Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West/Part Second, 3

by Ameen Rihani

III

MINE OWN COUNTRY

EVEN to one who loves her and accepts the rigor of her economy as part of her lasting reward, nature is not everywhere in a communicable mood, nor is she always the same. Her disposition often changes with our own; her appeal seldom reaches the discordant heart. Her inner voice is never heard by the passing stranger. To say that we love nature only when we take the pains to understand her, is trite; but we can only partly understand her when we suffer her to impose upon us her supreme will. She unveils for those who linger and wait; and she speaks only to him who stands in reverence before a moss or a fern as before the greatest of the mysteries of the universe. A bird is singing in the branches of a hemlock; a worm is eating into its bark. The ranger passes by indifferent to both, nothing seeing or hearing. But the poet-naturalist lingers, eager to see and learn; and with an undivided heart, an observing eye and mind, he returns again and again to his schooling, discovers the secret of both bird and worm, informs the music and the silence with a spirit of his own, and actually adds to the idealism and the practical knowledge of man. He saves the tree for the State and he saves the song for the world. Strictly speaking, the pages of nature's book we admire the most are those that bear marginal notes of our own personality and experience.

That is why, I think, Thoreau would not have felt as much at home in the rugged splendors of the ancient Lebanons as he did in the placid solitudes of Walden woods. He might have been a naturalist there, but not a poet; even as a stranger, coming to Concord from a distant land, might only find in the Thoreau-country the visible landscape, not of Thoreau's poetic Soul, but of nature's least poetic moods. This particular page of her book leaves him cold, and the marginal notes are often illusory. It may be that he did not come at the right time, or he did not open the book at an auspicious moment. But more likely his heart had been preempted elsewhere, so that, outside a particular spot, he finds Carlyle's obvious remark, One green field, all green fields, damping his enthusiasm, hopelessly extinguishing in him every poetic rapture.

Such has been my experience when I visited Concord, such, my disappointment in the Catskills that, although a lover of nature in all her moods, I found myself turning from her text to Thoreau's marginal notes and those of his distinguished but less poetic successor John Burroughs. And while I enjoy their chants, I can not be a worshipper at their shrines, nor can I even pretend to share the least intimacy with their goddess, having already pledged my soul at another temple. For though our faith and our rituals too are the same, our gods differ. It is curious, indeed, how the universal spirit sometimes carries us back to the parochial. Like the Ujigami of Japan, we all have our distinct deities, which we invest with our own personality. In this sense, we are all self-worshippers: the gods of our allegiance, our devotion, are the gods of our pride. Else why should we be so attached to the soil, the plants, the flowers, the cliffs of our native land? There is something even in a familiar fern that leaves in the soul the impress of its own locality.

In my own country the flowers are the toys of our childhood; they are nature's precious presents, which she never fails to bring us on every holiday. Even on Christmas she calls the children to her snow-crowned heights to surprise them with her wild violets. And these they bring to the altar of the local Saint, who promises to fulfill all their desires if they pray for them while picking the flowers in his name. Once I remember, in a fit of envy and anger I prayed for the death of a boy who got ahead of me to a favorite spot under a sheltering rock, where the violets bloomed in abundance. A week later there was an epidemic of smallpox in our village, and the boy, my playmate, was carried off by the disease. I was so angry with the Saint for answering in this instance my prayer that never after would I pray to him or pick the violets in his name. For if he heard me when I offered the prayer, I argued, he must have heard me also when I took it back. Thus early did I waver in my religious devotion; but nature, nevertheless, continued to bring me her presents, the flowers. Which made me love her the more. I even set up for myself a local Saint of her own,—St. Cyclamen I called him,—in a grove of pines, under the protection of the Cross. Why did I compromise with the Church, I knew not then—I know not now. But there it is, in the pine-grove, my Temple of the Flowers and the Christ. And whether a lover of nature be a poet, or a philosopher, or a child, he can at best only pretend to be indifferent to the call of the flowers of his own locality, which bloom every year on the altar of his faith. Perennially they call, and, although we be in the farthermost parts of the world, they seldom fail in the calling. Else why should I—and I die a hundred deaths in a sea voyage—cross the ocean again and again to visit my native land?

America too is the land of my birth, my second birth, so to speak, which is more significant, to myself at least, than the first. And here I have often found myself in the bosom of nature, comforted and reassured. Here are daisies as lovely as the soil and sun and rain ever made; but such loveliness is marred for me by a sad-sweet recollection: the daisies that have known the caresses of my infant love, that have heard the lispings of my superstitious heart, are sweeter of breath, stronger of appeal. Here are gardens where the resources and ingenuity of man would surpass the beauty of nature; but wherever I turn my eyes among the elegant variety of their flowers, I can see only the image of the homely sweet-basil, my mother's favorite plant. Here too are cultivated cyclamens hardier and more beautiful than the delicate creatures that peep out of the crannies and crevices of my native rocks and terrace-walls; but whenever I behold them I fain would run barefoot again in the Lebanon hills, ascending and descending the flower-covered terraces, to gather a sheaf on Good Friday of the April harvest and lay it at the foot of the Cross. And the hemlocks of the land of my second birth are as majestic and as generous as the Lebanon pines; but the fact that they have a claim upon my gratitude, having lived with them for a space and profited by their intimacy and healing influence, does not, and can not, alienate my first love for the trees of my boyhood,—of my childly joys,—and my child-faith. Alas, the wrath of my local Deity is upon me!

What is it then that would conquer the cosmic spirit in us and, overcoming all the faculties of reason, attach us in affection to certain spots and objects, which we call Home or Mother-Country? In my own case, it can not be patriotism; for I never had a chance to be a patriot, not even in the Johnsonian sense of the word. Moreover, in a land where the freedom of the spirit, even the freedom of the citizen, has not yet been realized, one can better serve one's country from a safe distance. I have often given it absent treatment with little or no result. My subject and I are not en rapport. Enough said of patriotism.

But whence comes it, this love for one's country? One's language? English to me is as dear, though not as explicable in some of its idiosyncracies, as the Arabic. Domestic life? the customs and traditions of the hearth? I did not love my own home when I lived in it; I little appreciated the domestic peace and beauty of it; and I was glad to say good-bye to mine own people when I left it. Does it consist of one's national faith, of the religion of one's ancestors, this love for one's country? I would not be so irresistably attracted by it, if it did. For my race, ever since the days of Antiochus the Great, nay, back to the times of my fellow-scrivener, Sanchuniathon the Phoenician, never had a real national faith; and my father's religion was in the pocket of my native robe when I threw it overboard the first time I crossed the Atlantic.

Why then, I repeat, this chronic nostalgia? My local Deity forever calling? I might go there only to find the Temple in ruins. Nature's presents heaped at my door? The heart craves knowledge now, not affection; the torments of the understanding can not be wholly assuaged by the Beautiful. Do the toys of our childhood become in latter days the toys of our souls? Here. I think, I am nearer to the truth. For we must be as children again to be able to enjoy, from purest spiritual motive, our native soil and the enchanted scenes of our childly days and dreams. And the comely simplicity of childhood, its mystic innocense, is incarnate in the trees, the flowers, the streams and the hills of the mother-land. Everything a child touches in his holy years lives afterward in the pious memory a life of its own and is subject, like the flowers, to the vicissitudes of the seasons. It grows, it blooms, it withers; and withering, it spreads of its petals a rug under the feet of remeniscence. It paints the horizon of the soul a sullen gold,—it fills its resting places with an entrancing perfume. The child-soul is a nursery which afterward often becomes a deserted garden in which we love to stroll. It is a cathedral in which are buried the cherubs of our fancy and the heroes of our dreams.—The cyclamen is going to be my intercessor at the altar of my local Saint. As I draw it gently out of its nich in the rock, to preserve its diapered leaf and every inch of its delicate russet stem, I impart to it a life separate from its own, which I cherish in my dream-moments more than any worldly dream. And our mother's nurseries, how we would rancask them to make a child's holiday! Those same flowers and odoriferous plants that we destroyed in infant rapture, still grow and bloom perennially to diffuse around them such joy and faith in life as mortal man, in his recurring doubts, perennially requires.

These toys of childhood, these spiritual tokens, fragile but unbreakable, live, indeed, in the flowers we used to gather for our local Saint; in the woods where we were often lost or caught by the storm; in the tall grass through which we would wade, playing hide and seek; in the trees we used to climb, whose branches still murmur our songs of joy; in the roaring rivulets whose wintry wrath we defied; in the Summer vineyards whose gold and purple grapes we stole; in the April fields whose lotus and iris and daffodil we gathered for Palm Sunday. The love for the mother-country that does not consist essentially of these, is not spiritually pure enough to engage our thought.

And yet, to be honest with the reader to the end, I must add, having already spoken of a second birth, that in its nursery Concord has sown a pinch of the flower-seeds of transcendentalism. But what chance have these seeds to grow in the cold and sunless habitations of the city? In my ceaseless search, however, I found a window once through which, now and then, a glint of sunlight came to surprise us. The seeds showed signs of life, which encouraged me to seek a place for them on the outskirts of nature, where they first grew to tenderness and beauty, in confusion and abundance. But they were smitten of a sudden, almost asphyxiated. From all the public highways around us came the fatal breath of the God of Gasoline. Deep into the glen, therefore, and far from the highways of motoring-man, we remove, seeking the virgin soil in the very heart of nature.

But here were wild flowers that reminded me of the roses, the jasmines and the sweet-basils of the homely nurseries of Lebanon. And in the deep silence of the woods the shadows of my native pines arose before me, above the majestic hemlocks, to say salaam. The myrtle and the sage around the scrub oaks beckoned and called. The crocus, the anemone, the cyclamen, blooming everywhere, as by magic, over the pale images of the asters and the goldenrods, remonstrated with me like true lovers. And yet, in the heart of mine own country the flower-seeds of Concord may not fare better than they did in the cold and sunless habitations of the city or on the outskirts of nature now hardened by the highways of the God of Gasoline. Go to Concord and transplant them there? It is long since the flower first bloomed in that soil that it would not, I'm afraid, be recognized today. It might die of neglect. Alas for the nursery of the soul! But our mothers' nurseries remain, my Brothers, to yield us a little solace. And what matters it if my Mother be old and crabbed and unsympathetic? What matters it if she is not counted of the young and strong among nations?

True, her history is that of a country without a flag or a national hymn; but her divine message once stirred the innermost heart of the world. True, her traditions are those of a nation without a king, a people without a voice, a soul without a temple; but her ancient spirit still lives and is still destined to conquer and redeem. And although her garden-walls crumble on one side into desert waste and on the other into barren strands, her heritage is the Cross and a sea of flowers. Syria the land of roses, Syria the cradle and the tomb of the gods! When Byblos adored Tammuz, when Baalbek worshipped Jupitor-Ammon, when Galilee conquered Judea, when Arabia overcame Galilee, thou wert then a Fountain of the Spirit toward which turned a thirsty world. Thy temple was the temple of the universe, thy voice was the voice of God. From the Tigris to the Red Sea, from the Taurus to the Hijaz, thou hast ever been the garden of revelation and the battlefield of the creeds. But if the Prophets no longer thunder on thy mountains, the bulbuls still sing in thy dells and dales, the roses still blow on thy rugged brow, and the cedars, from their snowy heights, still cast their shadows over the golden sands. Syria the land of roses, Syria the cradle and the tomb of the gods, if thou wert to become a howling desert to-morrow, thou wouldst still be the cheriched of nations and the coveted of empires.