A Word to the Wise: The Top of the Heap

“So what’s your specialty?”

“The history of religions. I’ve taught everything from Persian cults to Zen Buddhism.”

“You know I’m agnostic.”

“Then why talk to me? I’m comparative religious with a vengeance.”

“I’m sorry I never had you in class. It sounds like you make religion sensible.”

“You want one that makes sense?”

“I want one to believe in. A course with you might have helped. Do you have a favorite?”

“Yes, it deals with the Greeks and their many gods.”

“It sounds perfect.”

“So you want to be a polytheist, is that it? Come to think of it, you don’t need my course. You already are one.”

“A polytheist?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“From what you said earlier. You kneel before all the little gods of our culture.”

“Like what?”

“Power, prestige and prosperity. I’ll add a fourth: the iPad. It played havoc with a marriage. Because of it a woman friend is divorcing her husband.”

“On what grounds?”

“Abandonment. Day and night he’s connected to digital devices. Everything’s turned on. He ignores her at meals and even in bed. If she tries to become intimate, he makes her wait till he’s checked his e-mails. He’s closer to his iPad and computer than to her. Finally she told him: ‘I can compete with another woman but not with them.’ So she moved out and filed for divorce.”

“What do electronics have to do with religion?”

“Like objects of devotion, he was absolutely dependent on them. They were more important than anything else and more important than everything else. They were his local gods, supreme, without equal, ultimate—all the words used in religion. In New York we’d say the top of the heap.”

“I’m not like him. Despite technology—and I have the best—there’s room in my life for a love interest. In fact I’m hungry for romance in this desert of hook-ups.”

“I would never knock mutual attraction. It’s true for all mammals and even fruit flies if we can believe a Times column. When snubbed by females, sexually deprived males become barflies, choosing alcohol-laced food. Jilted, they exhibit conduct torn from the novels of Mickey Spillane whose antiheroes ease rejection by drunken stupors. For humans especially, sexual magnetism is a shaky foundation. Buddhism warns against craving, romantic or otherwise. It’s a sure formula for suffering.”

“So you’re a Buddhist?”

“By natural affinity. I’m a biblical man by conversion. I do shuttle diplomacy between eastern and western traditions. They mutually enrich. As coherent patterns for living, they remind us of how to be good. They help avoid what the poet Auden calls “the error bred in the bone of each woman and every man: to claim what they cannot have, not universal love, but to be loved alone.” What’s meant here is self-entitlement at the expense of others. Comparative religion is a stinging indictment of it.”

“Any guidelines to avoid it?”

“I’ll venture one that’s axiomatic. Become the kind of person you want to attract and attract the kind of person you want to become. Body of course, but brains and benevolence too. Look for all three at the same time. Don’t split one from the other, and don’t imagine they’re there by wish fulfillment. Exercise the heart muscle. But be on guard against the heart’s wanting fulfillment too quickly. The poet Yeats cautioned that hearts are not given as a gift but hearts are earned. So proceed slowly. Italian says it in one word: adagio.”

“Isn’t there a place for reckless abandon in your orderly world? I mean palpitations and wild swings. Your advice sounds so cautious.”

“What do you suggest in its place?”

“To act on the counterculture’s favorite maxim.”

“Which is?”

“Let it all hang out. I know it’s a cliché. I don’t ever expect to see you use it in print. But you might occasionally allow it as a way of behaving. It points to a need.”

“What need is that?”

“Spontaneity. It’s a clear sign of life. As an historian, surely you could make a case for it: how great artists had their creativity sparked by bursts of spontaneous imagination. If we can believe the excavations in the caves of southern France, it’s been going on for ten thousand years.”

“I agree with you it was a shining moment when our Paleolithic ancestors rose above the need to forage for mushrooms and spear wild boar. They etched on cavernous stone colossal bison and mammoth while torches flared at intervals and lit the inner darkness. But this was no spontaneous act but a protracted and methodical use of pigment. Millennia later, their heirs apparent Fra Angelico, da Vinci and Michelangelo also turned walls and vaulted ceilings into prodigious art. And yet you can sit there without blinking an eye and placidly advise me beyond all the constraints of reason and every esthetic precedent to Let It All Hang Out.”

“I get the point. Instead of spontaneity, what do you suggest?”

“Controlled chaos.”

“If I take the headlines seriously, it may be all that’s available to me. I’ll do my best.”

“That’s very classical, ‘Always to excel.’ I don’t want to cool your passion for excellence. I thought you might add a less assertive motive for action. Something more biblical.”

“Like what?”

“Do what’s humanly possible.”

“Can one act from both simultaneously?”

“Only if you like paradox. I’m suggesting a complementary dualism of both/and even if your experience feels like either/or. The two can stab at each other in apparent contradiction.”

“It’s more of your shuttle diplomacy. The passage back and forth sounds exhilarating. So is landing safely and coasting to the appointed terminal.”

“True, but not before sitting through occasional turbulence. It can be a bumpy ride. Fortunately, we both like to fly.”