Tag: philosophy

“Put the clubs away, Hardy,” [Rannulph Junah] said in a voice nearly inaudible. “I see no profit in them or this whole fool enterprise.”

I turned desperately to Bagger Vance. The caddie as always was the soul of composure. He motioned me to set the bag down, there in the dune grass beside the champion.

“Your mind is clearly in torment, Junah,” Bagger Vance spoke slowly and evenly. “Tell me please: what is the nature of your complaint?”

Junah glanced up sharply at this word, which seemed to trivialize his emotion. “It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?” He gestured toward the multitudes in their bright battle lines, visible across the linksland. “This whole endeavor is a freak show. A joke. What good will any of it do me, or anyone attached to it?”

“I perceive much good,” Bagger Vance replied in that same even tone. “But tell me more specifically, what is it you perceive?”

Junah’s eyes remained cast down. You could see his shoulders tremble and broaden as anger, long and deeply held, began to swell powerfully within him.

“‘Victory’ and ‘defeat'”—he spat the words with revulsion, as if their very sound were obscene—”I’m sick to death of them, and of men contending as if there was any difference between them! What good ever came of human beings facing one another in conflict? To see men of such stature as Jones and Hagen steeling themselves for this child’s game, it was all I could do to keep from howling with hysteria, or despair, which would have been more appropriate. While the world is coming apart, our countrymen starving by the millions…here we disport ourselves, chasing a dimpled ball across a millionaire’s playground. And for what? An heiress’ greed and desperation? A few dollars to be scraped from our visitors’ pockets, the pathetic need of Savannah’s war-haunted psyche to ‘redeem itself’—and through my efforts! I won’t do it. I won’t be a part of this circus.

“They’re here for blood,” he said, gesturing with contempt toward the distant hosts, “make no mistake about it. To see men contend against each other, hoping to watch one or all be torn and fall. This is war, for all its summer cottons and ladies’ frocks, and nothing good ever came from that.” Junah’s hands were trembling. He ran them in pain through his hair, eyes gazing hollowly before him into the dunes. “What is ever gained by ‘defeating’ others? What can be gained here today? If I win I take no pleasure, and if I lose…”

Here Junah’s voice choked and broke off; not, one felt, with the thought of his own possible defeat or disgrace, but with the overweening futility of contention itself, which even at my tender age I could see he had wrestled with long and hard.

Junah’s eyes rose now and met Bagger Vance’s. “I have been a warrior,” he said in a voice tremulous with emotion. “I have fought, and nearly died, in battles as grave and calamitous as any in the history of man. I have seen friends perish, and enemies who might have been friends but for the madness of war. I will never take up arms again”—he gestured toward the bag and its clubs—”even surrogates as preposterous as these.”

Saying this, Junah slumped yet deeper onto the running board, his mind tormented by grief.

Now Bagger Vance spoke. “This conduct is disgraceful,” he said. “Unworthy of any man, but more so of you, Rannulph Junah, whom I hold dear and bless beyond all others. Get ahold of yourself! It provokes me to fury, to see you cast down your eyes and give voice to such ignoble thoughts!”

Vance’s tone had changed utterly. He did not, and never did in my hearing, regress to rage; rather he spoke with a fiery primordial force and emphasis. Junah’s eyes rose again, shaken by the tone of his servant’s voice.

“What do you know of life?” Bagger Vance stood before the champion. “Are you a god that you have plumbed the depths of existence’s meaning? What statement can you make about what is real or important? Have you pierced the veil? When you have, then you may display the temerity to which you now presume! Despair. Death. You know nothing of them! Are you a god? Then shut up and do your duty!”

Junah started to speak, but Bagger Vance’s force overrode him. “What if I tell you that before a thimbleful of sand has slipped through the glass, one of your opponents today will need another man’s hand simply to rise from his chair…and the other will have passed into eternity? What if I tell you of your own death? And how swiftly it follows on the heels of this disgraceful moment?

“And war, since you yourself raise the subject. Shall I tell you of another conflagration coming—soon, Junah, soon—which will dwarf your Great War, breaking nations and peoples in their millions and culminating in horrors beyond the race’s imagining?”

Junah’s countenance was now chastened, even fearstruck. He looked up at his servant, with pure heartbreak in his eyes. “You upbraid me as if I were a child, and no doubt I deserve it. But please don’t abandon me. Do you think I want to feel these awful emotions, that I take pleasure in the desperate conclusions my heart leads me to? I’m lost, Bagger. Help me, my friend and mentor. Tell me what I must do.”

Across the dunes now sped a Krewe Island station car, a marshal’s vehicle, with a blue-blazered official driving and Dougal McDermott white-faced in the passenger seat. Its high undercarriage skimmed clear, approaching fast over the tufted greenskeeper’s road.

It was coming for us. Beyond, we could see the galleries massed in readiness, swollen to six and seven deep along the first fairway. Jones and Hagen had finished on the practice green. You could see their party, moving along the crested path to the first tee.

“We have spoken in jest many times, you and I,” Bagger Vance addressed Junah, “about why I initially attached myself to you, and why I’ve never strayed far from your side all these years. It was for this day, Junah. As we go, I will teach you.”

He nodded to me; I bent to the golf bag and passed it to him. Bagger Vance set it upright before the champion, its hickory-shafted irons flashing like quivered arrows in the sun. The Krewe Island car pulled up alongside us. Across the duneland you could hear the galleries cheer as Hagen and Jones approached the first tee.

“Your heart is kind, Junah. You have seen the agony of war and you wish never again to harm anything or anyone. So you choose not to act. As if by that choice, you will cause no harm.”

“This intention is admirable as far as it goes, but it fails to apprehend the deeper imperative of life. Life is action, Junah. Even choosing not to act, we act. We cannot do otherwise. Therefore act with vigor!”

Vance glanced once to McDermott, to let the professional know we were coming. Then he turned back to his champion.

“Stand now, Junah, and take your place. Do honor to yourself and to your station!”

— The Legend of Bagger Vance, Chapter 13

“Listen to me, Junah. All sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of yoga, meaning union, union with the divine. But golf is supreme because it more closely mirrors the Reality of the way to Self-realization. Listen and I will tell you why.”

“In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy. We seek by our actions to disable him. In tennis our stroke defeats him; in football our tackle lays him low. This is not the way to salvation, or, more accurately, it is at one remove. The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions. He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself. His little self. That yammering fearful ever-resistant self that freezes, chokes, tops, nobbles, shanks, skulls, duffs, flubs. This is the self we must defeat.”

“Consider the golfer’s relation to the Rules, Junah. This too differs from every other sport. In baseball a batter, knowing a pitch to be over the plate, will argue vociferously with an umpire to the opposite effect, trying to avoid having a strike called on him. The tennis player will bitterly contest a line call he knows to be fair, the footballer vehemently declare his innocence of a penalty he knows he committed.”

“In other words they will lie. Deliberately. To gain selfish advantage.”

“It is only in golf, Junah, that players routinely call penalties on themselves. Look at [Bobby] Jones, striding there. Do you remember the ’25 Open at Worcester? That great man, your foe this day, lost by a single stroke, the result of his calling a penalty on himself in the first round when his ball moved accidentally. Jones finished tied for first and lost in the play-off. Take away that selfenforced penalty and he would have won outright.”

“The greatness of this is that it mirrors Higher Reality. There can be no cheating in the dimension in which the Self resides. There every action inexorably produces its result, every thought its consequence.”

“Therefore, Junah, love your opponents. When I say love, I don’t mean hand them the match. I mean contend with them to the death, the way a lion battles a bear, without mercy but with infinite respect. Never belittle an opponent in your mind, rather build him up, for on the plane of the Self there can be no distinction between your being and his. Be grateful for your opponents’ excellence. Applaud their brilliance. For the greatness of the hero is measured by that of his adversaries. In this too the etiquette and honor of golf reflect the Reality of the Field. Those new to the game often cheer an opponent’s misfortune, but the player of wisdom who has entered into the soul of the game schools himself to feel and act the opposite. This too is the greatness of the game.”

“But all this you know, Junah. I repeat it now only to focus your distracted mind under this excruciating pressure. To return you to the imperative to act.”

Here Junah, who had been listening with as much attention as he could muster under the circumstances, bridled and pulled up in midstride. “I don’t understand you, Bagger,” he said. “You order me to win, as if I could, but in the same breath you tell me to love my opponents. Please be clear. I need to understand what you’re telling me.”

“Act, Junah, but act without attachment, as the earth does. As I do. The rain falls, with no thought of watering the land. The clouds roll, not seeking to bring shade. They simply do. And we must too….

— The Legend of Bagger Vance, Chapter 16

G’Kar:

It was the end of the Earth year 2260, and the war had paused—suddenly and unexpectedly. All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath, waiting.

All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. This had the feeling of both. G’Quon wrote:

There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities. It is against chaos and despair.

Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.

The future is all around us waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

— “Z’ha’dum” – Babylon 5, Season 3 (1996)

Katsumoto:

…You do not fear death, but sometimes you wish for it. Is this not so?

Algren:

Yes.

Katsumoto:

I, also. It happens to men who have seen what we have seen. And then I come to this place of my ancestors, and I remember: like these blossoms, we are all dying. To know life in every breath. Every cup of tea. Every life we take.

The Way of the Warrior.

Algren:

(whispers) Life in every breath….

Katsumoto:

That is Bushidō.

— “The Last Samurai” (2003)

…And it’s that which made the Jedi so cool in the first three [Star Wars] movies. Not that they could kill their foes with all sorts of neat tricks, spinning light sabers, or nifty force powers. It was that they operated on a plane above the normal, physical struggle of the conflict of the day, towards the more universal conflicts that are at the heart of every person. In the realm of the Jedi, why you were doing something was vastly more important than what you did….

— Light Saber Duels – Trollsmyth

The Meditations [by Marcus Aurelius] is customarily, and no doubt rightly, classified by librarians under the heading of “Philosophy” But this may give the reader a misleading impression, unless he understands the place which philosophy held in the ancient world. From what he knows of the writings of its twentieth-century [C.E.] exponents, he is unlikely to conclude that its chief aim and end is the attainment of personal virtue. This, he imagines, is the province of religion, not of philosophy. But in classical times things were different. Morality, the good life, man’s relations with the gods—all these were the domain of the philosopher, not the priest. Roman religion in the Imperial age had no concern with moral problems. Its business was simply the performance of such appropriate rites as would ensure the gods’ protection for the State, or avert the effects of their displeasure. It was a formal system of public ceremonies carried out by State officials, and provided no answers to the doubts and difficulties of human souls. Yet then, as now, men found themselves perplexed by the great questions that are the common concern of us all. What is the composition of this universe around us, and how did it come into being? Is it ordered by blind chance, or a wise Providence? If gods exist, do they interest themselves in mortal affairs? What is the nature of man, and his duty here, and his destiny hereafter? It was not the priests but the philosophers who claimed to supply the answers to such inquiries. Their answers, it is true, were not unanimous; there were rival systems of philosophy, and each proffered its own solution (as, for that matter, the different world-religions of our own day still do); But all were agreed that the sole right to pronounce with authority in the fields of metaphysics, theology, and ethics belonged to philosophy.

— Meditations, translator’s introduction

Emphasis mine.

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

— Meditations, p. 46