He struggled for months to draw the bow in the right way. Only when he became desperate and asked for help in a humble spirit did the Master inform him that his trouble was that he did not know how to breathe. Many more months were required to learn how to breathe, but when he was finally able to do so he found that he also was now able to draw the bow, effortlessly and without pain.
Herrigel asked a friend why the Master had not told him about breathing at the very beginning. “A great Master,” his friend replied, “must also be a great teacher. Had he begun the lessons with breathing exercises he would never have been able to convince you that you owe them anything decisive. You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you.” Learning to breathe took Herrigel more than a year.
He could now draw the bow, but every time he released the arrow his right arm flew back from the string and his body was shaken, and the arrow flew erratically. Why, he wondered, could he not release the arrow as the Master did? He practiced for many months. Finally he became aware that the Master was trying to tell him, in various ways that he had considered enigmatic, that his problem was that he was trying to shoot the arrow, when in fact the arrow must shoot itself. One day he asked the Master:
“How can the shot be loosed if ‘I’ do not do it?” “‘It’ shoots,” he replied.
“And who or what is this ‘It’?”
“Once you have understood that, you will have no further need of me,” the Master said. “And if I tried to give you a clue at the cost of your own experience, I would be the worst of teachers.”
It took Herrigel more than three years to learn to release the arrow properly—or rather, to be able to wait patiently until the arrow released itself.
Not until then did he and the small class of which he was a member begin to shoot at a target. Here again there were puzzles and contradictions for this Western man. Although the Master always struck the target in the black (its central part), he did not seem even to look at the target when he shot (his eyes were more than half closed), and he insisted that it did not matter if his pupils hit it. “You can be a Master even if your arrows never hit the target,” he told them.
Master of what? Herrigel wondered. But he was beginning to understand. The Zen art of archery is not the art of shooting an arrow at a target and always hitting it—or, most abominable of misunderstandings, the art of striking nearer to the center than an opponent in a competition. Instead, it is—well, I shall not try to say. Herrigel is able to say, or to suggest what it is, and why it was so terribly important for him to learn the art, and why, in his opinion (he became a Master himself, after many years), it is terribly important for all Western men and women to learn it. If you wish to understand this yourself, you must read Zen and the Art of Archery, which will take you an hour—or study the Zen art, which will take you at least six years. The latter is preferable, but you may not have the time, and in that case the book is an excellent substitute. Reading it sympathetically and with understanding will make you better at whatever you do best.
ISAK DINESEN
1885–1962
Seven Gothic Tales
Karen Christence Dinesen was born in Denmark in 1885, the daughter of a family with ties to the old Danish nobility. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Blixen-Finecke, and went with him to Africa, where they established a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her aristocratic husband paid her little interest, but unfortunately he gave her a case of syphilis, which tormented her body for the rest of her life. They were divorced in 1921. She attempted to keep the plantation going, but falling world coffee prices bankrupted her by 1931. She returned to Denmark and wrote Out of Africa (1937), a moving account of life on the plantation and of her parting from it and from those who had served and worked with her during the African years.
She had been writing stories, too, and she began to publish them in a series of collections that attracted a passionate following. The stories in Seven Gothic Tales are set in a past without a date except that it is just out of reach, just beyond the memory of living persons—at any rate, in an older world that is now gone, where honor was of first importance and promises were kept both by gods and by men. The stories are complex, often containing, in forty or fifty pages, two or three levels of subplot: in short, stories within stories. Interspersed among the narratives, which are packed so tight that there hardly seems to be room for them, are asides and comments of great interest. For example:
“God,” she said, “when he created Adam and Eve, arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the part of a guest and woman that of a hostess. Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you can also, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host. Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?” “I believe,” said Augustus, when he had thought for a moment, “that if we do, as I think we ought to here, leave out the crude guest, who comes to be regaled, takes what he can get and goes away, a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to get out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perhaps, he wants to find some justification for his existence altogether. But since you put it so charmingly, Signora, please tell me now: What does a hostess want?”
“The hostess,” said the young lady, “wants to be thanked.”
Here loud voices outside put an end to their conversation.
That passage comes from the story “The Roads Round Pisa,” which may be the finest of the seven tales. (I’m not sure; I love them all.) The passage is utterly typical, as is this:
I have always thought it unfair to woman that she has never been alone in the world. Adam had a time, whether long or short, when he could wander about on a fresh and peaceful earth, among the beasts, in full possession of his soul, and most men are born with a memory of that period. But poor Eve found him there, with all his claims upon her, the moment she looked into the world. That is a grudge that woman has always had against the Creator: she feels that she is entitled to have that epoch of paradise back for herself.
Aristocracy has become, for us, an almost unintelligible institution. It has become nearly impossible for us to comprehend why any men and women of goodwill (ignoring the proud and the greedy, whose motives are quite understandable) could ever have felt that the social arrangements of the ancien régime were preferable to those of today’s equalitarianism—or egalitarianism, as they themselves would have named it. Our image of aristocrats is formed by Marx Brothers movies in which fat dowagers scowl at idiotic girls who dance with stupid, rich young men. And perhaps that image was the reality at most times and places of the aristocratic past. But aristocracy also conveyed an ideal that could not be conceived by egalitarians: an ideal of excellence, of freedom and ease, of taste and thought and good conversation, of probity and honor beyond everyday standards, of a complete disregard for wealth and a complete regard for a kind of justice based on individual merit. Isak Dinesen would not have been the last to admit that the reality was far from this idea. But the ideal was, in her view, worth remembering as better than anything the modern world can offer. And this is the ideal world of her Seven Gothic Tales.