divergences and exceptions to any rule he formulated about the things he observed. He’d entered India an empirical scientist, and he left India an empirical scientist, not much wiser than he had been when he’d come. However, he’d been exposed to a lot and had acquired a kind of latent image that appeared in conjunction with many other latent images later on.
Some of these latencies should be summarized because they become important later on. He became aware that the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.
In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that”, which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.
Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyna, mispronounced in Chinese as “Chan” and again mispronounced in Japanese as “Zen.” Ph?drus never got involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India “sense” was always logical consistency and he couldn’t find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part.
But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Ph?drus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.
Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Ph?drus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.
He returned to his Midwest, picked up a practical degree in journalism, married, lived in Nevada and Mexico, did odd jobs, worked as a journalist, a science writer and an industrial-advertising writer. He fathered two children, bought a farm and a riding horse and two cars and was starting to put on middle-aged weight. His pursuit of what has been called the ghost of reason had been given up. That’s extremely important to understand. He had given up.
Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.
What started him up here into these mountains isn’t certain. His wife seems not to know, but I’d guess it was perhaps some of those inner feelings of failure and the hope that somehow this might take him back on the track again. He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.
We exit from the park at Gardiner, where not much rain seems to fall, because the mountainsides show only grass and sage in the twilight. We decide to stay here for the night.
The town is on high banks on either side of a bridge over a river which rushes over smooth and clean boulders. Across the bridge they’ve already turned the lights on at the motel where we check in, but even in the artificial light coming from the windows I can see each cabin has been carefully surrounded by planted flowers, and so I step carefully to avoid them.
I notice things about the cabin too, which I point out to Chris. The windows are all double-hung and sash- weighted. The doors click shut without looseness. All the moldings are perfectly mitered. There’s nothing arty about all this, it’s just well done and, something tells me, is all done by one person.
When we return to the motel from the restaurant an elderly couple are sitting in a small garden outside the office enjoying the evening breeze. The man confirms that he’s made all these cabins himself, and is so pleased it’s been noticed that his wife, who sees this, invites us all to sit down.
We talk with no need to hurry. This is the oldest entrance to the park. It was used before there were any automobiles. They talk about changes that have taken place over the years, adding a dimension to what we see around us, and it builds to a kind of beautiful thing… this town, this couple and the years that have gone by here. Sylvia puts her hand on John’s arm. I am conscious of the sounds of the river rushing past boulders below and a fragrance in the night wind. The woman, who knows all fragrances, says it is honeysuckle, and we are quiet for a while and I become pleasantly drowsy. Chris is almost asleep when we decide to turn in.
13
John and Sylvia eat their breakfast hot cakes and drink their coffee, still caught up in the mood of last night, but I’m finding it hard to get food down.
Today we should arrive at the school, the place where an enormous coalescence of things occurred, and I’m already feeling tense.
I remember reading once about an archeological excavation in the Near East, learning about the archeologist’s feelings when he opened the forgotten tombs for the first time in thousands of years. Now I feel like some archeologist myself.
The sagebrush down the canyon now toward Livingston is like sagebrush you see all the way from here into Mexico.
This morning sunlight is the same as yesterday’s except warmer and softer now that we’re at a lower altitude again.
There is nothing unusual. It’s just this archeological feeling that the calmness of the surroundings conceals things. A haunted place.
I really don’t want to go there. I’d just as soon turn around and go back.
Just tension, I guess.
It fits one of the fragments of this memory, in which many mornings the tension was so intense he would throw up everything before he got to his first classroom. He loathed appearing before classrooms of students and talking. It was a complete violation of his whole lone, isolated way of life, and what he experienced was intense stage fright, except that it never showed on him as stage fright, but rather as a terrific intensity about everything he did. Students had told his wife it was just like electricity in the air. The moment he entered the classroom all eyes turned on him and followed him as he walked to the front of the room. All conversation died to a hush and remained at a hush even though it was several minutes, often, before the class started. Throughout the hour the eyes never strayed from him.
He became much talked about, a controversial figure. The majority of students avoided his sections like the Black Death. They had heard too many stories.
The school was what could euphemistically be called a “teaching college.” At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.
Yet despite this he called the school by a name that didn’t make much sense, in fact sounded a little ludicrous in view of its actual nature. But the name had great meaning to him, and he stuck to it and he felt, before he left, that he had rammed it into a few minds sufficiently hard to make it stick. He called it a “Church of Reason”, and much of the puzzlement people had about him could have ended if they’d understood what he meant by this.
The state of Montana at this time was undergoing an outbreak of ultra-right-wing politics like that which occurred in Dallas, Texas, just prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. A nationally known professor from the
