Hello. 

After writing the first, disastrous draft of what became “Universes,” in 1988 I was nearly broke, and out of energy to attempt a new start. I reapplied for a copy-editing position with the Windsor (Ontario) Star and was hired. I spent the next 5½ years working nights and stuck at the level of copy editor, for which I feel I was overqualified. I was not in good odor with the management there – but at least they took me back.

My hours were either 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. or midnight to 7:30 a.m. I grew accustomed to the writing styles of the reporters on the paper’s staff, and felt I knew their traits quite well – their strengths and weaknesses. A pity, I thought, that I couldn’t pass along my thoughts to them.

In those long-ago days (I believe most newsrooms are desperately short of staff these days, owing to the contraction of the newspaper industry, of which I myself was a casualty), there was often slack time. I recall watching Nick, of sports, fiercely battling Arkanoids, a terrific computer game that gobbled my quarters in the smoking room. Nick, whose reflexes were astonishing, once kicked a hole in the wall in frustration (and not meaning to). Another fellow and I played many games of cribbage. But nighttime is bleak, and when I worked nights I was always tired; I never got used to it. Things were so slow that at times we were allowed to go home early, with the work done. (Then I would have my four beers on the sofa reading P.G. Wodehouse as the sun rose.)

I left a message for Bill, the city editor of the day, a good editor and a good man. I suggested that I write constructive critiques for individual reporters, leave them to be vetted by him, and that he pass them on to reporters. The scheme was approved, and participation by reporters was voluntary. A majority did take part, I believe. I found the work very stimulating. I hope something constructive was achieved.

After some time it occurred to me to write a general piece on news writing for all the participants. One night, when time allowed, I wrote such a piece, and left it for Bill. He urged me to revise it extensively, polish it up. I had a week’s vacation coming and did this task at home – the initial draft had taken three or four hours to write, the revision, all done at home, nine hours, I recall. The paper’s editor liked it and had it copied and distributed to all those in the newsroom who were involved with writing – photographers didn’t get a copy. Because I had done most of the work on my own time (unpaid), it was agreed I would own the copyright.

Originally I titled the piece “In praise of subjectivity,” but I never liked that too much and have changed it here to “The trouble with words.” It was written specifically about newspaper writing and its particular challenges and pitfalls, but might be of interest to others who write as well.

I wish to confess that I failed to credit the idea in the lead. It sprang from a line in “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran: “For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but will not fly.”

Here is the article:

The trouble with words

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
--Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet

By Peter Riley

Thought is nonverbal. When you write you’re trying to transfer something from your head into the reader’s head. Writing is terribly difficult, and the reason it’s difficult is because words are a weak vessel for thought.

Think for a moment about thinking: about everyday mental experience. A thought is shapeless, wordless, usually imageless. This is why people say “uh” all the time: They know exactly what they want to say, have it held in their hand so to speak, but picking out the right words to convey it takes time and a different, analytical kind of thought; and often the attempt fails.

This is why Archimedes said “Eureka.” This is why a mathematical idea and many other ideas and emotions can never be expressed fully in words. This is why survivors of plane crashes say, “There are no words to describe it.” In fiction, attempts to describe faces never work. Think about faces, and the reactions you have to the visual experience of looking at someone. It’s inexpressible.

Words are an arbitrary symbol system, taken for granted because they’re part of daily life, but woefully inadequate; not much better than Morse code. Good writing begins paradoxically with an awareness of the near-futility of the task at hand.

Now about leads.

When I was a reporter I found it a useful habit in writing leads to lean back and try to kick the words out of my head, then focus on what was most interesting about the story. Subjectively, I mean: What I as a private person found interesting.

Having fixed on that thought, the job was to fish around for the lead that would convey it, make it pop up in the reader’s mind. It didn’t have to be pretty, but it was supposed to do a job.

This above all is what is wanted in a lead: one solid thought that the reader can get. It should also be interesting – not more interesting than the story is, or the reader will feel cheated later on, and not less interesting, or you’ll lose the reader.

There’s no formula for doing this. Writing is as various as life.

Of the two types of leads – summary leads and teaser leads – summary leads are better because they set out directly to put the most interesting stuff up front. They shouldn’t be used always but they should be preferred, and for some reason reporters tend to slide into using too many teaser leads. Similarly, headline writers sometimes get into a spasm of pun-heads, and you get the feeling of being buried under an avalanche of plays on words.

Teaser leads aren’t bad in themselves. The problem comes when everyone in the newsroom feels he or she has to put a jazzy lead on almost every story, with the result that many leads are forced and unsuccessful. Through trying for too much, the reporter fails to give the reader one solid, clear idea, an anchor for the mind. If you’re always going for zingers, you end up with a lot of fuzzy writing.

A useful and difficult technique is, after writing a lead, to step outside yourself and pretend you’re a different person looking at the lead for the first time. Imagine yourself not as a professional, just as yourself, an ordinary person reading the paper at home. Do you understand the lead instantly? Does it put a clear idea in your mind? Does it make you want to read on?

Returning to the Mesozoic era when I was a reporter, it hit me once that clearness in writing was the branch you can hang on to to get to the other side of the water. “Clarity” sounds like a negative thing: avoiding unclearness. It sounds like something you should have mastered in the ninth grade and don’t need to work at any more. But I feel that – second only to the urge to connect with the reader – it’s the creative springboard that makes writing come alive.

If something is really clear, the words don’t get in the way. Instead of being aware of the writer’s language, the reader’s mind is at the fire scene or on the issues before city council, or in the room with the family with all the problems while they’re being interviewed. It comes from being clear. 

Something else a majority of reporters sorely need is the panache to assert their individuality.

It seems to me almost as if newspaper writers are in hiding, afraid to do things differently or break away from a slim catalogue of journalistic formulas. It’s understandable. Editing is negative by its nature. And a newsroom – any newsroom, anywhere – is loaded with second-guessing.

Besides, being an individual automatically means exposing some vulnerability – a thing no one want to do, least of all in print. The result is sameness, boring copy.

Look at CP [Canadian Press] copy. Even when it’s not atrocious, it has this deadening sameness, this formulaic quality. Sometimes you hear the equivalent in the voices of news readers on television and radio, often in the form of an unnatural sort of singsong. I’m sure it’s a defence mechanism for them.

The reason why individuality improves writing is that by consulting with a real human being with human reactions, you can make the best decisions on what obscure details to go with, on what quirky part of an event belongs in the story, even if logic says it doesn’t; and the only human being you have around all the time is you.

It’s a myth that there’s one right way to handle a story, or that 10 different reporters covering the same event ought to write similar stories. Individuality is healthy, it’s real. Most reporters need a strong dose of self-confidence, and the willingness occasionally to take well-considered risks. That’s the path to development into a stronger writer with a more human voice, and people who don’t take it wind up being capable bores who don’t have any fun.

I was a little bothered about this because I remembered reading in "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White about the value of the writer staying in the background. I agreed but still felt the writer needs to come out and show himself or herself more, so I looked up the section in Strunk and White. It’s very good, this is an excerpt that is apropos:

“As [the writer] becomes proficient in the use of the language, his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge, and when this happens he will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate him from other minds, other hearts – which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward.”

Newspapers are like jigsaw puzzles, small shards of life. Each story is a miniature, a string of facts often not awfully interesting, unwieldy, each with its own peculiar set of writing problems that necessitate whole gobs of words that are at the same time cumbersome and indispensable. The frustrations and difficulty of coping with this are unfortunately a commonplace of our lives and there’s no escaping that this demands a lot of hard finicky work with the analytical, verbal part of our minds.

But what’s most important is to have behind it a single-mindedness of purpose in keeping the thing interesting for the reader. Lookit: You get the lead right, and it plants one solid whole idea in the reader’s head; now you have to tell yourself to take that as a given, that you’ve got the reader, and keep on holding him or her. Think always of the fragility of the reader’s attention, the reader’s mental humming.

Picture yourself holding a soap bubble in your two hands, moving it from place to place and hoping it won’t burst; or holding a lighted match in a windstorm.

The point is there are real human beings out there who read your stories, and you have to be focused on what you imagine to be their mental experience as they read, striving with intensity to keep the energy level high, to keep the ideas moving. Even if the story is so-so.

This discussion would be incomplete without acknowledging that some stories that must be printed are plain boring and do not offer opportunities for writers to use much individuality. But there’s still a smidgeon of interest in the thing, so it becomes a technical job of seeking clarity and simplicity, probably brevity. And every reporter gets lucky now and again and gets a hot story.

Nearly every writer who succeeds in landing a job with a newspaper has acquired the fundamentals of sound writing. Young writers should remember that they’re out of the schoolroom now and the rule is: Anything that works.

It’s a good practice to review your copy looking for flatness or drabness. If it’s there, don’t be too punctilious about cracking it into motion. Let’s say you’ve written: “The food bank provided assistance to 280 clients in July.” There’s got to be a better way.

Adopt a conversational, informal tone of voice. It’s good in newspapers. You’re talking to the reader.

One enemy of energetic writing can be too much concern for well-roundedness, where every sentence seems to have a nice and “correct” rhythm. Another enemy of good writing can be too much orderliness. Pyramidal-style writing means you start with what’s most interesting, go on to second most, third most and so on. It isn’t chronological. The sequence of writing, like the sequence of thought, can’t be reduced to summary notation. If you get it right, choppiness is vigor, disorder is energy.

Now the following is a difficult point to discuss and could easily be misconstrued, but I think that the only thing that matters in life and in writing is emotion, and that the reporter should be guided by this while writing.

This doesn’t mean being mushy and it certainly doesn’t mean hyping things or being sensationalistic; it does mean looking for the part of the story that affects people’s feelings and giving it its due. Very often this is handled best with understatement, but it always strikes me as a shame and a waste when a story has strong emotional elements and the reporter flinches from them.

Emotional realism is what you’re after and you have to have a deep commitment to truth, in every possible sense of the word. If it’s a strong story you want to put the reader right there. For instance, if you cover a terrible accident and were horrified by screams but don’t find some way to get that into your story, you’re not being completely truthful.

You have to do this in your own voice, which you may not have found yet. This takes time and courage.

This is what I mean when I suggest that a degree of subjectivity improves copy. I don’t much like this quasi-scientific way of putting it, but you could say that both your left brain – verbal, analytical – and your right brain – intuitive, non-rational – ought to be employed in the writing. Your intuition should show the way, your analytical mind has the responsibility of saying, “No, that doesn’t work, but this will.”

So it’s not only all right, it’s desirable for you to take off your professional journalist’s cap for a moment to consult your feelings, before putting the reporter’s hat back on and running it by your analytical mind.

No one should interpret this praise of subjectivity as a licence to editorialize or treat subjects unfairly. It’s true that a tilt toward subjectivity entails ethical risks, but reporters must be trusted to deal with difficulties. No one wants them to be stenographers.

Often a reporter expresses individuality best with a light touch, just a paragraph or two fitted into a mainly conventional landscape. Readers have sensibility, they’ll get it.

For instance, a story about a university football player killed in a car accident had this as the eighth paragraph:

“ ‘Now he’s gone. It’s hard to put into words.... I don’t know how things happen. God has a plan. It’s time to go,’ Coste, a burly man with a crew cut, said as he looked toward the football field, the setting sun gently outlining the stubble on his face.”

This is pretty routine until “It’s time to go,” which is daring, something the reporter apparently went with because it felt right. Only two paragraphs out of this 16- or 20-paragraph story broke from the norm, and that may be all it takes to help the reader have the sense that this is reality.

For one editor, the detail in a story that jumped out and made it real was a down-and-outer’s preference for something like “Tanqueray gin and tonic with a lemon twist” – not just gin and tonic.

Occasionally you can get away with almost bravado, and to your surprise people may understand. Everyone’s had this experience: You’re reading and you think, gosh, that goes to something so deep inside myself that I never would have expected to find it on the outside. Print can’t approach television in delivering impact, but print kills TV in delivering depth.

A few years ago I read a book called Here at The New Yorker, by Brendan Gill. It’s a light anecdotal book. Somewhere he said that inside every writer there’s a six-year-old kid, and he described half-humorously his devastation when, approaching age 60, editors would tell him No, this piece isn’t good enough for publication. He said that all of a sudden he was transformed into the six-year-old kid with saucer eyes and mouth hanging open; hurt feelings; vulnerability exposed and lacerated:

“In our hearts, we are all six years old, and when Maxwell or Shawn is obliged to hand back to me a manuscript on which my hopes have centered for weeks or perhaps months, they know I will smile and try to get past the dreadful moment with some unconvincing pleasantry; they also know that if they don’t turn and hurry away from my office, they may catch sight of that inextinguishable six-year-old staring woebegonely out at them from the face of a middle-aged man.”

That kid, as he says, is inside us all and is inside the reader too; and it’s when we have the courage to be guided by the kid that real contact happens between our kid and the reader’s kid, and you finish your story and just know that it’s going to move people and some of them will even mention it to wives and husbands, and you go home with a kind of pleasure and satisfaction that is the glory of this crazy business. It’s fleeting and the exasperating part is you rarely if ever hear back from the ordinary reader. This means that the most important relationship in your working life – between you and the reader – seems a thing of fantasy.

But there are real readers out there, thousands of them, who see our stuff even though we forget and this is the romance of this work and anyone who doesn’t get this and doesn’t make a fairly profound commitment to the reader I simply don’t understand.

That is pretty high-flown and it gets away from the simplicity of reporting, which is: You were there, the reader wasn’t, you tell what happened.

The best mood for writing is confident expectation of success, analogous to a baseball pitcher’s ideal state of “relaxed tension.” You should keep refocusing on the reader and have a friendly, comfortable feeling toward the reader. You should not focus on editors’ reactions and above all you shouldn’t write for your sources; poisons copy.

You’re a whole human being and the reader wants to hear your whole voice.

© 2010 Julian Peter Riley

Happily it was after 4 o’clock in the afternoon – my coffee time (I’m on a diet) – when I started typing in the following two dozen quatrains. This took about an hour.

I think it was when I was a senior in high school that I had the most profound literary experience of my life. I would have been 17, living with my mother in a Detroit suburb. My older sister Chloe was off on her own in college in Vermont. My father and his zoo of a new family were surviving as they might back in New Jersey (or was it North Carolina by that time?).

In those years, my mother’s words were sacrosanct to me. (They have turned 180 degrees since then.) She had an old paperback copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She’d mentioned it from time to time over the years, always saying that she could tell it was great poetry, but couldn’t understand it. With this imprimatur upon it, I had looked at it several times over my earlier teen years; I couldn’t understand it either.

Then one weekend afternoon, my mother being away for several hours, I took it up again, apparently having no homework to do. This time, I did understand it – well, not all of it, but most of it. And it spoke to me, to the dark, mysterious, simultaneously romantic and fatalistic core of my being. I read it a few times, made a list of perhaps 40 of my favorites, and memorized them. (In those days, I thought of poetry memorization as a virtuous and worthy thing to do. I had earlier memorized part of Poe’s “The Raven.”) I can still recall several of them very readily.

Omar’s years were 1048-1131, and he lived in Persia, now Iran. It was a Muslim country back then too, Mohammed (Muhammad, Mohamet?) having founded Islam in the seventh century BCE. Omar was distinguished in his own time and land as a major mathematician and astronomer. “Philosophy, jurisprudence, history, mathematics, medicine and astronomy are among the subjects he mastered,” according to Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. At perhaps 14 or 15, I read a fanciful, fictionalized biography of Omar written by Harold Lamb; it was rather an exotic adventure story. In 1859, a version of his quatrains made by Britisher Edward FitzGerald was published, and it is on the basis of this version (better not to call it a “translation”) that Omar’s fame rests in the West. There’s been dispute as to the accuracy of the FitzGerald treatment: How much of it was Omar, and how much FitzGerald?

“Rubaiyat” is the plural of ruba‘i, a Persian poetry form with a rhyme scheme of aaba. A ruba‘i is a quatrain, or four-line poem, and FitzGerald used iambic pentameter, the same metric system Shakespeare used in his plays. (Interesting how modern actors never stress the syllables to reflect the meter – I wonder if the original Elizabethan players did otherwise.)

Omar’s chief themes seemed to be the glories of wine, and the dread inevitability of death. He, or FitzGerald, did all his talking through a gauzy mist of mystical romanticism, which appealed to me immensely, and still does.

So I picked out my favorites, and plunked them into the keyboard for your reading pleasure (I hope). As a “recovering alcoholic,” I can hardly approve of the rosy hues in which wine is portrayed, but still, in my early drinking years (and before my drinking had progressed, as it tends to do, to severe extremes), the romanticism that I attached to booze was a nice accompaniment to an evening of quiet sousing. (That “imprimatur” again.) I’ve always had a morbid fascination with death, and I do feel we secular westerners are kidding ourselves when we go about living as if deep inside there did not lurk a terror of our inevitable demise. (Everyone’s a health nut, hell-bent to postpone death; but you can’t postpone it eternally.) These issues inform my novel, as you may have seen.

So, this afternoon, for something “constructive” to do, I picked out 24 of my favorite Omar quatrains, and typed them in to upload onto Blog/Other Writings. (I had meant to keep this section to other writings of my own, but will make an exception in this, and perhaps a few other, case(s). I know people don’t read poetry much any more – I don’t. But these still speak to me. See what you think of them.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Awake! For morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight:
            And lo! The hunter of the east has caught
The sultan’s turret in a noose of light. 

Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky
I heard a voice within the tavern cry,
            “Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry.”

And, as the cock crew, those who stood before
The tavern shouted – “Open then the door.
            You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.”

Iram indeed is gone with all its rose,
And Jamshyd’s sev’n-ring’d cup where no one knows;
            But still the vine her ancient ruby yields,
And still a garden by the water blows.

Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
The winter garment of repentance fling:
            The bird of time has but a little way
To fly – and lo! The bird is on the wing.

A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou
           Beside me singing in the wilderness
Ah, wilderness were paradise enow!

Look to the rose that blows about us – “Lo,
Laughing,” she says, “into the world I blow;
At once the silken tassel of my purse
Tear, and its treasure on the garden throw.”

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes – or it prospers; and anon,
            Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two – is gone.

And those who husbanded the golden grain,
And those who flung it to the winds like rain,
            Alike to no such aureate earth are turn’d
As, buried once, men want dug up again.

Lo! Some we loved, the loveliest and best
That time and fate of all their vintage prest,
            Have drunk their cup a round or two before
And one by one crept silently to rest.

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the dust descent;
            Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie,
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and – sans end!

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that life flies;
            One thing is certain, and the rest is lies:
The flower than once has blown forever dies.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
            About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.

Into this universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing:
            And out of it, as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

What, without asking hither hurried whence?
And, without asking, whither hurried hence!
            Another and another cup to drown
The memory of this impertinence!

One moment in annihilation’s waste,
One moment, of the well of life to taste –
            The stars are setting, and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing – Oh, make haste!

Ah, fill the cup: – what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our feet:
            Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet!

How long, how long, in infinite pursuit
Of this and that endeavour and dispute?
            Better be merry with the fruitful grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, fruit. 

And if the wine you drink, the lip you press,
End in the nothing all things end in – Yes –
            Then fancy while thou art, thou art but what
Thou shalt be – nothing – thou shalt not be less.

’Tis all a chequer-board of nights and days
Where destiny with men for pieces plays:
            Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
            Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
            And then and then came spring, and in a trice
My thread-bare penitence a-pieces tore.

Ah, Love! Could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
            Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

And when thyself with shining foot shall pass
Among the guests star-scatter’d on the grass,
            And in thy joyous errand, reach the spot
Where I made one – turn down an empty glass!

When I was 18, I was a miserably unprepared youth embarked on my first year (1962-3) of higher education, at a small liberal-arts school, Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt. I had chosen Goddard only because my older sister, Chloe, was a student there, and I felt that I might get some comfort from her presence. In fact, she was involved in the challenges and angst of her own life, and the adventure of her first and only romantic attachment, and probably wished I’d never shown up.

I was desperately afraid of higher education. I felt I would never measure up academically to all these “adults.” In fact, I was more than able to compete scholastically, but my real fear most likely was based on an inner awareness that I was not nearly mature enough for the transition toward adulthood. As things turned out, my experiences with post-secondary education were ultimately disastrous, and after acquiring a total of three years of credit over a course of seven years, punctuated by a nervous breakdown and closed by a plunge into alcoholism, I gave it up. I still don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

I vividly remember the last half-hour or so of the train journey toward Plainfield, where I was to be met by my sister and the fine young man who later became her husband (and was legally still married to her at the time of her death in 2008, 36 years after their permanent separation). As the time of arrival in the terrifying world of mature responsibilities drew more and more imminent, I experienced my first “acute anxiety attack” (now called a “panic attack”).

Goddard at the time was a hippie college before hippies had been invented. The students tended to be left-wing and generally unsettled. There were a lot of emotionally disturbed kids floating around.

In the spring of 1963, my second semester at Goddard, I was seized by an urgent sense of need to write poetry. I’d written a little, and held ambitions about my writing prowess, particularly as a poet. I phoned my mother and asked if she would put me up for the next year (1963-4), while I wrote poetry. She agreed, seemingly pleased at the prospect. So at 19, I sat in her house supposedly writing what would have to be called an “epic poem,” or something of the kind. It was my mother, a music teacher in junior high, who, her face flushed, gave me the news that “The President has been assassinated” on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. (We had to go shopping at a large drugstore that evening, and I felt that the Musak blaring over speakers in the store was extremely tacky.)

I wasn’t mature enough to write seriously. (Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t for another 23 years that I undertook a serious project, which became my novel “Universes.”) I don’t recall what I did during the days while my mother was at school – played the piano some, I suppose – but I shortly fell to writing only two or four lines of poetry per day. It was poor stuff. I didn’t work up the nerve to take a hard look at it until about 15 years ago, at which time I concluded it was almost totally without merit. Its setting was a kind of once-upon-a-time world with kings, castles, court jesters. The hero, King Sebastian, and his court live under a curse invoked by a witch many years before. Hoping to overcome the curse, Sebastian with others climbs a tall, conical mountain, only to discover that the mountaintop is actually hollowed out, filled with empty, cell-like caves. But I never got as far as that. I wrote, I think, about 40 pages of single-spaced verse.

Even if it had been good, it would not have been published because of the style it was written in. It was all in rhymed couplets, in iambic pentameter, the meter used by Shakespeare (naturally. This goes “da-DUM-da-DUM-da-Dum-da-DUM-da-DUM.” It is also the meter used in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald.)

There is one bit I like, and I’m posting it here. My memory on this is quite murky, but I suspect I actually wrote this about a year previously, while visiting my father in North Carolina, somewhat drunk at the time of writing. Over the years I’ve made some small changes to it. I’ve always thought if it as my “purple passage.”

Purple Passage

Oh, that the vast and lustful soul
Should fill and swell the years, its intemperate thirst
The while undrunk, merely to be burst
On death’s bare desert, there at once to pour
Its bitter vintage, evermore
Soaking deeper in the sand, to dry
Underneath a dead and sunless sky.
Alas, the souls that are no more alive,
The poor dead men in whose lives we strive
Like strangers now for what they did not find
Are lying alone in death, and all entwined
Within eternity, and, as the rolling sea
That rolls in death, are no more blind that we
Who play above the water in a glow
Like spray caught by the rocks and tempest-blow.

“Desiderata” is a poem that appeals to me. I’d encountered a very curious and interesting account of how it came into public awareness, and for some time was under the impression that its author, American author-lawyer Max Ehrmann, had deliberately written it on the wall of an old church in hope that it would be discovered and mistakenly attributed to an anonymous writer of an earlier time. Its writing style certainly does ring of an earlier epoch and approach to letters.

 I suppose I ought to have researched Desiderata better, but I only looked it up on Wikipedia (a convenient source, but clearly not as reliable as some others), which said Ehrmann had written it, and that its popularity followed discovery of a copy of it near twice-defeated U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson’s bedside after his death  in 1965.

I like the sentiments expressed in Desiderata very much, as well as the language in which they are expressed; and if I could actually live in the ways it urges, my life would no doubt be a great deal better.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;

or the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

                                                                                               -- Max Ehrmann (1872-1945)

I would like to share with you a “think-piece” I wrote six years ago. It was published on March 27, 2004, in The London Free Press in London, Ontario, Canada; it appeared as the main item on the front page of the newspaper’s Viewpoint section. At the time I was employed by The Free Press as a part-time copy editor (and occasional editorial writer) in the newspaper’s opinion section. Although I was working for the newspaper, the piece was written on my own time and sold to the paper for one-time use. It was understood that the rights for any future use belonged to me.

By Peter Riley

© 2004 Julian Peter Riley

I believe; help thou my unbelief.                 

                             – Mark 9:24 (King James Version)

                 In huge type on its cover for April 8, 1966, around Easter time, a headline on the cover of Time magazine asked, “Is God dead?’

                I was a student in Ann Arbor, Mich., and one of my professors, a witty, iconoclastic anthropologist named Leslie A. White, gleefully held the magazine high over his head, in both hands, in front of his lecture class – thus excusing himself for an apparently annual rite of bashing organized religion.

               It was, and is, a good question: Has spirituality become irrelevant in the western world? Apparently not, surveys suggest.

              According to a World Faith News website, a 1997 Gallup poll found that “96 percent of Americans today say they believe in God [and] 71 percent profess belief in an afterlife.”

              The figures from a similar 1947 Gallup poll were little different: 95 percent and 73 percent respectively.

              Well, okay. But there has been a change in the past 50, 100 years. People don’t talk about God, heaven and so on . . . unless they’re joking.

              In the public forum, the only people who refer to God with a straight face are clergy and politicians – the latter of whom probably can expect to be excused on grounds of rhetorical norms. Can anyone consume popular culture – movies, television – and seriously think religion carries the weight in people’s lives it once did? In the public forum, at least, God is dead. He’s dead at the water cooler.

              People answering poll-takers’ questions are probably being truthful when they say they believe. But do they relate to divinity as part of their everyday lives? Fear hell, long for heaven? Except for a substantial minority of the deeply religious, I think the answers are no.

             I think most people take a deep breath and do some serious pondering, for the most part, only when someone close to them dies.

             I envision them teetering, at that emotion-tossed time, toward belief in “something. And then returning to the business of routine existence.

            As they grow older, thoughts of their own  mortality may trouble them at times, but will be hastily swept aside, I suspect. Until, of course, their own death is imminent.

            Well, I’m getting up in years, but it seems most of my life, questions surrounding spirituality have held a place of precedence with me. But not answers.

             My religious schooling was unusual. When I was six or seven, I asked my mother if there was a God. She said I’d have to figure that out when I was older.

            Around the same age, I recall walking with her on a sidewalk on an utterly lovely day – in spring, I reckon. “What’s heaven like?” I asked.

            Her reply was equivocal. Her father was a distinguished academic and an atheist who looked down on religion as something lowbrow. Perhaps she did, too.

            In my mid-teens, I was deeply affected by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, an 11^th- and 12^th-century Persian poet, translated by Edward Fitzgerald. He wrote, for instance:

One moment in Annihilation’s Waste,

One moment, of the Well of Life to taste –

The Stars are setting, and the Caravan

Starts for the dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!

             Reading these poems – I memorized about 40 of the quatrains – meant so much to me. Someone in an ancient past had anticipated what life felt like for someone with my own world-view and given form to it in such exquisite words. It dignified my angst . . . made it strangely sweet.

            Not long afterward, I was blown away by Samuel Beckett’s theatre-of-the-absurd play, Waiting for Godot. It was televised, twice, and I remember being struck the second time around with how readily I seemed to grasp it, obscure though it was. Two hoboes linger aimlessly, miserably, in a nondescript wasteland. Here is some of the dialogue:

Estragon: Let’s go.

Vladimir: We can’t.

Estragon: Why not?

Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.

Estragon: Ah.

            “Let’s go” means “Let’s get away from awful reality. Let’s die.” Godot, I’m guessing meant a vague hope of spiritual relief. (I was an atheist. I knew the parched landscape Vladimir and Estragon inhabited.)

            Hamlet had similar musings. An excerpt:

To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep we say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s no respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

            It’s curious, isn’t it, that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audiences could have accepted such bold questioning of doctrine, that is, of the immortality of the soul? It’s curious, too, that this meditation on suicide is among the Bard’s best-known passages in modern times.

            The late Joseph Campbell was an American professor specializing in comparative religions or, as he called them, mythologies. In the evolution of cultures, from primitive hunter-gatherer tribes to present-day civilization, Campbell saw a steady decline in the immediacy, the realness, of myth in people’s lives. A better word might be faith.

            I saw an instance of this transition in microcosm in a television show about a terrible hurricane that struck New England states without warning in the 1930s. A woman about 60 years old when interviewed told of her experiences going through the storm back then, when she was about 10.  Her family had huddled in the top story of their beach home until the house was torn from its foundations and floated out to see like a boat. It ended up on dry land the next day, in another state.

              Her family all knew they were about to die, the woman said. They thought they would go to heaven.

             “Of course, that’s what people believed back then,” the woman said (or words to that effect), as if apologizing for their naivete.

             What a swift change of belief – in a single lifetime.

             The clash between absolute faith  – in which all life flows out of spirituality – with the modern condition in which religion is, if anything at all, a supportive adjunct to the real stuff of living, is illustrated in a mid-19^th-century letter written by an American Plains Indian chief to the United States president, whose representatives wanted to buy his tribe’s land. His name was Chief Seattle and he writes with breathtaking eloquence:

              “The president in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

               “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

               “We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.”

                In only the past century, the bulk of the population in the western world has moved from rural areas to cities. I feel sure that the disconnect of man from nature has exacerbated our disconnect from the spiritual quality that I believe, from my own experience at times, life can possess. Perhaps the breakup of intimate communities, in which, of old, a person didn’t travel 10 miles from his or her place of birth during a lifetime, has contributed to the nihilistic thread of modern life. Bigness intensifies the impersonal, accidental, meaningless character of experience. We go to big schools, work for big corporations, live in cities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people or more.

              The battles of science and religion over the past few hundred years, in which religion has taken a drubbing, haven’t helped. Much of the blame lies in the conservatism of organized religion, as it clings to dogmas that include antiquated notions on the nature of the universe. As Campbell said, trying to build a contemporary metaphysics on the basis of 4,000-year-old science is hopeless.

               Scientists perhaps can’t be blamed if they have an anti-religious bias. In 1633, the Inquisition imprisoned Galileo for life because of his belief in a sun-centered universe. Science seeks truth, while religion insists the basic truths were pronounced by sages centuries ago and are immutable.

              Scientists and religious leaders have been at each others’ throats for centuries, and both sides have, I think, a motive unknown consciously even to themselves. Priests were once a society’s great arbiters of truth, authority figures revered and mystified in the community. Now scientists have usurped that role. No wonder they maintain continuing mutual antipathy. No wonder science hostilely dismisses any evidence that exists – as some does exist – that there is in fact an unseen world whose mysteries remain to be plumbed.

              Campbell, I believe, felt that a man or woman could not come into the fullness of humanity without undergoing a spiritual transformation. He or she would live life as a half-man, or half-woman. I believe this. It does not necessarily matter whether there is truth behind spiritual beliefs. It is enough that the absence of our belief in them truncates us as human beings.

              Can we as a race, so pygmied, deal effectively with the crises that surely will strike in the years and centuries to come? Manmade disasters – think of nuclear strikes, pollution, civilization-vs.-civilization conflict – will be of a magnitude never seen before. Will the planet survive as a fit place to live in, say, 500 years from now? I doubt it.

               Unless, that is, there’s a spiritual reawakening, which must come, if it ever does, in a way now completely unforeseeable. History is full of astonishing twists. And this might alter us so we could manage the coming strife.

               The texture and feeling of a person’s passing moments must differ so vastly, depending on whether one is spiritually alive or a nonbeliever, that it must be as if they lived in different universes. (I have had a foot in either world at one time or another in my life, which must be unusual.) Compare the serene, dark mystery of the face of a Buddha statue with the leer of many a contemporary pop icon. Compare the indescribably profound passions of the works of J.S. Bach with the popular airs of our era. Or think of The Week’s Best Late-Night Laughs, a collection of jokes by talk-show hosted published weekly in The London Free Press. Here’s a recent one from David Letterman:

               “It’s a two for one. We got fashion week going on and also the Westminster Dog Show over at Madison Square Garden. I hate this time of year because the town is full of temperamental little bitches.”

               The cynicism – the hardness – of our times is suffocating.

               My first period of spiritual bliss occurred one summer when I was 16. I hadn’t much to do. In the afternoons, I sat by a lake watching the speed boats pass; watching the rippling lines of water advance to shore, and the trees across the lake, which had a color of such poignant beauty that no artist has come close to capturing, except maybe Henri Rousseau. It was so real, so present. I came into a mood of grand serenity I have never experienced since. Several times, I absolutely know, fearing that in coming years, which were certain not to be so pleasant, I would dismiss the power and glory of this extended state of mind. I imprinted in my memory the strongest mental notes I possibly could: “Yes, this really happened.” “Yes, it was this good.” At the time, I would have called myself an atheist. Belief had nothing to do with it.

             All that faded. Then, when I was about 33, I read a book popularizing parapsychology – purported evidence for events not explainable by mainstream science. From it I took the leap of considering that, just maybe, souls did exist – something I had always dismissed till then. Not only that, they might survive death. I had always had such a terrible fear of death, eternal nullity, that this came on me as a wonderful new vista, even if it was conjectural. I entered another spiritual frame of mind. It wasn’t as good as the first – this was winter in New Brunswick, Canada, and I was working – but it was sweet. Then it glimmered away.

              There is a traditional gospel song that originated, I have read, in 19^th-century America either among blacks or poor southern whites, as it is now believed. You’ve heard it if you’ve ever seen the 1943 western The Ox-Bow Incident. This is the refrain:

You got to walk that lonesome valley,

You got to walk it by yourself;

Nobody here can go there with you.

You got to walk it by yourself.

            I’ll turn 60 this year. My life has had bad times, good times and neutral times. The bad times have been very bad, the good times very good. I am just now coming into the sun after three years in darkness.

            About three months ago, I memorized the 23^rd Psalm. I formed a habit of reciting it silently in my mind before going to sleep. This was done as a prayer, to a personal God, by someone who is uncertain whether there is  God at all, let alone a personal one. The psalm contains the lines, “Yea, though I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with my; they rod and they staff they comfort me.” But the phrase I like best is, “He restoreth my soul.” In the intervening time, my life and mindset have altered inexpressibly for the good, to an extent and with a rapidity I had never hoped for. Because of the prayer? I don’t know.

            In the time that remains to me there will be periods when I “walk that lonesome valley” once again. The rub is, “Thou art with me” does not apply in my case; at least not to my conscious awareness and belief. Much as I want to believe in spirits and heaven-sent help, I still consider that there are as many reasons to dismiss religion as there are to embrace it. That doubt will tarry with me to the end of my days.

The following two citations are sidebars to the article “An Agnostic’s Prayer.”

From Chief Seattle’s letter

            If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

          Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

          This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself ....

          We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all.

          As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be he Red Man or White Man, can be apart. We are brothers after all.

+   +   +   +   + 

23^rd Psalm

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

-- King James Version