18 Diamond

I had been unable to study the problems in my math and physics textbooks for just two hours or three, but now I found myself reading philosophy and literature late into the night and early morning. In addition to the texts required by my professors I tackled on my own the classics I had been told any educated person should read. I stayed up all night to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and I kept Crime and Punishment beside my bed and read one chapter a night until I finished it. Soon my entire understanding of life and I had been transformed through the study of art, literature, philosophy, history, psychology, the social sciences and the humanities. Though only slowly and sporadically at first, I did begin to consider nonviolence from the point of view of the literatus, the intellectual, the nihilist, the esthete. For me neither a religion nor a philosophy it was rather a kind of contempt for violence.

Joyce:

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

Over the years I came to see this passage as almost a translation of my favorite injunction of Jesus:

"Behold! I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves."

Literature.

Art.

Education.

The International Pacifist Conspiracy.

School.

On June 11, 1963, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sat down at a busy intersection of downtown Saigon, he crossed his legs in the full lotus meditation posture, and with the help of his fellow monks he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to call attention to the oppression and suffering of the Vietnamese people. Though I had been puzzled and awed by the eerie photograph of his self-immolation—a ragged, flapping flag of flame unfurling from his form, his spine erect, his legs crossed, his hands resting in his lap—at that time I knew almost nothing of either Vietnam or Buddhism.

In November of the same year just four hours after my son Devon had been born, John F. Kennedy was assassinated—his murder a red bloody mist in one frozen frame of the Zapruder film. Within just a few months, it seemed, several hundred thousand American soldiers were engaged in the war in Vietnam. Of my acquaintances John was the first to oppose it. I did not—mainly because it did not touch me personally. Though by this time I detested war and violence, I was what might be called an apolitical liberal, no coward but at best only well-intentioned and lost. One morning of my junior year at Iowa State I climbed the dark, dusty stairs to my friend Larry Reed's one-room apartment in campus town. There Larry and John and our friend John Magnuson, whom we called Soon, were all listening to a recording of the strangest song I had ever heard—by Bob Dylan:

O what did you see—

My blue-eyed son?

And what did you see—

My darlin young one?

I saw a newborn baby

Wild wolves all around it

A highway of diamonds

With nobody on it

I saw a black branch

With blood that kept drippin

I saw a room full of men

Their hammers a-bleedin

I saw a white ladder

All covered with water

I saw ten thousand talkers

Whose tongues were all broken

I saw guns and sharp swords

In the hands of young children

And it's a hard

It's a hard

It's a hard

And it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall