I also once saved a dog – a poor little pup as it seemed – from drowning in a swimming pool. I had been staying for a few days of vacation in Malta (at a hotel that turned out to be astonishingly lousy, located in the middle of nowhere, even lacking any kind of public transport connection to anywhere at all, but that’s a different story). My wife had recently gone through an eye surgery, so I had had to make the trip all by myself.
When I was about to return back home, I had to check out from the hotel in the middle of the night and go to wait for the transfer bus, in order to be in time at the Valletta Airport for an extremely early flight to Stockholm. Walking past the hotel pool, quite alone in the deep darkness of the southern Mediterranean night, I heard and saw a little dog desperately fighting for its life in the water, probably using up its last dwindling strength (God knows for how long it had been struggling down there). When the dog saw me approaching, it made it towards the edge of the pool, so I could pick it up.
Of course this reminded me of the anecdote I told here above. Where are the news that could infuse a glimpse of hope in us? How many joyful news could we cut out from our morning paper and heap up on the breakfast table?
Somewhere down the line of history, our civilization must have begun to make a series of mistakes, leading up to a point where improvement does not seem to be the viable pathway to change any more. This is by no means something unique though – all known civilizations of humanity have ended up in dissolution, sooner or later, and due their own shortcomings. Some of them have left impressive cultural and artistic heritages behind them, thus becoming in some respect inspirational to civilizations succeeding them; some have vanished virtually traceless. The question is, though, whether there is not considerably more at stake this time than any other time in the past – whether we are again in the midst of a transition to some new kind of civilization, or heading to nothing at all.
I very much dislike to use the concepts of modernism or modernity, since everything in humankind, from the prehistoric age up to the present day, has been “modern” at some point of time. And how could one pinpoint when something is starting to get “modern” and when – or why, or by the decision of whom – it ceases to be? Things simply are changing, in terms of culture, science, medicine, technical development, social and political ideas and conditions, and so on. For the better? Yes of course. And we all know in what respects – and for whom, and where – things have improved. Yet, at the same time, it can hardly remain a secret that humankind’s skills, and perhaps also its intrinsic drive, in engineering its own common, eventual collapse often seems to be overshadowing most of its true achievements.
In the Talmud, the great Jewish collection of rabbinic biblical commentaries and expositions that was created somewhere on the threshold between Antiquity and the New Era, we find an expression called Tikkun ha-olam, roughly meaning “repairing Creation”, being Creation’s repairers, constantly trying to mend what human beings are destroying.
Those Jewish sages of old, those sages of Jerusalem and Babylon, never harboured any illusions whatsoever about human being. Being a repairer, a mender, incessantly at work in this world, this house of madness, would be his allotted duty until the end of time.
But no, we are not supposed to live in a house of madness. If we could just learn to shut our ears to all vain and empty and evil rhetoric surrounding us (because all evil, in the end, is emptiness), all inflated language with its slogans and malevolence, and call in mind instead a word that has been almost forgotten. Shrines are carrying its name in Greek, and the same do a lot of girls and women around the world, and even a capital city. Yes, this word is a she – and it is not an empty slogan. That is because it is connected to a spiritual Reality: Wisdom. All future, all present, all past is there:
“Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and is easily perceived by those who love her;
for she is found by those who seek her.
She comes upon those who long to know her beforehand.
He who rises early in the morning to seek her
will not grow weary,
for he will find her sitting at his gates.
For to think deeply about her
is the perfection of discernment,
and he who keeps watch for her
will soon be free from worry;
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she appears to them favourably in their paths
and meets them in every thought.”
(Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16.)