It is entirely possible – even probable – that I have set forth on this matter before. As a Gentlemen of a Certain Age, I retain the privilege of forgetting what I’ve had to say before and, owing to its urgency in my mind, repeat it. The Almanack also takes some salubrious pride in returning, like the biblical dog to its vomit, to a few recurrent follies.
One such folly is the “terms of our contract,” a notion extracted from Almanack favorite Saul Bellow. In Bellow’s book Mr. Sammler’s Planet, keen social observer, Polish intellectual and “registrar of madness” Artur Sammler ponders the craziness of 1960s New York City. The novel ends with a beautiful prayer, which Sammler delivers silently to his deceased nephew Dr. Elya Gruner, but addresses to God:
“Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even in suffocation and even as death was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps . . . to do what was required of him. At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, every man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, we know, we know.”
It is a stunning passage to which I return often. The idea of meeting the terms of an inner contract returns with such regularity, in my life and in that of others, that one must pay attention. The terms of one’s contract, the one understood instinctively and without coaching or external reference, that we already know. It is as good a guide as I’ve found to acting with purpose in every facet of life. It works in sickness and in health, in peaks and valleys, in private and public life, at work and at home. If I think of my too-infrequent best moments, those flashes I sometimes feels of deep satisfaction, they always correlate to my contract.
A strange way to think of personal conduct, isn’t it? A contract seems like a business and legal term, until you meet Mr. Sammler. My friend Andrea Howe spends a great deal of time writing and talking about this subject in the business context; she calls it trust. I think of Andrea as the Duchess of Trust and her acute observations of what it takes to cultivate trusting relationships track quite nicely with Sammler’s dictum to do what is required. A severely abbreviated sampler:
“Business is personal.”
“Be quiet and listen if you want to be heard.”
“Getting real. Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”
Indeed. Doing what we know is required of us and what is consistent with our own star and compass, is personal, quiet and often difficult.
If you look closely at a human face, you can often detect the most exquisite sadness of those who have experienced tragedy and grief, and met them with humanity in excelsis. Sometimes this appears in the young, more often in the aged. In such faces, the meaning of Sammler’s contract become more visible, more beautiful. This is why, if you ask me, you sometimes hear people speak of their attraction to photographs of older people.
Like the fictional Artur Sammler, the non-fictional Viktor Frankl survived the Holocaust, where virtually every human attachment was removed from prisoners. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, developed a premise that the only thing that could not be taken from a person is their meaning. In my interpretation, the terms of their contracts kept some Jews alive in even the most dehumanized circumstances.
Frankl famously quipped that the Statue of Liberty should be accompanied by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
Saul Bellow’s 1970 had its share of degraded clowning, as the counterculture began its steady slouch toward cultural sloppiness. 50 years hence, may we be forgiven for having made some matters worse, with a thousand daily opportunities for disgraceful behavior. All the more important, then, that we understand our responsibilities, the meaning of our existence and the terms of our contracts.
The ones we know.
Poor David's Almanack 