Peter’s Blog for February

 

The story I want to tell this month is that of a novel by John Williams called Stoner. It was first published in the 60s but did not appeal to people at the time. Then on the recommendation of John McGahern, Vintage books decided to republish it in 2012. In reviewing it for the Independent Colum McCann says it is “a book for everyone, democratic in how it breaks the heart… It is a triumph of literary endeavour. It deserves the status of a classic”.

Stoner questions us about how we deal with adversity, with the terrible things that happen to us, with whether life’s sufferings makes us bitter or better. How we deal with the major and minor tragedies of life is for the Oriah Mountain Dreamer the measure of our greatness:

 

It doesn’t interest me what planets are
squaring your moon. I want to know if you have
touched the centre of your sorrow, if you have been
opened up by life’s betrayals or have
become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own…
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
or how much money you have. I want to know
if you can get up after a night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone,
and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or how you
came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in
the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with
whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains
you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company
you keep in the empty moments.

These are the questions a number of films I have seen recently are asking us, films like, All Is Lost, The Railway Man, 12 Years A Slave and novels like, Stoner and In the Garden the Swallows. It is the question Buddha must answer if he is to find enlightenment and serenity in the midst of life’s Four Sights

 

Buddha and the Four Sights
At the beginning of his life, even though Buddha had an abundance of this world’s goods he was not happy. His parents did their best to remedy this by shielding him from life’s hardships. They even had the inside of the windows of his carriage painted with pleasant pictures so that he might not see the pain of the world around him.

Then one day when he was travelling through his kingdom he opened the window of his carriage and saw the Four Sights. He saw people looking for food, mourning a loss, caring for the ill and facing old age. These sights had such a profound effect on him that he left his kingdom in search of enlightenment. He eventually found it under the Bo Tree where he was inspired to become a Buddha for others. As a result, wherever we go we find statues of the Buddha. He is smiling, for having been enlightened by the woundedness of human kind, he is no longer depressed.

Stoner’s epiphany 
The novel begins with Stoner as an only child growing up on a farm in Missouri in the early twentieth century. It is a small farm on which his parents eke out a meagre existence. By skimping and scraping, however, they save enough to send their son William to the University of Missouri where he initially studies agriculture. One of the requirements of this course is that he takes a class in English literature and one day during this his teacher reads Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet and asks Stoner for his thoughts on it. Stoner finds himself tongue-tied and embarrassed, unable to say anything meaningful about the poem. And yet, something happens within him: an epiphany that occurs in a moment of being overwhelmed by something he cannot understand much less articulate.

Sonnet 73 is Shakespeare’s reflection on his approaching death which he compares to the death of nature in Winter, then to night or “Death’s second self” and finally to a burnt out fire. What he recommends we learn from these images is to treasure life, or “To love that well which thou must leave ere long”.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Truth is given the dignity of art 
As a result of this experience Stoner realises that there is something out there which, if he can seize it, will unlock not just literature but the life which Shakespeare invites him to treasure. On hearing this invitation Stoner already feels his humanity awakened, and a new kinship with those around him. His life changes utterly from this moment: he will discover “a sense of wonder at grammar, and grasp how literature changes the world even as it describes it.” He becomes a teacher and even a good one as he admits to himself. Through what he teaches he discovers a truth to which “is given the dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man”.

Good things do happen in Stoner’s life, but so many end badly. He is a son of the soil and though he has learned to be patient, earnest and enduring he rarely feels at home with himself as he moves unprepared into the city and into the world of the university. The book is wonderful at describing his awkwardness, his physical and emotional shyness, his inability to voice his mind or his heart, maybe because he cannot articulate them, or because he simply cannot follow what is happening, or both

He relishes teaching students and they find him a kind, devoted and engaging teacher, but his career is stymied by a malevolent head of department. He falls in love and marries, but knows within a month that the relationship is a failure, “And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realise the significance of the failure until long afterward.” They have a daughter whom he adores and she him, but whom his wife maliciously turned against him; he is given sudden new life by an affair with one of his students called Catherine, but when it threatens their careers they agree to part. When he is aged 42, he reflects that “he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember”.

All these pains of lost and thwarted love test Stoner’s reserves of stoicism to the full; and you might well conclude that his life must be accounted pretty much a failure. But, if so, you would not have John Williams the author of the book on your side. In one of his rare interviews, he commented: “I think he’s a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing … The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of a job … a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was.”

How we see and feel about Stoner depends a lot on what criterion we use to evaluate his life. If we use the criterion of how successful his marriage or his academic career was, we would probably say he was a failure; he was never driven by the success that is so much a part of the american ideal. If we rate him as a teacher or by the job he did I would agree with the author of the book that Stoner’s was a good and even a heroic life. But if we evaluate his life on a human basis, on the way he loved and related with people or on the way he faced a very difficult life or by the courage and serenity with which he faced the greatest adventure of his life which was his death we would have to say his life was extraordinary. His style of relating ended up showing many of the signs of what St Paul in his letter to the Galatians says are those of a truly mature person. He was kind, gentle, tolerant, faithful and generous, and yet he was a person of integrity and courage in the way he adhered to the truth and lived in its light. Like Buddha he reached a state of enlightenment and contentment, especially in the way he faced his death.

When we compare Stoner’s story to that of the people in the three films and in the novel I mentioned above we notice that they all survived and were heroic in doing so because they kept alive the memory of a love that was at the centre of their experience. They learned to live in this love and in the holding environment it created and sustained in spite of the destructive power of the circumstances they were forced to live in.

Even though Stoner grew up as an only child of parents who did not communicate or show much tangible affection he was always conscious that they wanted the best for him and sacrificed a lot to send him to university. He also returned often to the memory of two friends he made as a student, one of whom died in the first world war and the second who worked with him at the university and cared for him in many ways. It was however in his brief relationship with Catherine that he found the most fulfilling love and relationship of his life. It is a relationship that takes us by surprise in its extraordinary range and depth especially for a person who came out of such a stoical background. It is hard to account for the serenity of his final years unless he lived with the vision of himself that he saw in the eyes of those people who loved him. It is a great tribute to Stoner that he was able to maintain this vision or enlightenment in spite of the way he was treated by his wife at home and by his head of department at work.

Even though I have never experienced the enduring adversity Stoner had to deal with I find an echo within of what he went through and how he learned to handle it. I wrote the following lines some years ago when I went through a period of darkness and I felt the truth of Dante’s words, “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of”.

The Taste of Darkness

Dull disinterest drains my energy

And clothes all in listless grey.

The sun that lights my life has hidden

Behind the dark clouds of hopelessness.

Where I would have a hundred things to do,

All my enthusiasm abandons me now.

I am beached and on my back

Waiting helplessly for the tide to turn.

And turn it will in its own good time

For the ocean will surely engulf me again

But refuses to be rushed by my impatience;

We do not rule the tide of God’s benevolence.

This enervating dullness is a testing time,

A weaning from the need for intensity;

A learning to live on heartfelt convictions,

Expressed in the dark winter rings of my story.

Thus develops this taste for a deeper reality,

Felt apart from sense and emotion,

When, in spite of all appearance,

Love is known with faith’s certainty.

How we deal with the sufferings and hardships that come our way so that they do not diminish or destroy us is a major theme in the gospel story. Jesus was no stranger to suffering in his relationships and in the work he set out to do. He describes himself as one immersed or baptised in suffering and in all the pain involved in having what he wanted so passionately to do for people resisted and rejected. “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:49-50) We get a wonderful glimpse of how he dealt with his own sufferings and how he would have us deal with ours when after his resurrection he met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. The lives of these two were torn apart when they witnessed Jesus’ passion and death and all that led up to it. They were suddenly bereft of their faith and their hope, of their joy and enthusiasm. How Jesus enters their suffering and works to restore their joy and their hope is one of the most exciting and instructive of the Gospel stories.

When Jesus joins them on the road, he first gives them time to say all that is troubling them. He then teaches them a way to maintain their belief in his love and the joy and hope this will open up for them. They must keep alive the memory of his love by telling the story of how he loves them “to the utmost extent”. (Jn 13:1) No matter how hard life becomes they must maintain their joy and hope by keeping the memory of his love alive through the Word and the “breaking of bread”. (Lk 24)

How telling the story and “breaking of bread” can become the most powerful way we have of dealing with the worst things that happen to us is explored in my book Love Remembered. Its title is taken from the final lines of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (No 29) that encapsulates much of what I have said about Stoner.

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.