Postscript to a short series of 3
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walkingAntonio Machado
Proverbios y Cantares
Adagio – to accompany reading
This series began, as the best things do, without intending to be a series at all. A morning walk. A barn swallow gathering mud. The Latin name of a Wren. And then, one morning leading into the next, something accumulated that felt worth following — until three posts had arrived, not quite planned, not quite finished, and a motto had quietly established itself: pay attention, name carefully, hold lightly.
A postscript, then. Not a conclusion — the cantus firmus doesn’t conclude — but a pause, and a look ahead at some of the views that might be encountered along the road still to be walked.
A dear friend and colleague, now gone from this world but not from memory, once observed — with that particular mixture of rueful amusement and genuine wisdom that was his gift — that ‘the trouble with being retired is that one too often finds the words one couldn’t find or speak when starting out in one’s twenties.’ I’ve been thinking about that remark this morning, on a bright Lakeland day, the lawn freshly mown, three miles already behind me, coffee in hand. This series has been, in its own small way, an act of finding words. The words for what it means to name carefully. To hold lightly. To see the Universe in the Wren, and mean it.
Perhaps that is what the liberal arts, at their best, have always been: not a syllabus, but a vocabulary for being fully human. A set of lenses, each ground differently, each revealing what the others cannot quite reach alone.
And we need those lenses now. Rudyard Kipling — not, perhaps, the first name one expects to encounter in a series that has moved from Linnaeus to Tagore to Kabir to Arendt — wrote a poem whose opening lines have never felt more timely:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too …
The gendered conclusion belongs to its era and hopefully will not detain us. But the wisdom is universal and urgent: the capacity to remain grounded, thoughtful, and generous precisely when the surrounding noise is loudest — to hold one’s head and hold one’s humanity simultaneously — may be among the most important, and most countercultural, acts available to any of us just now.
So: where might the road lead from here? I’m hoping to home in a bit more— one at a time, as the mornings allow, on
Roots: Simone Weil wrote, in 1943, that to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. Her book The Need for Roots has never been more necessary.
Mutual regard: Emmanuel Levinas — less well known than he deserves — built an entire philosophy on a single observation: that the face of another human being constitutes an ethical demand before any word is spoken. The face says ‘do not harm me.’ We might spend a morning with that.
Linguistics and meaning: George Steiner’s After Babel argues that the miracle is not that we so often misunderstand one another across languages and cultures — but that we ever understand each other at all. A humbling and hopeful thought. Will any of my readers want to burrow into some more etymology with me? – not for decoration, not for being ‘precious,’ but because ‘the root and meaning of a word’ is too precious a gift to miss out on. Words can be lighthouses. Life-savers.
Compassion: Etty Hillesum — a young Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943 and whose diaries were published only decades later — wrote of finding, and keeping, compassion intact even as the world contracted around her. She is one of the most extraordinary spiritual witnesses of the twentieth century. What can the cries of the suffering teach us about ‘all our yesterdays,’ and our hoped for tomorrows?
Spirituality, cultures, ground, meaning, the liberal arts: all – and so much more – waiting, patient as adamah, for the mornings that will come.
The road, as Machado knew, makes itself by walking. This series arose from a single barn swallow gathering mud at Red Barn. Who knows what future walks will bring – for any of us?
Pay attention. Name carefully. Hold lightly.
The cantus firmus hums her invitation – the road beckons.
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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from
The Continuing Road – a Postscript
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