About the Monastery
All that is personal soon crumbles away, and to this destitution one has to submit. This is not despair, not senility, not coldness and not indifference: it is grey-haired youth, one of the forms of convalescence or, better, that process itself. Only by this means is it humanly possible to survive certain wounds.
In a monk, of whatever age he may be, one is continually meeting both an old man and a young man. By burying everything personal he has returned to his youth. He has begun to live easily, on a grand scale–sometimes too grand…. In reality, a man now and again has a feeling of futility and loneliness among impersonal generalities, the elements of history, and the shapes of the future which pass across their surface like the shadows of clouds. But what follows from this? People would like to preserve everything, both the roses and the snow; they would like the clusters of ripe grapes to be lapped round with May flowers. The monks used to escape from the temptation to murmur by means of prayer. We have no prayers: we have work.Work is our prayer. It is possible that the fruit if both will be the same, but for the moment that is not what I am talking about.
Alexander Herzen, in his memoir My Past and Thoughts, points out one of life’s fundamental truths: that most people suffer from a desire for the past and the future to be an integral part of the present. That is to say, we’re so attached to both past and future that we cease to live in the present, and therefore lose some fundamental part of our life.
He suggests, though, that the monk — or the nun, or any other given to prayer and meditation — escapes from that desire by focusing on prayer. He suggests that work can serve the same role for the intellectual — by ‘work’, he doesn’t mean the 9-5, but the work of the mind. I’ll further this by saying that one doesn’t even need prayer or work to accomplish this shift in perspective; one needs only be able to focus on the present, on living in the present, and enjoying the present while it lasts — and then letting it slip into the past and taking the future as it comes.
Some people find it easy to live this way; they seem born with such perspective, and maintain it with little difficulty. For the rest of us, it’s not so light an undertaking when we’re programmed to look forward, forward, forward, back, back, back. I find it hard to live in the present; but I find greatest happiness when I do, even when — and this is going to sound paradoxical — the present consists of reminiscing about the past or planning for the future.
But for the sake of a name for a blog, and with that focus, this becomes a Monastery.
The name “Monastery of Idealism” comes from Herzen’s description of the academies in the days shortly after his return from exile, when Hegel was all the rage. I don’t aspire to recreate them, nor do I pretend to an infatuation with Hegel on the level he describes (or, in fact, any infatuation with him at all). I do, however, like the descriptor.
So allow me, if you will, to build in this place my own Monastery of Idealism as a forum for discussing (and pontificating on) politics, religion, society, literature, and life.