All the more reason amid today’s national rancour to revisit Whitman’s open embrace of the democratic ideal, his declaration that ‘every atom as belonging to me as good belongs to you’,no matter where you were born.
Read the full article at…
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/1
This post kindly provided to us by one of our many occasional contributors.
Comments
2 responses to “ED. SIMON.-Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020 (NYT 30.12.2019)”
Spell checker did its worst…! The beautiful Rumi quote should read:
“OUT beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. Let me meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Even the phrase ‘each other’ makes no sense.” (Rumi)
I very much hope that some P & I readers will take the few minutes needed to click on and read this article. We will indeed “need” Walt Whitman in 2020 and beyond – and any other great writers whose vision has authentic depth. It is only from that perspective that we can begin to grasp how inevitably we “belong to one another”. It is only that perspective that will keep us safe.
With that conviction, it becomes impossible to see our fellow human beings as objects, to be traded, or exploited, by the very few; to be sent to fight senseless wars; to be impoverished so that others will have enough for 100 lifetimes, and still want more.
One way of thinking about this is to see it as “non-dual thinking”. This is the thinking of poets and mystics. Have they ever been more trivialised and disparaged? Have they ever been more needed?
“One beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. Let me meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Even the phrase ‘each other’ makes no sense.” (Rumi)
May I mention two of my own books? “Seeking the Sacred” invites us to understand how deeply we need to “re-sacralize” our view – not much to do with religion; very much to do with joy in living and keeping one another safe; and also “In the Company of Rilke”, a study of how it is, indeed, poetry (and music and silence) that lets us perceive how much life, truth, beauty, exist in the spaces between words that, paradoxically, bring us magnificently close together.