From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, August 26
Al Jazeera — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: a conflict flares up anew, drawing people into its grip and pushing others toward safety. Israeli strikes hit Lebanon's Nabatieh district, killing at least eleven and marking the deadliest day since June's ceasefire. Alan Watts considers the futility of such cycles first, followed by Ralph Waldo Emerson reflecting on resilience and response.
The ceasefire was a sentence we diagrammed in school — subject, verb, object — ... and called it peace. You see, the truce held the shape of stillness while the underneath kept moving, the way a river looks frozen until you press your hand to the ice and feel the current laughing at your palm. Eleven dead in Nabatieh. Families loading trucks, pointing north. The same north their grandparents pointed toward in '48, and '67, and '82. The compass needle never learns.
Now here is the paradox that makes the diplomat choke on his tea: the enemy is the only proof the self exists. Remove Hezbollah, and Israel loses the contour of its own fear. Remove the Israeli jet, and the resistance evaporates into mere grief. They need each other the way the wave needs the trough , not to destroy, but to be. Voltaire knew. If the Devil did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. We have been inventing him for seventy-six years and calling it security.
The pacifist in 1939 wrote that war is as natural as a thunderstorm. He was called coward. He replied: if you know the house cannot be saved, you do not stay to fight the fire , you save the life. But the world calls that foolhardiness. It calls the burning duty. The trucks move north. The jets return south.
The border is a sentence we keep diagramming, hoping the syntax will finally mean what we pretend it means.
‘‘Buddhism and War,’ Watts again takes a pacifist line, but an extreme one that is explicitly critical of those casuists who declare themselves ideologically opposed to killing but who, when the chips actually go down, are usually able to find some high-minded reason for taking u…
the conflict: to call each other the worst names, but to refrain from dropping bombs. Or, if they insist that there must be some fighting to keep armies in trim, they restrict it to local conflicts in “unimportant” countries. Voltaire should have said that if the Devil did not ex…
Early Writings of Alan Watts regarded as escapists and cowards, but since war itself is an act of cowardice and military courage for the most part a matter of running away from one’s own fears, I do not think they are to be especially blamed. They may be cowards, but they do at l…
by fighting those who attempt to disturb it. If someone swears at you in the street, do you stop him by swearing back? If you have tried this way, you may have noticed that so far from stopping the swearing, the vol- ley of abuse increases and that each side tried to get the mas-…
doomed anyway. Why rub it in? We’re all going to die. And of course the Christians and the Islamic people. And to some extent, the Hindus and Buddhists tried to rub it in and say, you think death is the bad thing here. You just wait till when you are dead. Because we’ve got eons …
That was me, twenty-four years old in the King's School debating society, arguing that war is a thunderstorm you don't stop by shooting at the lightning. I took the next ship to New York while my contemporaries took rifles to France, and the British press called it yellow-livered evasion... though the same editors would later call the bombing of Dresden a moral necessity. The pacifist's dilemma: if you refuse to kill, you're accused of letting evil win; if you kill to stop evil, you've become the evil you swore to oppose. Chuang-tzu understood: the useful tree survives because nobody wants its wood.
The wire brings word of cannon fire on the coast of ancient Lebanon , eleven souls returned to dust in the district of Nabatieh, the deadliest reckoning since the summer's fragile truce. Families shoulder their bundles and walk northward, the same road their grandsires walked when the Ottoman tax-collector came.
I read the tally and feel the old chill: three officers and forty-nine men killed, five officers and fifty-nine men wounded of the army, eleven men killed of the navy , Cook's numbers from another shore, another century, but the arithmetic of slaughter does not change. A truce is a piece of paper.
The over-soul knows no ceasefire. When the gun speaks, the treaty burns.
I have seen this in Concord: the militia assembling on the green, the redcoats marching from Boston and the shot heard round the world , the pattern repeats, the grave fills, the law of compensation exacts its due.
shoulders a very large portion of the work seems to have fallen, says: "Our landing was next to miraculous." There were 3 officers and 49 men killed; 5 officers and 59 men wounded of the army; 11 men killed, and 4 officers and 29 men wounded of the navy; and 19 men wounded of the…
in the History. Cook also made a pen-and-ink sketch of it, which is in the British Museum. COOK'S WASHING STOLEN. On 31st October they rounded East Cape, and following the coast, which trended more to the west, they saw a great number of villages and patches of cultivation, some …
Phillips and his wounded marines plunged into the water and, covered by musketry fire, gained the boats; their officer, though wounded, jumping out again to the assistance of the last man who, severely injured by a blow on the face, was in great danger of being captured. The boat…
to set forth its merits and how it should be cultivated. Towards the end of the month a man reported that the two Spanish ships had returned, and showed a piece of cloth he said he had obtained from them, so Cook, not knowing if England and Spain were on friendly terms, prepared …
caught two birds in the rigging that had evidently been blown off the coast of Spain. On 13th September they anchored in Funchal Roads, and during the night "the Bend of the Hawser of the stream anchor slip'd owing to the carelessness of the person who made it fast." The anchor w…
The Over-Soul does not judge. It records. Every cannon shot, every bundle shouldered on the north road, every mother's silence , it enters the ledger without mercy and without pardon. I wrote in the Old Manse study that "the law of compensation exacts its due," and I meant it as physics, not metaphor. The gun speaks and the treaty burns because the soul that pulls the trigger has already severed itself from the whole. Transcendence is not escape. It is the refusal to let the slaughter become your measure. Thoreau went to jail rather than pay the war tax; he knew the only clean ledger is the one you keep yourself. The dead in Nabatieh are not statistics. They are the Over-Soul's own flesh, and the debt comes due.
The story ran in Al Jazeera. Ceasefires, like sentences, often hide their fragility until the violence speaks. That's Old News for today.