These days and particularly on these uncharacteristically sunny
Vancouver days I feel this empty thing in my stomach. I feel uneasy.
Both my Rosemary and I are more or less in good health.
There is money in the bank and we live in a nice neighbourhood. Our deck garden
is about to explode in the blooms of our roses. Food is good and simple to
make. Breakfast in bed, every day with our Vancouver Sun and the New York Times
in our hands is satisfying. And more so with the presence of our brother and
sister cats, Niño and Niña.
This unease runs concurrently with thoughts into my past
with all those people that are now gone.
There is one person who can, I believe, put some sense into
my uneasiness. This is Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the
United Nations.
It was around 1966 when I was a conscript in the Argentine
Navy that I disobeyed the order of an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He said
he was going to arrest me and put me in the brig for a few days. He told me
that he was going to be kind in giving me until the next day to get ready and
order whatever I had to order in my life.
I decided I needed reading material. I went to the nearby
Pigmalion (Pigmalión in Argentine Spanish) bookstore on Calle Corrientes 515. I
was much too ignorant to notice a blind old man who was there frequently buying
books in English. In this occasion I bought two books. One was the Phenomenon
of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the other a slim volume that attracted
my eye called Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld that was translated into English by
Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden.
In that dirty brig I very quickly found interesting stuff by
the Swede that I immediately underlined. Some years ago I had the book re-bound
in leather in Mexico City. I often take it out from my living room bookcase.
This is something I did today and I knew where I would find the relevant quote:
26.8.56
Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy –
Why?
Because – when opportunity gives you the obligation to
Create, you are content to meet the demands of the
moment,
from one day to the next.
Because – anxious for the good opinion of others, and
jealous of the possibility that they may become ‘famous’,
you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen
in the the end to what you have done and been.
How dead can a man be behind the façade of great ability,
loyalty – and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign
that there is still life in you.