[Sundaycommunity] Fwd: Catholic Network for Women's Equality Fwd: Leonard Cohen on the antidote to anger and the meaning of resistance, Doris Lessing on breaking the prisons we have chosen to live in, loving words

Tue Nov 19 05:18:26 PST 2024

Thank you Catherine for a wonderful meditation on anger and its antidote in
these sad times of violence that threatens us all. More than ever Jesus'
message of love of enemy, put back your sword, and nonviolence beckon us to
take his message seriously!

In Peace
Greg

On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 7:55 AM Catherine Walther via Sundaycommunity <
sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:

>
> So beautifully written by a true preacher of Truth.
> Enjoy, Catherine
>
>
> *From: *The Marginalian by Maria Popova <newsletter at themarginalian.org>
> *Subject: **Leonard Cohen on the antidote to anger and the meaning of
> resistance, Doris Lessing on breaking the prisons we have chosen to live
> in, loving words*
> *Date: *November 17, 2024 at 12:00:27 AM EST
> *To: *
> *Reply-To: *The Marginalian by Maria Popova <newsletter at themarginalian.org
> >
>
> NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it
> in full
> <https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/leonard-cohen-doris-lessing?e=3b5837fdb5>
> .   If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own
> newsletter, subscribe here
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6e02b64cd3&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — it's free.   Need to modify your subscription? You can change your
> email address
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629&e=3b5837fdb5&c=2e3638e287>
>  or unsubscribe
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629&t=b&e=3b5837fdb5&c=2e3638e287>
> .
> [image: The Marginalian]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e9ee56aa5f&e=3b5837fdb5>
> [image: Welcome]Hello Jan Kraus! This is the weekly email digest of *The
> Marginalian*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=96c40d0bdf&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  by Maria Popova. If you missed the November 7 emergency edition, it is
> here
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e52298bffe&e=3b5837fdb5>;
> if you missed last week's regular edition — Oliver Sacks on despair and the
> meaning of life, Toni Morrison on our task in troubled times, the science
> of tears and the art of crying — you can catch up right here
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=942e1bdb94&e=3b5837fdb5>.
> And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider
> supporting it with a donation
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cb15f5435e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — for eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks
> to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you
> know.Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=caa6736995&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=307da2314e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to
> helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our
> political lives.
>
> We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty,
> touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the
> longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be
> a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying —
> children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a
> world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous
> impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the
> history of the world.
>
> Leonard Cohen
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1153ea7ee9&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and
> passionately
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=53780d8a44&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise
> gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces
> found in his *Book of Longing*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5789f56f3c&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  (*public library*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b7ec8a41a5&e=3b5837fdb5>)
> — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over
> the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.
>
> Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)
>
> In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:
>
> We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which
> people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of
> their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People
> will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of
> just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for
> Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The
> sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
>
> In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and
> inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light
> between us
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c6f0848ddd&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
>
> Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another
> piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem
> for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty,
> personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of
> authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He
> writes:
>
> Take a long time with your anger,
> sleepyhead.
> Don’t waste it in riots.
> Don’t tangle it with ideas.
> The Devil won’t let me speak,
> will only let me hint
> that you are a slave,
> your misery a deliberate policy
> of those in whose thrall you suffer,
> and who are sustained
> by your misfortune.
> The atrocities over there,
> the interior paralysis over here —
> Pleased with the better deal?
> You are clamped down.
> You are being bred for pain.
> The Devil ties my tongue.
> I’m speaking to you,
> “friend of my scribbled life.”
> You have been conquered by those
> who know how to conquer invincibly.
> The curtains move so beautifully,
> lace curtains of some
> sweet old intrigue:
> the Devil tempting me
> to turn away from alarming you.
>
> So I must say it quickly:
> Whoever is in your life,
> those who harm you,
> those who help you;
> those whom you know
> and those whom you do not know —
> let them off the hook,
> help them off the hook.
> You are listening to Radio Resistance.
>
> Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2028fefff6&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and
> disorientation
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6eba682018&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9276cd5c3&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  and what makes a saint
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f717b7eb6d&e=3b5837fdb5>
> .
> SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE
> <https://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2e3638e287&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /READ ONLINE
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cd1dfd75fe&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /[image: Like
> https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/07/18/leonard-cohen-anger-resistance/
> on Facebook]
> <https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/leonard-cohen-doris-lessing?fblike=fblike-784ad119&e=3b5837fdb5&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D2e3638e287%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F07%252F18%252Fleonard-cohen-anger-resistance%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F07%252F1...>
> donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of
> dollars keeping *The Marginalian* going. For seventeen years, it has
> remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I
> have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
> labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes
> your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its
> sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the
> difference.
> monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring
> monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn
> lunch.   one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with
> a one-time donation in any amount.
> [image: Start Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9eb871ee78&e=3b5837fdb5> [image:
> Give Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b27a14dd55&e=3b5837fdb5>
> Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way:
> *197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7**Need to cancel an existing donation?
> (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate
> your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=313a3e94e1&e=3b5837fdb5>.*The
> Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable
> about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f822afa388&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0e71c3521f&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving
> recording of her voice
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9839dde56b&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of
> being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin
>  wrote
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=57f43f578e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to
> care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and
> deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4c6337c55d&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and
> deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons
> propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept
> of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent
> surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life
> into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e21373d856&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to
> tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of
> yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing
> principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.
>
> Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his
> deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e6f5d9fa8d&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> “an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere
> basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself
> become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be
> someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It
> takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a
> time of tumult and transformation
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=60bcb57038&e=3b5837fdb5>
> .)
>
> We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in
> those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first
> experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions, but
>  Oliver Jeffers
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=921a0a5969&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their
> second
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b1b740f91e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  collaboration, *The Dictionary Story*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d09db04bc7&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  (*public library*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4e0bf4888c&e=3b5837fdb5>)
> — a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the
> existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language
> carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and
> Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f1ff0a599a&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books
> knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the
> words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things
> that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her
> organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her
> not a story but a list.
>
> It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from
> ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a
> snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten,
> darts across the alphabet.
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4fadab2fe4&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1eadab745e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters —
> a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand
> their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ec03da31cd&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=973c18dc3b&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=45c782a906&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=888cc1aaec&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns
> into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts
> to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of
> characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing
> overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at
> once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in
> even deeper incoherence.)
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=138e39bbb0&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to
> herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to
> sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f5cc77d4a4&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1cd44cc31d&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=490b902aac&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> Couple *The Dictionary Story*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a71b2d3a6d&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, *A Child of Books*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4eae40c1fd&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> then revisit *The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d68c70953d&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real
> etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words
> like *maru mori* (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and
> *apolytus* (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).
> SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE
> <https://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2e3638e287&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /READ ONLINE
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3eee8f99e2&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /[image: Like
> https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/15/the-dictionary-story/ on Facebook]
> <https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/leonard-cohen-doris-lessing?fblike=fblike-ec65fa2c&e=3b5837fdb5&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D2e3638e287%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F11%252F15%252Fthe-dictionary-story%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F11%252F1...>
> donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of
> dollars keeping *The Marginalian* going. For seventeen years, it has
> remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I
> have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
> labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes
> your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its
> sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the
> difference.
> monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring
> monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn
> lunch.   one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with
> a one-time donation in any amount.
> [image: Start Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=23992fb3ab&e=3b5837fdb5> [image:
> Give Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=47fb1b7fc6&e=3b5837fdb5>
> Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way:
> *197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7**Need to cancel an existing donation?
> (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate
> your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7beb734de5&e=3b5837fdb5>.*Prisons
> We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on Redeeming Humanity
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b5b116464e&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1dc52f2639&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants,
> leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within
> them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract
> from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes
> us and keeps us human, and human together.
>
> This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the
> spirit
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=00a8189115&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the
> soul above the self, unselfing
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0562249d32&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told
> Margaret Mead in their epochal conversation
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a224836914&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> that “we are still each other’s only hope.”
>
> Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by
> farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, *Doris Lessing* (October 22,
> 1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply
> wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the
> oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young
> woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery
> but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the
> right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding
> up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing
> Communism as “an interesting manifestation of popular will.” Working by
> that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist
> Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though
> short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ or
> virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my
> rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated
> Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left
> the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent field of of
> behavioral psychology and its revelatory, often disquieting findings about
> the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its
> immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made
> answer to the problem of social harmony.
>
> And so, in that way artists have of complaining by creating, she devoted
> her life — almost a century of life, a century of world wars and violent
> uprisings, of changes unimaginable to her parents — to asking the
> difficult, clarifying questions that help us better understand what makes
> us human, how we allow ourselves to dehumanize others, and what it takes to
> cohere, as individuals and as societies. At 87, she became the oldest
> person to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for writing that “with
> scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation
> to scrutiny.”
>
> In 1985, months after I was born under Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship,
> Doris Lessing delivered Canada’s esteemed annual Massey Lectures, later
> adapted into a series of short essays under the haunting title *Prisons
> We Choose to Live Inside*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a59e904c96&e=3b5837fdb5>
> (*public library*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d7a238d517&e=3b5837fdb5>)
> — a searching look at how it is that “we (the human race) are now in
> possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do
> not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives,” lensed
> through a lucid faith that we have all the power, urgency, and dignity we
> need to choose otherwise, to use what we have learned about the worst of
> our nature to nurture and magnify the best of our nature, to figure out
> “how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not
> control us.”
>
> One of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s original watercolors for *The Little
> Prince*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=fbbb1941f6&e=3b5837fdb5>.
> (Morgan Library & Museum)
>
> In a sentiment Rebecca Solnit would echo three decades later in her modern
> classic *Hope in the Dark*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=107443e125&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> Lessing writes:
>
> This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to
> think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see
> brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen
> but that — a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to
> check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it
> is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do
> not notice — or if we notice, belittle — equally strong forces on the other
> side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.
>
> To be realistic about our own nature, Lessing argues, requires
> attentiveness to both of these strands — the destructive and the creative.
> This is the cosmic mirror Maya Angelou held up to humanity in her stunning
> space-bound poem
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=39c3083bb6&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” An epoch
> before her, Bertrand Russell — also a Nobel laureate in Literature, though
> trained as a scientist — reckoned with our twin capacities
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=786859a648&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  to define them in elemental terms — “We construct when we increase the
> potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy
> when we diminish the potential energy.” — and in existential terms:
> “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but
> construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more
> satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”
>
> Our sanity, Lessing observes, lies in “our capacity to be detached and
> unflattering about ourselves” — and in the understanding that our selves
> are not islanded in time but lineages of beliefs and tendencies with roots
> much longer than our lifetimes, not sovereign but contiguous with all the
> other selves that occupy the particular patch of spacetime we have been
> born into. It is vital, she insists, that we examine ourselves — our
> selves, and the constellation of selves that is our given society — from
> various elsewheres.
>
> Art by Felicita Sala from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1be106a29f&e=3b5837fdb5>
> .
>
> This is why we need writers — those professional observers, in Susan
> Sontag’s splendid definition
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aedd5b8ccc&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> whose job it is to “pay attention to the world” and shine the light of that
> attention on every side of the kaleidoscope that is a given culture at a
> given time. A decade after Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb reckoning
> with the role of literature in democracy
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9d0354d2ce&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art
> tends to clarify,” Lessing writes:
>
> In totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this
> reason… Writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function
> that has been evolved by society… Literature is one of the most useful ways
> we have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing
> ourselves; history is another.
>
> Because we are the future of our own past, the posterity of our ancestors,
> looking back on history from our present vantage point offers fertile
> training ground for looking forward, for shaping the world of tomorrow.
> Lessing writes:
>
> Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful
> convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next.
> There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people
> who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us
> of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost
> impossible to detach ourselves.
>
> […]
>
> There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the
> right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is
> bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new
> development — at the best, something that has been changed, all passion
> spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.
>
> Doris Lessing, 1950s. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
>
> In consonance with Carl Sagan’s admonition against “the sense that we
> have a monopoly on the truth”
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3c98c07142&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  and with Joan Didion’s admonition against mistaking self-righteousness
> for morality
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9b6f0cfc1d&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> Lessing offers:
>
> This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong;
> our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as
> nonsense, if not as downright evil… Well, in our sober moments, our human
> moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to
> dominate us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is,
> quite simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through
> interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of
> thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life,
> as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in
> history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development — the main
> current of social evolution — cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to
> expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into
> the general stream.
>
> Looking back on the colonialist Zimbabwe of her childhood, on the
> “prejudiced, ugly, ignorant” attitudes of the ruling whites, she reflects:
>
> These attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though
> the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were
> educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their
> certitudes were temporary.
>
> At the center of Lessing’s inquiry is the paradox of how seemingly
> sound-minded, kind-hearted people get enlisted in ideologies of oppression.
> Kierkegaard had written
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=67985e0005&e=3b5837fdb5>in
> the Golden Age of European revolutions — those idealistic but imperfect
> attempts to unify fractured feudal duchies into free nations, attempts that
> modeled the possibility of a United States of America — that “the evolution
> of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the
> individual apart from the crowd,” that “truth always rests with the
> minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because…
> the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no
> opinion.” An epoch and a world order later, Lessing considers how regimes
> of terror take hold:
>
> Nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is
> always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the
> future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be
> thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and
> not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
>
> Art by Jeska Verstegen from *Bear Is Never Alone*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b00fe42f30&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  by Marc Veerkamp
>
> The mess we have made, she intimates, may be the most effective teaching
> tool we have — a living admonition against doing the same, a clarion call
> to rebel by doing otherwise:
>
> Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest,
> wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of
> immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with
> some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and
> stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much
> enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of
> bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in
> periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”
>
> As for us, here in the roiling mess, our sole salvation lies in learning
> to “live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment,
> but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a
> state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.” Lessing writes:
>
> While all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel,
> continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and
> accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities… If we
> decided to use it, [we may] transform the world we live in. But it means
> making that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild
> emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor
> from another planet might see us.
>
> Art by Diana Ejaita from *Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1f2053917f&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  by poet Aracelis Girmay
>
> This, in fact, was the conditional clause in Baldwin’s words to Mead — in
> order to be “each other’s only hope,” he said
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ae27cead81&e=3b5837fdb5>,
> we ought to be “as clear-headed about human beings as possible.” This, too,
> was Maya Angelou’s conditional optimism for humanity: “That is when, and
> only when, we come to it” — to that “Brave and Startling Truth,”
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=814915a3df&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  balanced on the fulcrum of our conflicted capacities, “that we are the
> possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”
> SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE
> <https://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2e3638e287&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /READ ONLINE
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d297c5c631&e=3b5837fdb5>
> /[image: Like
> https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/11/doris-lessing-massey-lectures/ on
> Facebook]
> <https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/leonard-cohen-doris-lessing?fblike=fblike-7b8cbe56&e=3b5837fdb5&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D2e3638e287%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F11%252F11%252Fdoris-lessing-massey-lectures%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.themarginalian.org%252F2024%252F11%252F1...>
> donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of
> dollars keeping *The Marginalian* going. For seventeen years, it has
> remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I
> have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
> labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes
> your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its
> sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the
> difference.
> monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring
> monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn
> lunch.   one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with
> a one-time donation in any amount.
> [image: Start Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a5898d63d2&e=3b5837fdb5> [image:
> Give Now]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=160eb9c811&e=3b5837fdb5>
> Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way:
> *197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7**Need to cancel an existing donation?
> (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate
> your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cc711e9b25&e=3b5837fdb5>.*IF
> YOU MISSED IT
>
> *A Lighthouse for Dark Times*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8deb09a95b&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d032e628b1&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> *18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian*
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8df264b9f9&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a78d6d5f53&e=3b5837fdb5>
> ALSO: A LIVE EVENT
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2d458c7665&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> To celebrate the centennial of The Morgan Library & Museum
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a970b6ab46&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most
> influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen
> several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as
> springboards for larger conversations
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8e47c79a38&e=3b5837fdb5>
>  about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women
> I know. The year's final event in the series — a conversation with composer
> and National Sawdust founder Paola Prestini — draws on the music
> manuscripts of Fanny Mendelssohn (long attributed to her famous brother
> Felix) and Clara Schumann (who worked in her famous husband's shadow) for a
> broader reckoning with inclusion and exclusion in creative culture, the
> challenges and superpowers of working in the margins of the mainstream, and
> the long history of women owning their genius against the odds. Tickets
> (pay-what-you-can) and livestream (free) here
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=12610681bb&e=3b5837fdb5>
> .
> ALSO: OUT NOW
>
>
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9a2c963ef&e=3b5837fdb5>
>
> A labor of love 7 years in the making. Peek inside here
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1aa747ea26&e=3b5837fdb5>
> .
> [image: ---]
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3c4617115d&e=3b5837fdb5>
> You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org
> <http://themarginalian.org/> (formerly BrainPickings.org
> <http://brainpickings.org/>). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday
> mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week.
> The Marginalian
> NOT RECEIVING MAIL
> 47 Bergen Street, 3rd Floor
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+NY+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
> Brooklyn
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+NY+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
> , NY
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+NY+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+%C2%A0+NY+%C2%A0+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
> 11201
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+NY+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> Add us to your address book
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629>
>
> unsubscribe from this list
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629&t=b&e=3b5837fdb5&c=2e3638e287>
>
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/47+Bergen+Street,+3rd+Floor+Brooklyn+,+%C2%A0+NY+%C2%A0+11201?entry=gmail&source=g>
>   update subscription preferences
> <https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629&e=3b5837fdb5&c=2e3638e287>
>
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Catholic Network for Women's Equality (CNWE)" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to cnwe+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cnwe/CAFmR-mVR_RkcoZzvopLHQFxgwuOtEe57phQu5tU7b5odoA4nEA%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cnwe/CAFmR-mVR_RkcoZzvopLHQFxgwuOtEe57phQu5tU7b5odoA4nEA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
> ________________________________________
>
> Sundaycommunity mailing list
> To send message: sundaycommunity at integralshift.ca
> To manage Subscription: https://sundaycommunity.integralshift.ca
> To Unsubscribe send email to: sundaycommunity-unsubscribe at integralshift.ca
> To Subscribe send email to: sundaycommunity-subscribe at integralshift.ca
> Link for Zoom mass Sundays 11AM EST:
> https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83018087848?pwd=Yjh4VnV6QXE2MFRzbEZwWUpacmJ5UT09
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integralshift.ca/pipermail/sundaycommunity-integralshift.ca/attachments/20241119/10101971/attachment.htm>