Based on the blurbs on the book cover and from some of the reviews, it appears he talks quite a bit about commitment in the midst of doubt?
Again, the analogue of the mid-teen doubting the veracity of his parents and family history would again fit. Sure, commitment is nice, should there be such a one in a loving family given no real reason to doubt, but that’s a hypothetical and not true belief and knowledge. Those who do really doubt should be encouraged rather to seek and find experience of God that is undeniable and ‘to die for’, and not in the idolatrous sense of commitment and confidence an Islamic fundamentalist martyr would have.
I would say that every time I sin, I deny his lordship, not his existence. A slight alteration I make to the to the beginning “Be Thou My Vision” is “Be thou my vision” not “O”, but “and Lord of my heart”, a petition, not a statement.
It was really a rhetorical question remarking about co-instances and God’s getting your attention in what probably you would characterize as your conversion experience.
“Yet the idea sown by this one small voice would eventually spread throughout the Roman Empire, even outlasting it, so that Christ’s ideas remain central to our entire western culture and spiritual outlook, whether one believes in his god or not. It was the idea that survived, as ineradicable as the genes of the Phoenicians.”
Paul Strathern, Ten Cities that Led the World
As the book closed, and the final remark was made about that city, “the unknown unknown” to lead the world and “determine the future of the human or partly artificial race,” there was an unmistakable allusion to a New Jerusalem and yet there was also an ironically mixed metaphor.
I was just quoting as much as I could recall of the poem “If,” by Rudyard Kipling, with my boys.
I would like to hear some others’ thoughts on this.
Thanks.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
I don’t know about any “thoughts” I can share about that, Randy. Indeed, any such thing I could share would probably just be a desecration of it. All I can say is that the above poem is a balm to my beleagured soul just right at this time. For me, a word straight from God. Thank you.
-Merv
Kipling’s sexism aside (honestly, Rudyard, don’t you see women of character in the world as well?!), most if this is what we view maturity and character to be.
I think losing all for a selfish gamble (and he talks about it as a gamble on a game, rather than a gamble on something really valuable that would help people) might just shame one into keeping one’s mouth closed. However, taking a huge gamble on something you believe could really benefit people (maybe a school, or service) and seeing it fail, now never breathing a word about that loss could really take some character.
The rest is all good stuff, and would be good for anyone to strive for. But it’s incomplete. This is the person of character, but he is insular, an island to himself as well. The person here is not described as loving or as having any deep relationship with other people. He is a Rock, and Island, who has trained himself to feel no pain.
He lacks tenderness (emotional intelligence), and the ability to survive in spite of being crushed by life’s circumstances that affect not only him but people he loves. Those who love him can rely on him, but cannot really know him. We’re not sure if he really even knows himself.
Finally, he is entirely self-reliant, sufficient in himself. He feels need for no one, nothing. What could Jesus offer this man?
I was just filtering his “You’ll be a Man” through my King James filter of “they always spoke that way then” - though we can easily (granted - men have it made even more easy for them) see how this should apply to all of us. But yeah - he is a bit more deliberate addressing it to his son. Your point is well taken.
And as much as I like it, your final points are really good too! I know nothing of Kipling’s known [alleged] spiritual states, and have little interest in looking them up. But I like how you can take his high exhortation in this poem and recognize how it could be aimed infinitely higher yet! Thanks for that.
I just finished listening to the second installment, and this part really struck me as well. There is an interplay between analytical and creative thinking that is essential for the synthesis of ideas and new information. Without creative thinking it’s harder (maybe not possible at all?), to look for what might be possible based on the workaday study and analysis that one has put in so far.
I would like it if IM emphasized the idea of interplay more. Sometimes, and probably with good reason, it seems like he is arguing one over the other. I suspect that is because there is often a tendency for those folks who more highly value the rational (and our Western cultural tendency) to feel like the creative side isn’t really doing anything of analytic value, and IM has to make his case. But they aren’t operating separately. They are both subtly talking back and forth.
Those of us without a poetic or artistic bone in their bodies are taught culturally that they then lack creativity and imagination. But creative thinking takes many forms that have nothing to do with art or philosophy or poetry, at least in the formal ways we often imagine they do.
We don’t, for example, value highly abstract thinking as creative or imaginative, probably largely because most people aren’t able to engage in it much less understand it. And highly abstract thinkers probably are enculturated to see what they’re doing as purely analytical. But you don’t move from the known (whatever it is to you) to the “what could be” without creative thought. Even when no one else understands it.
You’re right and he does come back to the need for both many times. But the heavier lift is to convince many that intuition and imagination have any value at all. In the books as a whole he does go a long way toward making the case you desire. He desires it too but recognizes that you can’t fully justify them on rational grounds. Rationality only involves coherence within the map. A good map will track with reality, but whenever we start to think we’ve taken the measure of reality with our maps we’re sure to hit a bump. Global conclusions about what more is ruled out based on what we think we currently know need to be identified as the speculation they are.
The research based difference between the hemispheres is that one is always open and broadly attentive to whatever the world presents while the other categorizes and systematizes what we’ve already experienced for known purposes. Consciously we would be better off to make use of both perspectives, but it is only our maps which allow us to pin things down and that is useful. But to be in touch with reality we’re better off to leave space for what intuition and imagination offer as well. Over emphasizing the maps of the left hemisphere leads to over confidence of the sort we find in scientism while reflection can restore humility. But there is no reason to choose. Both are needed and a deficit on either side is pathological. His larger point is that as a culture we’ve become unbalanced, over valuing expedience and utility.
Great, thank you! I agree that there is much that needs discussion. You’ve put your finger on many spots I’ve been wanting to review. I’ll share this with my boys, if that’s ok.
From my recollection, he had a very dismal experience with Christianity, staying with an abusive couple, that turned him away from it–for 6 years in England, while his parents and aunt had no idea of the trauma.
Kipling referred to the place as “the House of Desolation”.[25]
In his autobiography published 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered if the combination of cruelty and neglect that he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: “If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture – religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.”[25]…
In the spring of 1877, Alice [his mother] returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers “Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”[25]
There’s much more to his history, but I sometimes wonder if that trauma contributed to his darker side, too. I still like the positive portions of the poem.
Thanks for all this background, Randy. I didn’t know anything about his childhood. It’s incredible what people survive!
I think his poem, “If,” reflects the common values of his time, class and culture. Most of it is praiseworthy. Even the response to losses, although gambling for sport is never a good idea. He reflect the idea of the Ethical person, and even the Knight of Infinite Resignation in Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling. These are (culturally situated) good things, but incomplete.
It’s wonderful that you are so deliberate in your conversations with your kids and sensitive to their understanding and needs.
As far as talking about what I wrote, Randy, if you find something of value, it’s all yours. This is all public.
In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard hammers incessantly at the anxiety Abraham endured when God required him to sacrifice Isaac. The most significant aspects of the anxiety have to do with Abraham’s love for Isaac, and Abraham’s inability to make himself understood by anyone besides God. These two paragraphs, shortened for clarity and focus, demonstrate the fear-inducing paradox fairly well:
Let us, then, consider a bit more closely the distress and the anxiety in the paradox of faith. The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to become the single individual. … By contrast, the knight of faith knows that it is glorious to belong to the universal. He knows that it is beautiful and pleasant to be the single individual who translates himself into the universal, who, so to speak, himself edits a clean and elegant and—so far as possible—error-free edition of himself that can be read by everyone. He knows that it is refreshing for a person to be understandable to himself in the universal in such a way that he understands it and, in turn, every individual who understands him understands the universal in him, and both find joy in the security of the universal. He knows that it is beautiful to be born as the single individual who has his home, his welcoming place of rest, in the universal, which if he wishes to remain there, immediately receives him with open arms. But he also knows that, higher than this, a narrow, steep path wends its lonely way; he knows that it is frightful to be born alone, outside the universal, to wander without encountering one single wanderer. He knows very well where he is and how he is situated in relation to people. Humanly speaking, he is mad and cannot make himself understood by anyone. And yet, madness is the mildest expression for it. If he is not viewed in this way, he is a hypocrite, and the further up the path he ascends, the more abominable a hypocrite he becomes.
"… And if only he could explain why he wants to do it—but it’s always a trial.” Nor could Abraham have provided any further explanation, for his life is like a book that has been impounded by the divine and does not become publici juris [a public matter].
From Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard (Problema II, ¶16 & ¶17)
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. John 14:27
In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard confronts the easy way we approach Abraham’s trial, that is God’s requirement that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son; the way we belittled what was demanded of Abraham by abstracting the story, by leaving out Abraham’s distress at having to do what everyone else would call murder.
With faith, it is another matter. But what no one is permitted to do is to lead others to believe that faith is something inferior or that it is something easy, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of things.
People understand the story of Abraham in another way. They laud God’s grace for having restored Isaac to him—the whole affair was only a trial. A trial: this word can say a lot and a little, and yet the whole affair is over as soon as it is said. We mount a winged horse and at that very instant we are atop Mount Moriah. At that very instant we see the ram. We forget that Abraham only rode upon a donkey, that it went on its way slowly, that he had a three-day journey, that he needed time to split the firewood, to bind Isaac, and to sharpen the knife.
…
So, either let us write off Abraham or let us learn to be appalled at this enormous paradox that is his life’s significance, so that we might understand that our age, like every age, can rejoice if it has faith. If Abraham is not a nullity, a phantom, some bit of frippery we use to pass the time, then the error can never be that the sinner wanted to do likewise; rather, what is important is to see the greatness of Abraham’s deed, so that the man can judge for himself whether he has the vocation and the courage to be tried by something of this sort. The comical contradiction in the orator’s conduct was that he made Abraham into someone insignificant and yet wanted to prevent the other person from behaving in like manner.
Fear and Trembling, “Getting Something off my Chest,” ¶30,¶32.
