The Silent Sanctuary

"Let us keep our silent sanctuaries, for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved" Edith Hamilton quotes Senancour in The Greek Way. "We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won permanent possessions of humanity. 'Excellence,' said Aristotle, 'much labored for by the race of men.' When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages. The eternal perspectives are being blotted out, and our judgment of immediate issues will go wrong unless we bring them back."

The eternal perspective can be observed all around, from the subtle darkness of the beach at night, to the piercing rays of the morning sun. I maintain that all the wisdom of the ages can be grasped in the solitude of an unlit bedroom. This isn't easy for all of us however. The world, as Hamilton said, is "storm driven." Moments of absolute silence are becoming increasingly more rare. Where can one turn when the technology that is supposed to help us is hindering our ability to connect with the immortal? Literature is my sanctuary. In literature we find truths about the world we would be hard pressed to discover on our own.Thucydides can't show us how to cook an omelette. He can't show us how to repair a car. But he can teach us about the perennial reality of human nature. Dostoevsky can't demonstrate a proof for a logarithmic function, but he can take us into the psyche of a wannabe nihilist killer better than any psychology textbook. Rudyard Kipling's If is more informative than any self help seminar.


To be continued