| When, in preparation for this Foreword, I had a long
telephone conversation with Paul Fleischman, the first thing I told him was that
my family and friends were teasing me for reading his book.
I’d been re-reading it over Christmas, a time when we all ought to
cultivate peace. Yet everyone was
cheerfully agreeing, with British flippancy, that a world in which all of
humanity had successfully cultivated inner peace would be appallingly boring –
inhuman, too. To my relief, Paul
took this point very well. |
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| He also responded benignly when I told him I was thinking of writing a
book called American Friends, to
explore how Americans think about the world.
He said he would gladly be one of my interviewees, and in a follow-up
email – with ‘teasing out peace’ in the subject line, and written just
before departing for India for six weeks of concentration on Vipassana
meditation – he assured me
(referring to his son):
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During his high school years Forrest trained us in
the ways of Monty Python. So we are
now prepared to meet the British invasion head on.
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| A week or two later, on a beautiful, snowy yet sunny day, I walked with
friends along the west side of the Pennines, not far from my Northumberland
home. I found myself thinking about
Paul’s book a lot, as I had just finished it.
The day was of a sort that comes to us rarely: perfect weather, perfect
company, perfect happiness. We
can’t live that all the time, and I don’t think most of us would want to.
Apart from other drawbacks, how would we fully appreciate such days if
there were not other, less happy days to compare them with?
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| Reflecting
on this question, after talking to Paul and finishing his book, I concluded that
he had addressed it fully. He is
the last person to want everyone to go around in a state of perpetual serenity,
with beatific – and intensely irritating! – smiles on their faces.
He sounded very calm on the phone, despite the fact he had wrenched his
knee badly while skiing, four days before he and Susan were due to leave.
Yet I expect, like all of us, he can get ratty and impatient at times;
even as a psychiatrist, listening to his patients’ sagas of inner pain and
turmoil, he might sometimes feel bored, though it would be professional suicide
to admit to that.
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| He
told me that Vipassana meditation in fact involves phases of considerable,
subjective turbulence before calm and objectivity are achieved.
In the chapter of his book where he writes of his personal experience of
meditation, he emphasizes the unveiling of ‘ceaseless change…the fluidity
and impermanence of every particle of your being’.
That itself is not peaceful; but direct awareness of it can be.
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| He
is also fond of quoting Robert Louis Stevenson’s: ‘To travel hopefully is
better than to arrive.’ All the
figures he writes about in his book – from Juan and Kathleen Mascaró to Scott
and Helen Nearing, the Shakers, Walt Whitman, Gandhi, John Muir, Thoreau, Tagore
and the Buddha – were travellers and seekers.
They were finders too, to varying degrees, but none of them thought that
in our mortal existence the journey can ever entirely cease.
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| Similarly,
with the problems of overpopulation, pollution and environmental degradation
that Paul writes about with such passionate eloquence, no one imagines that we
shall ever solve all such problems completely.
But we can all agree that we should commit ourselves to travelling
towards a solution, and that the achievement of peace at a personal level can
help us greatly towards that end.
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| As
I read the book, I found myself often thinking of a sequence of short poems I
wrote from August 1986 to November 1987. They
were a sort of diary in verse – all I had time for at a time when I was
looking after our two small daughters while attempting to finish my D.Phil
thesis. I called the sequence
‘The Retreat’, and put it into a book of that name which was published in
1994 by the University Press Limited in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The book was dedicated to Kathleen Mascaró, and I used as an epigraph an
aphorism of Juan’s: ‘The universal is personal.’
I wrote in a Preface:
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For a while, I regarded the book as a failure of nerve, a retreat from the
poetry I really wanted to write. But
now I do not see it like that. Sometimes
retreats are necessary in order to advance: reculer
pour mieux sauter, as the French say. And
the title has positive as well as negative associations for me, as it is the
name of the house near Cambridge where my friend Juan Mascaró lived, and where
his widow Kathleen still lives….Looking back, I find it miraculous that during
hectic and worrying years I managed to ‘retreat’ sometimes into my
imagination, and come up with poems that may last better than I thought they
would.
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| In
many ways, the inner peace that Paul is inviting us to cultivate, in emulation
of the thinkers, poets and environmentalists he writes about, is a capacity for
‘retreat’, which does not necessarily mean withdrawal from an active live in
a busy world. |
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| Looking at my poems
again now, I find plenty of irritation –
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Do
you want to hear of the peace
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That
the Bible says is in store?
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No, I say, and slam the door.
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| and dismay –
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| Famished
war-torn poisoned world,
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What
is the Word you speak?
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Groping
for a gloss, I touch
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A
power huge, yet weak.
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| and environmental
anxiety –
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| I
walk in the Park: the autumn colours are warm
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| As
the sunshine: I have a sudden bad day-dream.
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| Suppose
we become so liable for the world we’re in
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it becomes our task to take the leaves off, every one,
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| Each
autumn, and then, come spring, stitch them on again?
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| Does
God intend to leave us more and more on our own?
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| Yet the very act of describing that turmoil in verse was perhaps my way of
achieving peace. Certainly,
whenever I am writing poetry, now as then, I concentrate totally.
I’m not a meditator – I told Paul I’d always been reluctant to
pursue anything such as yoga or meditation that required long periods of doing
nothing. But perhaps in poetry
I’ve found my way of cultivating inner peace, just as Paul’s heroes
cultivated it in their respective ways.
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| I
mentioned to Paul how much I admired the style in which he had written his book:
the energy, vividness and sophistication of his language.
He is a real writer, with an adventurousness in his use of English such
as British writers often envy in their American counterparts.
It’s an adventurousness that is underpinned by his love for the
American land – her wildernesses, huge open skies, and endless forests. Land and language are part of who Paul is: no timid quietism
there.
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| Combined
with these deeply American qualities is a love-affair with the East.
In this he owes something to his New England heritage, for the ‘Boston
Brahmins’ (Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott) also looked Eastwards like him.
But in his discovery and dedicated practice of Vipassana meditation he
also shows an American capacity for composite self-cultivation.
‘I went to Mexico recently,’ he told me. ‘There’s an age-old
Hispanic and indigenous culture there that we Americans do not have.
Here, each individual has to pick and choose and create his or her own
culture.’
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| He
was being self-deprecating, as Americans often are when talking to someone from
the Old World. But that quality of
picking and choosing – ‘selectivity’ as Paul calls it in his book – is
precisely what makes Americans like him impressive.
They are not hidebound. They
are not locked into large joint families, or trapped in nets of social
convention. Their vision is as free and open as their landscape.
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| Perhaps
I can indulge myself with one more poem from ‘The Retreat’, written just
after my first visit to North America:
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| I
have reached North America at last.
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The Fall, the Fall!
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| Till
you’ve seen it you cannot understand at all
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The American dream.
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If ageing leaves can seem
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So lapidary, so also can
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Post-lapsarian Man
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Triumph over sinfulness,
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Overcome his feebleness!
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| Red,
brown, orange, yellow, gold –
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| No
autumnal sense of a world grown old.
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| I
wander ecstatically in the bright Ontario air:
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| Adam
and Eve saw nothing so passing fair.
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| Northumberland, 29 January 2003
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