If he hadn’t died almost fifty years ago in a plane crash regarded as suspect by investigators as notable as bishop Desmond Tutu, and had lived to see the new millennium, Dag Hammarskjöld would be 103 years old today.
Best known as a cold-war era U.N. Secretary-General with a Carter-esque gift for diplomacy (he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously), Hammarskjöld kept a journal that was published after his death and has since become a minor classic of Christian mysticism. Poet and translator W.H. Auden said of the book, Markings,
The overall impression which the book makes (is) the conviction when one has finished it that one has had the privilege of being in contact with a good, great, and lovable man.
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I picked up the book more than ten years ago, when I was working in an independent bookstore as the buyer for the psychology and religion sections. Hammarskjöld’s style immediately struck me as poetic, aphoristic, and epigrammatic, much like Nietzsche’s – but his content differs wildly from the latter author’s, at least in its conclusions. A reader can find that same sense of special-ness, that same narrator’s perspective of being set apart from others (by reason of superior sensitivity or intelligence), but Hammarskjöld seeks to diminish rather than cultivate his considerable ego. I can’t imagine Nietzsche writing the following:
Your ego-love doesn’t bloom unless it is sheltered. The rules are simple: don’t commit yourself to anyone and, therefore, don’t allow anyone to come close to you. Simple — and fateful. Its efforts to shelter its love create a ring of cold around the Ego which slowly eats its way inwards toward your core.
And here, in a dark moment of unqualified misanthropy that reads more like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, he is thoroughly candid and doesn’t flatter himself:
At any rate, your contempt for your fellow human beings does not prevent you, with a well-guarded self-respect, from trying to win their respect.
But it is probably reflections like these (which mirror the essence of other spiritual traditions like Buddhism) that earned him the appellation of mystic:
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is — is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.
On being present:
The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.
And, on one of my favorite themes lately, nonresistance:
What must come to pass, should come to pass. Within the limits of that must, therefore, you are invulnerable.
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It’s worth mentioning that, thanks to his journal, we now know that Hammarskjöld also composed lyrical, imagistic modern poetry that translates beautifully from Swedish.
The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law.
An austere line
Gathers the body’s play of strength
In a bold balance.
Shall my soul meet
This curve, as a bend in the road
On her way to form?
(His undergraduate degree had been a humanities degree, specializing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Herman Hesse.)
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Little is known about the details of Hammarskjöld’s personal life. He never married, or even publicly courted anyone, and the openly gay Auden always believed him to be a closet case. But there is no evidence to either support or refute this. What can clearly be divined from his writings is that his heart’s desires were, for some reason, decisively thwarted. As with our friend Kierkegaard, however, this particular form of suffering seemed to contribute greatly to his spiritual development and lead him to some of his more profound insights.
“Perhaps a great love is never returned,” he writes. “Had it been given warmth and shelter by its counterpart in the Other, perhaps it would have been hindered from ever growing to maturity.” Instead of getting caught up in the cycles of need, demand, and preoccupation with physical and psychological gratifications that can dominate even the best of relationships, Hammarskjöld arrives at observations like this:
Our incurable instinct to acquire — to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word — provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience. Like the mountain troll who wants to eat the princess over and over again — only over again to have the experience of being just a mountain troll. We pick the flower. We press body against body — bringing to nought that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessable to human touch.
Hammarskjöld understands the underlying hunger — that the desire to possess derives from a sense of spiritual incompleteness. He also comes to a realization that could quite easily have been written by Osho or Krishnamurti or even Eckhart Tolle:
When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When love has matured and, through a dissolution of self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.
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Dag nabbed it, all right. I’d like to think that in that moment when his small aircraft smashed into a Congolese jungle, he dissolved into a final radiance, and became one with everything he longed for.
As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting.
Happy Birthday to a beautiful soul, and one of my great and beloved teachers.
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