aescetic in little unnecessary points
Monday 14 May 2007 | I like a cookie
“I have an intellect?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What’s an intellect?”
Alessandro shifted position and snorted to get more delicious night air. “It’s a thing you have in your brain. It remembers other things and lets you shuffle them around so you can figure them out.”
“The people who’ve got these intellects, they’re smart, aren’t they?”
“Not as smart as they think.”
“They’re not?”
“No. They don’t know it, but the intellect is the attribute easiest to develop, and if it grows out of proportion to the rest of them they think they’re smart—but they’re not any smarter than a telephone book. A fact of humanity throughout history is the desirability, the necessity, of balance among the intellect, the spirit, and the flesh.”
“Flesh, what flesh?”
“Mortification of the flesh.”
Nicolò drew back almost imperceptibly.
“What do you think we just did?” Alessandro asked. “This walk, for days and nights in the open air, without sleep, under sun, moon, and stars, is mortification of the flesh. Like thundering music, it agitates the spirit until it rises. In Islam the Sufis and Dervishes use drugs to accomplish this. We’re Christians, we don’t. We launch our souls from cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of these men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings.”
“Yeah, but you don’t…you don’t take walks like this every day,” Nicolò said, “and if everyone did, the whole world would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Everybody walking around the mountains in the middle of the night, Christ!”
“Tell me,” the old man said, slyly. “You don’t think there are other ways?”
“Like what?”
“Then you do.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes you did.”
“All right, what are they?”
“What time do you get up in the morning?” Alessandro asked.
“Me?”
“Who else is here?”
“Seven-thirty. Why?”
“So you can get to work?”
Nicolò nodded.
“And on days when you don’t work?”
“Nine, ten, whatever.”
“You get up at seven-thirty because you have to.”
“Yes.”
“I’m retired. I don’t have to get up at any time. If I want, I can sleep all morning. What time do you think I get up?”
“How should I know?”
“Guess.”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“That’s what guessing is for, when you don’t know. I knew you didn’t know—how could you know? That’s why I asked you to guess.”
“Nine-thirty?”
“No. Five.”
“Five?”
“I’m at my desk by five-thirty.”
“You must be crazy.”
“You’re a great runner,” Alessandro said. “I saw you run after the bus for kilometers and kilometers. How many times a week do you exercise to exhaustion?”
“When we have a soccer game. You? You can’t exercise to exhaustion, you’d die.”
“Four times. I row. I row until I have visions. I drink lemonade. I hear music. I hear music, Nicolò, even though no one is playing it. Do you?”
“No. Sometimes I don’t hear it even when someone is playing it.”
“Do you sleep in a bed?”
“Of course I sleep in a bed. Who doesn’t sleep in a bed?”
Alessandro smiled.
“You don’t sleep in a bed? Where do you sleep?”
“The floor.”
“The floor, you sleep on the floor? Why?”
The old man looked at the boy and said, with the air of someone who is telling a great secret, “Because the floor is hard and cold.”
“I don’t believe this,” Nicolò said to an imaginary third party.
“What time do you think your sister’s nuns get up in the morning?”
Nicolò shrugged his shoulders.
“Ask her.”
“Christ,” Nicolò said. “I don’t want to be a nun.”
“I’m not asking you to be a nun,” Alessandro told him. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just telling you that the intellect is of no use unless it’s disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul. That’s all. The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’ve heard it.”
(Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War)
•
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically aescetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
(William James)
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