Robinson Crusoe, an Imperialist

Robinson Crusoe was a consummate Imperialist. This may sound strange since Crusoe was alone for so much of the time in the  novel. However, the relationship between Crusoe and Friday from their initial meeting is cast as a Colonialist and his subaltern.  Crusoe has the hubris that complements his treating Friday as a childlike inferior being.  In 1719 when Defoe wrote the novel our country was still a colony of Great Britain. The Colonialist has hubris; he also has power. Imperialism is an attitude supported with the instruments of power. Jared Diamond, the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," argues that hegemony over peoples is not because of inherent genetic superiority of the Colonialist, but because he possesses instruments of power that subdue and arrest those peoples colonized. The Imperialist would prefer compliance without violence, but if necessary violence will be used to enforce compliance.

Rudyard Kipling, a British poet, promoted this colonial attitude in his poetry. In 1899 he wrote the poem “The White Man’s Burden” in support of United States Imperialism in the Philippines.  It was considered the responsibility or burden of White men to educate ignorant savages to the Western institutions and culture. Wikipedia says, “American Imperialists understood the phrase “The white man's burden” to justify imperialism as a noble enterprise of civilization, conceptually related to the American philosophy of Manifest Destiny.”

This is the first stanza of a seven stanza poem---“The White Man’s Burden.”  The reader soon realizes just how condescending the words are and the utter contempt the words express for those peoples that are to be subjugated by the Imperialist power.

Take up the White man's burden --

  Send forth the best ye breed --

Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folk and wild --

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.

There was a saying "the sun never sets on the British Empire.  And there could have been an accompanying saying, "the sun never sets on the violence done by the British Empire." The peak of British Colonialism happened during the reign of Queen Victoria, whose reign was from 1837 to 1901. In the late 1840s in Ireland during the potato famine she let 1.1 million Irish persons starve to death while she continued to export grain and livestock from Ireland. She would not let relief ships from other countries dock in Ireland to deliver food. The British Empire extended to countries like India and even to other continents such as Africa.  Today many people revere England and ignore its violent past. The same people are aghast at the violence of Nazis and are vocal about it. The Guardian article that follows demonstrates how apologists don't deny the atrocities of the British, they ignore them.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities

Discourse with Oneself and The Solitude of Place

Everyone probably knows something about the novel “Robinson Crusoe” and its protagonist of the same name who was stranded on an island reliant on his own resourcefulness to survive such an existence.  Crusoe had a faithful companion, his man, Friday.  Ironically Friday does not appear as a character in the novel until Crusoe has been on the island twenty-five years of his twenty-eight years there.  Crusoe had many years of solitude before he had the companionship of Friday.

Edward Engelberg has interpreted the novel through the idea “Discourse with Oneself and The Solitude of Place.”  Crusoe’s solitary existence on the island elicits many moments during which, by necessity, Crusoe engages in discourse with himself.  And place is critical since Crusoe must create tools and use these tools to develop the resources on the island to survive, but he does so in the great solitude encompassing the island.

Crusoe, on the second anniversary of being on the island, in discourse with himself, gives thanks to God and “His providence” but nonetheless recognizes that “it was possible I might be more happy in this solitary condition than I should have been in the liberty of society, and in all the pleasures of the world.” This acknowledgement of the enjoyment of solitude is overshadowed by its detrimental effects to human consciousness. The “want of human society” concern is the subject of Crusoe’s inner discourse several times in the novel.  Apropos of this is Crusoe’s reflection: “Thus, we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.” John Donne, the seventeenth century poet, speaks to the need for human contact: "No man is an island entire of itself; / every man / is a piece of the continent, a part of / the main.” Donne and Crusoe come to the same conclusion that we need “human society.” Crusoe does so through the concept of “contraries” and Donne does so with poetic lines.

Crusoe speaks of life and its vagaries, “And by what secret different springs are the affections hurried about, as different circumstances present! To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of.” Hopefully when our circumstances change the change is not a fickle response, but a measured response emanating from the emergent awareness of an authentic search for meaning in life.

Few of us will experience a place with the degree of solitude that Crusoe had.  We may have to search out at place that allows us to be alone so we can enjoy the advantages of solitude. Indeed solitude may permit us to gather our thoughts and have a refreshing discourse.

Permit Yourself to Understand the other

“If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual”
                                                             Carl R. Rogers

Our world suffers from what I call “Existential Indifference.”  This lack of interest or concern of others is deep seated in our culture. While the psychologist, Carl Rogers, has stated the dilemma his use of the word “permit” demonstrates how unbelievably difficult it is to simply understand another person.  We are not trained to listen, which is the key to understanding someone else. The skill-set needed to listen is presented in the following link.

https://www.ccl.org/multimedia/podcast/the-big-6-an-active-listening-skill-set/      

Beyond the listening skill-set we need to challenge ourselves to appreciate and value empathy in our contact with others.  Empathy is “the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.” It has been said: “Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.” To discover those “echoes” we need to reflect and pay attention to others in instances in which empathy is essential. Wake up to the situations that beg for an empathic response. Practice permitting yourself to understand others.

Words to Myself in Solitude

The lighthouse as a light-emitting instrument of nautical guidance of ships to shore has come also to represent symbolically a path to personal realization and personal fulfillment. A beacon of hope, if you will.

While the “lighthouse” is the controlling symbol of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” in it, it seems to symbolize how unattainable personal realization and personal fulfillment are in our lives. It narrates the frustrated attempts at human contact and human connection. As this deficit of communication persists existence exhibits its ephemeral nature; things change, people die.  We like to think something will last forever, but of course it doesn't.  The retreat to solitude may be just the respite we need from futile attempts at authentic interchange.

Two passages of the novel illustrate this: James Ramsay, age six, anticipates a voyage to the Lighthouse tomorrow.  He is at the side of his mother; she is his protector from his father who seems to get satisfaction in telling his son that the voyage won't be possible because of bad weather; indeed the voyage does not happen because of inclement weather. Soon his mother dies suddenly.

Time passes, ten years to be exact. During these years James's sister, Prue, dies giving birth to her child and his brother, Andrew dies in the war.  Existence is indeed ephemeral.

The long delayed voyage takes place with James, his sister Cam, and his father Mr. Ramsay. The narrator tells the reader, "James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat."  While the Lighthouse is not what James anticipated as a young Knight Gallant he realizes this too is the Lighthouse and that "nothing is simply one thing." 

In a passage in which Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay are physically near each other, the narrator tells the thoughts of each of them and these show a great degree of emotional aloofness and separation between them.  Mr. Ramsay wants his wife's sympathy and confirmation of her love for him and she is unable to give these to him. Her thoughts reveal, "it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination." The reader might at this point hope that the "flawed" relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay would undergo a change that would make communication and connection possible, but, unfortunately, Mrs. Ramsay suddenly perishes alone. And any hope of resolution perishes with her.

While "To the Lighthouse" is not usually characterized as an existential story it shows the obstacles that make the search for authentic meaning in a world that comes with no preordained meaning so intractable and so problematic. Each of the characters in a sense seem to be acting out a prescribed cultural role that limits the radical freedom that Sartre says is possible and is desirable.  While circumstances in life do change, sometimes considerably, people and their makeup seldom do.
 

Virginia Woolf-Suicide

This is Virginia Woolf's note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, explaining her suicide, on March 28, 1941. She was fifty-nine years old.  Today she probably would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  She had established herself as one of the great Modernist authors.

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

*****

In June 2018 I entered a blog post "Suicide" the subject of which were the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, both popular cultural figures.  In that post I stated, "Albert Camus, a philosopher and author, held that suicide is the central philosophical concern. Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” stated “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.”  Suicide is rarely an issue until something goes wrong and there is a deficit of meaning. Woolf was plagued by her mental condition throughout her lifetime. Indeed, when she revealed Mrs. Ramsay's assumptions about life in "To the Lighthouse" which were: "She took a look at life . . .  A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her" these were assumptions she probably shared. It seems for Woolf life finally "got the better of it" and the prescient words that Mr. Ramsay uttered in the novel, "we perish, each alone" prevailed for Virginia Woolf as they shall for each of us.

Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"

Mrs. Ramsay of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is modeled after Woolf’s mother.  She is the mother of eight children and is characterized by her kindness and by her tolerance, but especially as protecter of those she cares about.  Her husband is the opposite.  He is egotistical and he comes across as insensitive and uncaring.  His self-doubt prompts him to seek sympathy and reassurance from his wife and from others.  With the burden of protecting her children and with the task of reassuring her husband is it any wonder that she might seek solitude as the narrator describes, “For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

This narrative description signifies that solitude is a time for Mrs. Ramsay to free herself from responsibility as a mother and as a wife and to be “by herself” and “To be silent; to be alone.”  However the disclosure, “She could be herself” implies that she is not herself when she acts in other capacities; that there is a private self that is not revealed to others---a secret self.  This may not be true for only, Mrs. Ramsay, but for the rest of us as well.  When the time comes to no longer be “by herself,” “Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight."  While we are not told what the “odd” or “end” is it might “the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment.”  She is knitting the stocking for “the lightkeeper's son’. . .  “his boy with a tuberculous hip.” Her six year old son, James, will take the gift if, weather permiting, they make the trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. James so wants to go.

Before Mrs. Ramsay's interlude of solitude and its postlude described above the narrator had shared her thoughts about life as such, " She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance" (60). Her view of life is adversarial and embattled and it seems so incongruent with the way she presents herself to others. Little wonder that this "something real" is also "something private."

Evidently, Virginia Woolf created a remarkable likeness of her mother through the character, Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf, was thirteen when her mother died and she stated that she was obsessed with her mother's memory until she wrote "To the Lighthouse." After Woolf finished the novel she said, “I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.”  When Woolf's sister read the novel she said it was like seeing her mother raised from the dead.

The following piece in the Literary Hub by Christopher Frizzelle speaks to the mother-daughter relationship and Woolf's mother as the inspiration for Mrs. Ramsay in the novel.

https://lithub.com/the-day-virginia-woolf-brought-her-mom-back-to-life

Thoreau and Solitude

Edward Engelberg in discussing several forms of “solitude” refers to one of these as the “personal space for pleasure and creative self-indulgence.” This form is in sharp contrast to the prevailing view of solitude as a condition of loneliness and isolation. Both views are discussed extensively by Existentialists. The former view promises a greater possibility for authentic meaning in life.

Henry David Thoreau was a proponent of solitude as a source of joy and emotional self-attunement. Thoreau in his work “Walden” has a chapter on solitude.  He describes his being alone in solitude, “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” For two years Thoreau lived on the shore of Walden Pond in a hut he had built with solitude as his companion.

 

On the shore of Walden Pond, listening attentively, Thoreau heard, “Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre . . .

Of the universal lyre, there are those who say the harp and lyre possess the sacred and the secular, or possibly the sacred in the secular and for Thoreau nature provided the necessary musical instrument---the universal lyre. We each might want to listen attentively to get in touch with the music that surrounds us. We will hear sounds we have not heard before and feel feelings we have not felt before.  Find a time for solitude and make a “personal space for pleasure and creative self-indulgence.”