[Hammarskjold feels himself driven from within to a kind of inner perfectionism. He is constantly examining himself to see whether his motives are "pure"-- i.e. whether he is entirely devoted to some higher good, or whether his apparent high-mindedness is merely a facade covering up some indirect self-centeredness. He is not responding to some external authority or social standards in doing this, but is responding to something from within. The important thing is that he values this inner drive and self-critical attitude as something most important to pay attention to, even though it prevents him from just settling down to a contented life.]
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak. Is this the starting-point of the road towards the union of your two dreams - to be allowed, in clarity of mind to mirror life, and in purity of heart to mould it?
***
Openness to life grants a lightning-swift insight into the life-situation of others. What is necessary? - to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form - and then act accordingly.
***
To preserve the silence within - amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens - no matter how many tramp across the parade-ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.
***
Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.
***
Twice now you have done him an injustice. In spite of the fact that you were 'right' or, more correctly, because you were, in your conceit and your stupid pride in your powers you went stumping on over ground where each step gave him pain.
***
If you don't speak ill of others more often than you do, this certainly isn't from any lack of desire. But you know that malice only gives you elbowroom when dispensed in carefully measured doses.(9)
***
In spite of everything, your bitterness because others are enjoying what you are denied is always ready to flare up. At best it may lie dormant for a couple of sunny days. Yet, even at this unspeakably shabby level, it is still an expression of the real bitterness of death -- the fact that others are allowed to go on living.
***
Isn't the void which surrounds you when the noise ceases your just reward for a day devoted to preventing others from neglecting you? (7)
***
We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday's self-admiration is the legitimate father of to-day's feeling of guilt.(4)
***
He seeks his own comfort --and is rewarded with glimpses of satisfaction followed by a long period of emptiness and shame which sucks him dry.
He fights for position -- all his talk about "the necessary preconditions for doing something worthwhile" prove an insecure barrier against self-disgust.
He devotes himself to his job -- but he is in doubt as to its importance and, therefore, constantly looking for recognition.(27)
***
When all becomes silent around you, and you recoil in terror -- see that your work has become a flight from suffering and responsibility, your unselfishness a thinly disguised masochism; hear, throbbing within you, the spiteful, cruel heart of the steppe wolf -- do not then anesthetize yourself by once again calling up the shouts and horns of the hunt, but gaze steadfastly at the vision until you have plumbed its depths. (10)
***
On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted. In the whitewashed hour of birth, He is a jubilation and a refreshing wind, too immediate for memory to catch. But when we are compelled to look ourselves in the face -- then He rises above us in terrifying reality, beyond all argument and "feeling", stronger than all self-defensive forgetfulness. (10)
***
Never let success hide its emptiness from you, achievement its nothingness, toil its desolation. And so keep alive the incentive to push on further, that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves.
Whither? That I don't know. That I don't ask to know.(45)
***
Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy -
Why ?
Because - when opportunity gives you the obligation to create, you are content to meet the demands of the moment, from one day to the next.
Because - anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become 'famous', you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been.
How dead can a man be behind a facade of great ability, loyalty - and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you.
***
That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anaesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel - or believe you feel - that you are needed.
***
A troubled spirit? Isn't the cause obvious? As soon as, furtively, you sought honour for yourself, you could no longer transform your weakness into strength. So you were 'led into temptation', and lost that certainty of faith which makes saying Yes to fate a self-evident necessity, for such certainty presupposes that it is not grounded in any sort of a lie.
***
Do you still need to evoke memories of a self-imposed humiliation in order to extinguish a smouldering self-admiration?
To be pure in heart means, among other things to have freed yourself from all such half-measures: from a tone of voice which places you in the limelight, a furtive acceptance of some desire of the flesh which ignores the desire of the spirit, a self-righteous reaction to others in their moments of weakness.
Look at yourself in that mirror when you wish to be praised - or to judge. Do so without despairing.
***
To rejoice at a success is not the same as taking credit for it. To deny oneself the first is to become a hypocrite and a denier of life; to permit oneself the second is a childish indulgence which will prevent one from ever growing up.
***
"The purer the eye of her attention, the more power the soul finds within herself. But it is very rare to find a soul who is entirely free, whose purity is not soiled by the stain of some secret desire of her own. Strive, then, constantly to purify the eye of your attention until it becomes utterly simple and direct."
***
On a really clean tablecloth, the smallest speck of dirt annoys the eye. At high altitudes, a moment's self-indulgence may mean death. (86)
***
How ridiculous, this need of yours to communicate! Why should it mean so much to you that at least one person has seen the inside of your life? Why should you write down all this, for yourself, to be sure -- perhaps, though, for others as well?
***
You ask yourself if these notes are not, after all, false to the very Way they are intended to mark out.
These notes? - They were sign Posts you began to set up after you had reached a point where you needed them, a fixed point that was on no account to be lost sight of. And so they have remained. But your life has changed, and now you reckon with possible readers, even, perhaps, hope for them. Still, perhaps it may be of interest to somebody to learn about a path of which the traveler who was committed to it did not wish to speak while he was alive. Perhaps but only if what you write has an honesty with no trace of vanity or self-regard.
***
The scientist only records what he has been able to establish as indisputable fact. In the same way, only what is unique in a person's experience is worth writing down as a guide and a warning to others. In the same way, too, an explorer leaves it to others to pass their time taking notes on the quaint customs of the natives, or making devastating remarks about the foibles of their traveling companions.
True - and which do you do?
What gives life its value you can find -- and lose. But never possess. This holds good above all for "the Truth about Life".(7)
***
It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self-delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all -- every one of us -- take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.(8)
***
What I ask for is absurd: that life shall have a meaning.
What I strive for is impossible: that my life shall acquire a meaning.
I dare not believe, I do not see how I shall ever be able to believe: that I am not alone.
Is the bleakness of this world of mine a reflection of my poverty or my honesty, a symptom of weakness or of strength, an indication that I have strayed from my path, or that I am following it? -- Will despair provide the answer?
‘A meaning.' When a seventeen-year-old speaks of this, he is ridiculous, because he has no idea what he is talking about. Now, at the age of forty-seven, I am ridiculous, because my knowledge of exactly what I am putting down on paper does not stop me from doing so. (72)
***
Echoing silence.
Darkness lit up by beams.
Light
Seeking its counterpart
In melody.
Stillness
Striving for liberation
In a word.
Life
In dust
In shadow
How seldom growth and blossom
How seldom fruit.
These wretched attempts to make an experience apprehensible (for my sake? for others?) -- the tasks of the morrow -- Y's friendship or X's appreciation of what I have done: paper screens which I place between myself and the void to prevent my gaze from losing itself in the infinity of time and space.
Small paper screens. Blown to shreds by the first puff of wind, catching fire from the tiniest spark. Lovingly looked after -- but frequently changed.
This dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis [infinite spaces] -- only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.(40-41) ["Infinite spaces" is a reference to a comment of Blaise Pascal reacting to the discovery that the universe is infinite: "The infinity of space terrifies me."]
***
A modest wish: that our doings and dealings may be of a little more significance to life than a man's dinner-jacket is to his digestion. Yet not a little of what we describe as our achievement is, in fact, no more than a garment in which, on festive occasions, we seek to hide our nakedness.
***
How easy Psychology has made it for us to dismiss the perplexing mystery with a label which assigns it a place in the list of common aberrations.
***
In self-defense - against the system-builders:
Your 'personal' life cannot have a lasting intrinsic meaning. It can acquire a contingent meaning, but only by being fitted into and subordinated to something which 'lasts' and has a meaning in itself. Is this something what we attempt to identify when we speak of 'Life'? Can your life have a meaning as a tiny fragment of Life?
Does Life exist? Seek and you shall find, experience Life as reality. Has Life a 'meaning'? Experience Life as reality and the question becomes meaningless.
Seek - ? Seek by daring to take the leap into unconditional obedience. Dare this when you are challenged, for only by the light of a challenge will you be able to see the cross-roads and, in full awareness of your choice, turn your back upon your personal life - with no right ever to look back.
You will find that 'in the pattern' you are liberated from the need to live 'with the herd'.
You will find that, thus subordinated, your life will receive from Life all its meaning, irrespective of the conditions given you for its realization.
You will find that the freedom of the continual farewell, the hourly self-surrender, gives to your experience of reality the purity and clarity which signify - self-realization.
You will find that obedience requires an act of will which must continually be re-iterated, and that you will fail, if anything in your personal life is allowed to slip back into the center
.
[Seen in a Christian context, most people will associate thoughts of death with thoughts of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. It is important to see that Hammarskjold never mentions what happens after death. He associates the thought of death with the thought that one has a limited amount of time to live, and one must live each moment as perfectly as possible. This is what will make one "ready to die." Seen this way, "how grievous the memory of hours frittered away."]
Smiling, sincere, incorruptible --
His body disciplined and limber.
A man who had become what he could,
And was what he was --
Ready at any moment to gather everything
Into one simple sacrifice.(2)
***
To-morrow we shall meet,
Death and I --.
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
But in the meantime how grievous the memory
Of hours frittered away.(2)
***
Birth and death, love and pain - the reality behind the dance under the daylight lamps of social responsibility.
***
Do not seek death. Death will find you.
But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
***
The hardest thing of all - to die rightly. - an exam nobody is spared - and how many pass it? And you? You pray for strength to meet the test - but also for leniency on the part of the Examiner.
***
Never at your destination. - The greater task is only a higher class in this school, as you draw closer to your final exam, which nobody else will know about, because then you will be completely alone.
***
Loneliness is not the sickness unto death. No, but can it be cured except by death? And does it not become the harder to bear the closer one comes to death?
***
There is only one path out of the steamy dense jungle where the battle is fought over glory and power and advantage one escape from the snares and obstacles you yourself have set up. And that is - to accept death.
[Hammarskjold feels a strong sense of being "driven onward" through his life. This inner drive is partly his own perfectionist drive toward a certain kind of purity of mind. But he interprets it also in terms of a "calling," some higher purpose that his life is to serve; ultimately to "be an instrument of that which is greater than I." He seems never certain what this calling will be in the future, but in any given situation he feels he can discern it if he has purified his motivation of any self-centered interest. These passages should be read in the light of the passages collected above about self-criticism. Without strict self-criticism, the passages here would border on megalomania. Without these passages, the ones about self-criticism would be masochistic self-flagellation. Taken together, we can see that he is so self-critical because he thinks that the stakes are so high.]
I am bring driven forward
Into an unknown land.
the pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There were life resounds,
A clear pure note
In the silence. (p. 1)
***
If your goal is not determined by your most secret pathos, even victory will only make you painfully aware of your own weakness.(4)
***
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step: only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.(3)
***
Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.(3)
***
Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.(3)
***
'Better than other people.' Sometimes he says: 'That at least you are.' But more often: 'Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you are not -- like other people.(4)
***
What you have to attempt -- to be yourself. What you have to pray for -- to become a mirror in which, according to the degree of purity of heart you have attained, the greatness of Life will be reflected.(4)
***
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible -- not to have run away.(4)
***
He bore failure without self-pity, and success without self-admiration. Provided he knew he had paid his uttermost farthing, what did it matter to him how others judged the result.(5)
***
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from. casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.
***
It is an idea you are serving -- an idea which must be victorious if a mankind worth the name is to survive.
It is this idea which you must help towards victory with all your strength - not the work of human hands which just now gives you responsibility and the responsibility of creating a chance to further it.
Knowing this, it should be easy for you to smile at criticism of decisions misunderstood, ridicule of expressions misinterpreted as 'idealism', declarations of war to the death upon that to which, for all outward appearances, you are devoting your life.
But is it so easy? No - for the pettiness you show in your reactions to other people about whose motives you know nothing, renders you - very justly - vulnerable to the pettiness you encounter in interpretations of your own efforts.
Only on one level are you what you can be. Only in one direction are you free. Only at one point are you outside time. The good-fortune of 'Sunday's Child' is simply this: that he meets his destiny at that point, in that direction, on that level.
***
To become free and responsible. For this alone was man created, and he who fails to take the Way which could have been his shall be lost eternally.
***
Fated or chosen - in the end, the vista of future loneliness only allows a choice between two alternatives: either to despair in desolation, or to stake so high on the 'possibility,' that one acquires the right to life in a transcendental co-inherence. But doesn't choosing the second call for the kind of faith which moves mountains?
***
Maturity: among other things - not to hide one's strength out of fear and, consequently, live below one's best.
***
Goodness is something so simple: always to live for others, never to seek one's own advantage.
***
Maturity: among other things, a new lack of self-consciousness -- the kind you can only attain when you have become entirely indifferent to yourself through an absolute assent to your fate.
***
He broke fresh ground - because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood.
He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation - a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind loving. In sun and wind, how near and how remote -. How different from what the knowing ones call Mysticism.
***
We act in faith - and miracles occur. In consequence, we are tempted to make the miracles the ground for our faith. The cost of such weakness is that we lose the confidence of faith. Faith is, faith creates, faith carries. It is not derived from, nor created, nor carried by anything except its own reality.
***
The road to self-knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the self-knowledge we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is. How many have been driven into outer darkness by empty talk about faith as something to be rationally comprehended, something "true". (11)
***
A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.
***
While performing the part which is truly ours, how exhausting it is to be obliged to play a role which is not ours: the person you must really be, in order to fulfill your task, you must not appear to others to be, in order to be allowed by them to fulfill it. How exhausting - but unavoidable, since mankind has laid down once and for all the organized rules for social behaviour.
***
It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.
***
On the field where Ormuzd has challenged Ahriman to battle, he who chases away the dogs is wasting his time.
***
Beyond obedience, its attention fixed on the goal - freedom from fear. Beyond fear - openness to life.
And beyond that - love.
**
What next? Why ask? Next will come a demand about which you already know all you need to know: that its sole measure is your own strength.
***
The 'great' commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one - and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart.
***
To say Yes is never more difficult than when circumstances prevent you from rushing to the defense of someone whose purity of heart makes him defenseless before an attack.
***
Faulkner: Our final wish is to have scribbled on the wall our 'Kilroy was here'.
The last ditch of the enemy. We can sacrifice ourselves completely to that which is beyond and above us - and still hope that the memory of our choice shall remain tied to our name or, at least, that future generations shall understand why and how we acted. At times it seems to us that the bitterness we feel when we fail at an attempted task lies in this: that our failure will condemn our efforts themselves to oblivion.
0 contradiction! 0 last stand! If only the goal can justify the sacrifice, how, then, can you attach a shadow of importance to the question whether or not the memory of your efforts will be associated with your name? If you do, is it not all too obvious that you are still being influenced in your actions by that vain dead dream about 'posterity'? (29.11.56)
***
Another opportunity was given you - as a favour and as a burden. The question is not: why did it happen this way, or where is it going to lead you, or what is the price you will have to pay. It is simply: how are you making use of it. And about that there is only one who can judge.
***
You told yourself you would accept the decision of fate. But you lost your nerve when you discovered what this would require of you: then you realized how attached you still where to the world which has made you what you were, but which you would now have to leave behind. It felt like an amputation, a 'little death', and you even listened to those voices which insinuated that you were deceiving yourself out of ambition. You will have to give up everything. Why, then, weep at this little death? Take it to you - quickly with a smile die this death, and become free to go further one with your task, whole in your duty of the moment.
***
You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something of value to contribute.
This is the answer when you are groaning under what you consider a burden and an uncertainty prolonged ad infinitum.
***************************
The Excerpts above omitted most of Hammarskjold's references to God. "Being an instrument of God" was central to his identity, but this raises some important questions dealt with in a separate essay