he was doing something entirely different, at first, which was writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which wasn’t nearly so important. And perhaps I have been doing the same. So – comments, suggestions? Oh, and what was going on Friday night/ Saturday morning?

You understand me instinctively in the same way you understood Colin Wilson, and the result is that our consciousnesses and yours are linked in ways unsuspected by the outside world. Walden is a finished product, and could never be changed now because too many minds link to it, and share their being with it. But I live, and I am affected, as are we all by each other. Continue reading Henry Thoreau on guidance