⩩ 17
Our ordinary business makes us empty, tired and anxious. The work of living, our everyday traffic with the world, leaves us exhausted, without will or energy, or else restless, nervous, breathless, — with energy and no clue what to do with it. Life becomes a chore and a terror; we are anxious and weary by turns. Moreover, we need to know, and the sprawling disorder of the spectacle is intolerable to the intellect, the more so the more sensitive we are in this direction. The only way we can survive is to let go, to detach. My name for this detachment is retreat.
The attraction of quiet downtime, of a bench by the water or a cabin in the woods, does not need to be explained. All are familiar with weekends and vacations and the needs they serve. This is over-the-counter medicine. When the disorder of the world as such becomes a burden, a more radical treatment is needed.
That’s why we see the church fugient, as James says, the church inflight from the world, with its hermitages, monasteries and sectarian organizations, which establish in relative isolation more uniform societies, by strictly regulating costume, phraseology, hours and indeed all habits. Such disparate and varied cultures have created whole patterns of life around the idea of retreat that it is clear that it is not the arbitrary invention of a particular tradition but a possibility built into our structure, a permanent need and drive of the human soul.
What does the life of retreat look like today? This is a question I would like an answer to, because, while we cannot today hold the old monastic-ascetic life highest in esteem — it is too small aesthetically and too socially useless — I do believe it has a decisive advantage over the others. It owns up, in a way none or few others do, to a basic fact of existence, and thereby pays respect to a fundamental need. This is death.
The most perfect form of detachment, the one all other exercises in detachment seem to look up to and presage, is death. Let us examine our relations with it. We recognize our longing for death, a longing of the kind expressed, for example, in the lines “And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep” of the poem by Robert Frost. We acknowledge our ignorance about it, most of all about whether it is a good or bad thing for the one dying: it is enough to point out that we ordinarily understand death only from the point of view of the living, not at all from the point of view of the dead. But who are we to say whether death is an end or a beginning for them? Lastly, it is guaranteed, so that we may cultivate a curiosity toward it with assurance.
But in the meantime we are living, and retreat can take many forms besides physical and social isolation, including practices of prayer and art. To Plato philosophy was practice for death. It is an inward solitude that matters, one achieved wherever anyone melts their internal defenses and embarks on communication with the whole self.
An excellent example is “Jesus Walks,” a poem sung by Kanye, one of our great poets and rappers. The song is a confessional prayer. The speaker details the ways he is at odds with his community, and therefore also at odds or “at war” with himself; he then prays for strength in the difficult path and calling he has acknowledged and undertaken by this very confession.
There is one line that is noteworthy in particular for its articulation of the Jonah-like starting point of the cycle of retreat. In the chorus, with military drums in the background, as if he is marching, forced to march into confession, he sings, “I want to talk to God but I’m afraid because we ain’t spoke in so long, so long, so long.” He wants to but is afraid. As long as we haven’t yet learned the practice of retreat and recovered our own judgement – as members of a society as such we also have not spoken to God in a long time and are afraid.
My favorite image of retreat, however, is Halloween. Picture it like this. We are standing on the street as night falls on Halloween. At the beginning of the evening, we see a young girl come out of her house, all dressed up, say, in a witch’s costume, with an orange pumpkin basket in her hand. Her eyes are sparkling. She is floating, carried almost weightlessly through the air.
She runs across the street to the neighbor’s house, where she knocks on the door; when the door opens, a second basket appears, which she thrusts her little hand in: she takes it out and — it’s a catch. She looks wonderfully at the thing in her hand, the treat, staring at it momentarily, before throwing it in her basket and running across the lawn or across the street to another house and another door.
This process repeats itself, door after door, basket after basket, house after house; until, sometime later, we see her in a different mood. The spark is gone. Now her basket is full, her legs and arms are heavy and tired. It’s time to go home.
The evening, however, is not over.
When she gets home, she tears off her costume, turns the basket upside-down and pours the contents out onto the floor. She spreads the goods around her and out in front of her, so that she can sit above them like a queen. She wants to organize them, to hold them all in a single view and to size up their worth.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 17, the beginning of the third chapter, on Retreat. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.
A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
The Robert Frost poem is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
The James quotation is from p. 349 of Varieties of Religious Experience.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
Lots of gems in this one for me. Loved the way you casted weekend getaways and vacations as "over-the-counter medicine." Also, I've been thinking a lot about death recently (haven't we all?) and just picked up The Tibetan Book of the Dead from a used book store. Have you read it? I'd also never truly listened to that Kanye song before today. Thanks for sharing it. I liked lots of lines, but this one made me laugh: "The way Kathie Lee needed Regis that's the way I need Jesus." Glad this is just an introduction to retreat. I want to read more.