Dialogue on wisdom we wish we had had when we were younger this coming Wednesday March 11

We lost Jorg Ostrowski last week, yet his wisdom is still with us. His home in Calgary has been visited by more than 100,000 people. It is an architectural testimony to the importance of harmony with the ecosystem of which we are a part.

Each of us grows in wisdom as we grow older. Synopses previously shared with you (like the one appended below) provide wisdom from the authors of books. Yet you yourself are a living book of wisdom. If you tap into that wisdom, you might recall a part of it that you wish you had acquired years or even decades before it came to you. Maybe your life would have been even better than it has been, if you’d had that wisdom sooner. Perhaps that very wisdom would be extremely important to others if you could share it with them while they are still young.

We’ll think about that opportunity when we meet for our weekly dialogue and potluck this coming Wednesday March 11, at the Humainologie Gallery & Store,1514 Seventh Street SW.

Arthur

Book Chapter: (Robert Greene) The Laws of Human Nature (2018), Chapter 18

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), author of some of the most unforgettable short stories I’ve ever read, had to deal with more than her share of stressful relationships and encounters with human beings. One of the reasons for her extraordinary maturity was that at an early age she was forced to look death in the face, and she did not blink. In his concluding chapter, Robert Greene focuses on her life as a case study.

Chapter 18. Meditate on Our Common Mortality. The Law of Death Denial

The only child of a father with whom she bonded deeply, who died of systemic lupus erythematosus, and a mother who was much less bonded with her, Flannery O’Connor was shy and bookish growing up, already showing literary talent by the age of twelve. When she was just fifteen years old, her beloved father died; he was just forty-five. A devout Catholic, Flannery aimed to focus on her literary genius and to do this she left Georgia, on a full scholarship to the University of Iowa in 1945. Soon her stories were appearing in prestigious magazines and publishers sought her attention. Around Christmas of 1949, however, she fell ill and within months she was found to have the same disease that had killed her father. Despite cortisone therapy, she knew that death was approaching. Circumstances soon forced her to return to the family farm, a kind of prison for her, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia. Yet she accepted it and went on producing her powerful stories, writing at one point to a friend, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”

By this time, she was also becoming keenly aware of the superficiality of life in America, a materialistic and soulless culture as she saw it. So many people were without any sense of purpose. “And at the core of these problems was their inability to face their own mortality and the seriousness of it. …As she saw it, people were losing their humanity and capable of all kinds of cruelties. They did not seem to care very deeply about one another…. If they could only see what she had seen – how our time is so short, how everyone must suffer and die – it would alter their way of life; it would make them grow up; it would melt all their coldness.”

In 1953 she met a tall, handsome twenty-six-year-old man from Denmark, Erik Langkjaier, a travelling textbook salesman who had asked to meet this literary genius of Georgia. Soon there was a relationship between them. When Erik announced he was taking a six-month leave of absence to return to Denmark, Flannery began writing letters to him, expressing how much their meetings had meant to her. She felt there was a bond between them. Then came the news that he was engaged to be married to a Danish woman. “She had intuited such an event would happen, but the news was a shock nonetheless. She replied with utmost politeness, congratulating him, and they wrote to each other for several more years, but she could not get over this loss so easily. She had tried to protect herself from any deep feelings of…separation because they were too unbearable for her. They were like small reminders of the death that would take her away at any moment, while others would go on living and loving. And now those very feelings of separation came pouring in.”

Now she knew that her life would forever be lived alone. The heightened awareness of her fate became the impetus for more stories, rich with “her knowledge of people and their vulnerabilities.” Her relentless drive to produce these stories, against advice from her doctors to stop working, led her to hide her notebooks or even to keep the stories in her memory until she could write them down. “She died in the early hours of August 3, at the age of thirty-nine. In accordance with her last wishes, Flannery was buried next to her father.”

As Flannery saw it, her heightened empathy for other human beings was a consequence of her having looked death “squarely in the eye without flinching.” She learned what really matters in life and “was thoroughly at home with the ultimate reality represented by death.” Her “empathy and feeling of unity with others, as evidenced by her strong desire to communicate with all types of people, caused her to eventually let go of one of her greatest limitations: the racist sentiments toward African Americans she had internalized from her mother and many others in the South. …By the early 1960s she came to embrace the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.”

Flannery O’Connor had an advantage over most of us, Greene explains, in that she was “compelled to confront death and make use of her awareness of it.” Death “is a fate shared by us all and something that should bind us in a deeply empathic way. We are all a part of the brotherhood and sisterhood of death.” He refers to the paradoxical death effect. Awareness of our mortality makes us feel more awake and alive, as well illustrated by the history of Flannery O’Connor. “By connecting to the reality of death, we connect more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life. By separating death from life and repressing our awareness of it, we do the opposite.”

The author advises us to make our awareness visceral, as if we had just been given a death sentence. Fyodor Dostoyevsky experienced exactly that wakening when he and other alleged conspirators were told they would be executed that very day. The sentence was commuted, but the awakening remained. Awaken to the shortness of life. See the mortality in everyone. “Let us look at the pedestrians in any busy city and realize that in ninety years it is likely that none of them will be alive, including us. …Our unique consciousness of death has created our particular form of love.”

Embrace all pain and adversity. We have a choice between avoiding things that might lead to failure or other painful experiences; or to live life fully, “to commit ourselves to what Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati (‘love of fate’): wanting nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity. . . but to love it.’” We can choose to see (as did Flannery O’Connor) that everything happens for a reason.

Open the mind to the Sublime. We can encounter the Sublime by thinking about the origin of life on earth or by contemplating the night sky and thinking of how miniscule a place our planet or the solar system has in the universe. “In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver, a foretaste of death itself, something too large for our minds to encompass.”

As we become more aware of our mortality, “we experience a taste of true freedom. …We can be more daring without feeling afraid of the consequences. …We can commit fully to our work, to our relationships, to all our actions.”

Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom…. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. – Michel de Montaigne