{"product_id":"markings-isbn-9780307277428","title":"Markings","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Perhaps the greatest testament of personal devotion published in this century.\" — \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA powerful journal of poems and spiritual meditations recorded over several decades by a universally known and admired peacemaker. A dramatic account  of spiritual struggle, \u003ci\u003eMarkings\u003c\/i\u003e has inspired hundreds of thousands of readers since  it was first published in 1964.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMarkings\u003c\/i\u003e is distinctive, as W.H. Auden remarks in  his foreword, as a record of \"the attempt by a professional man of action to unite  in one life the \u003ci\u003evia activa\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003evia contemplativa\u003c\/i\u003e.\" It reflects its author's efforts  to live his creed, his belief that all men are equally the children of God and that  faith and love require of him a life of selfless service to others. For Hammarskjöld,  \"the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.\" \u003ci\u003eMarkings\u003c\/i\u003e is  not only a fascinating glimpse of the mind of a great man, but also a moving spiritual  classic that has left its mark on generations of readers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Perhaps the greatest testament of personal devotion published in this century.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe  New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The conviction when one has finished [\u003ci\u003eMarkings\u003c\/i\u003e is] that one has  had the privilege of being in contact with a great, good, and lovable man.\"—W. H.  Auden\u003c\/p\u003eDag Hammarskjold was born in Sweden in 1905 and died in Northern Rhodesia in a plane crash in 1961, while flying there to negotiate a cease-fire between United Nations and Katanga forces. Elected Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953, serving until his death, he was known throughout the world as a peacemaker. He had studied law and economics, but was also widely read in philosophy and literature. His internal struggles remained a private matter between him and God until after his death, when this book of meditations was published, making him posthumously one of the twentieth century's most noted spiritual pilgrims.MARKINGS         Only the hand that erases can write the true thing    MEISTER ECKHART         1925-1930              Thus is was         I am being driven forward    Into an unknown land.    The pass grows steeper,    The air colder and sharper.    A wind from my unknown goal    Stirs the strings    Of expectation.         Still the question:    Shall I ever get there?    There where life resounds,    A clear pure note    In the silence.         Smiling, sincere, incorruptible--    His body disciplined and limber.    A man who had become what he could,    And was what he was--    Ready at any moment to gather everything    Into one simple sacrifice.            Tomorrow we shall meet,    Death and I--    And he shall thrust his sword    Into one who is wide awake.         But in the meantime how grievous the memory    Of hours frittered away.            Beauty: a note that set the heartstrings quivering as it flew by; the  shimmer of the blood beneath a skin translucent in the sunlight.         Beauty: the wind which refreshed the traveler, not the stifling heat in dark  adits where beggars grubbed for gold.         Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step: only he who  keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.         Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving  in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.         Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then  you will see how low it was.         \"Better than other people.\" Sometimes he says: \"That, at least, you are.\"  But more often: \"Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you  are not--like other people.\"         What you have to attempt--to be yourself. What you have to pray for--to  become a mirror in which, according to the degree of purity of heart you  have attained, the greatness of life will be reflected.         Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence.  Friendship needs no words--it is solitude delivered from the anguish of  loneliness.         If your goal is not determined by your most secret pathos, even victory will  only make you painfully aware of your own weakness.         Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is  possible--not to have run away.         To be sure, you have to fence with an unbuttoned foil: but, in the  loneliness of yesterday, did you not toy with the idea of poisoning the tip?         We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday's self-admiration is the  legitimate father of today's feeling of guilt.         He bore failure without self-pity, and success without self-admiration.  Provided he knew he had paid his utter-most farthing, what did it matter to  him how others judged the result.         A Pharisee? Lord, thou knowest he has never been righteous in his own eyes.         1941-1942         The middle years         He stood erect--as a peg top does so long as the whip keeps lashing it. He  was modest--thanks to a robust conviction of his own superiority. He was  unambitious--all he wanted was a life free from cares, and he took more  pleasure in the failures of others than in his own successes. He saved his  life by never risking it--and complained that he was misunderstood.         \"The Army of Misfortune.\" Why should we always think of this as meaning \"The  Others\"?         Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is  God whom you ask to attend to them.         Isn't the void which surrounds you when the noise ceases your just reward  for a day devoted to preventing others from neglecting you?         What gives life its value you can find--and lose. But never possess. This  holds good above all for \"the Truth about Life.\"         How can you expect to keep your powers of hearing when you never want to  listen? That God should have time for you, you seem to take as much for  granted as that you cannot have time for Him.         The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of  guests, you have first to open the door.         \"Upon my conditions.\"* To live under that sign is to purchase knowledge  about the Way at the price of loneliness.         There is only one path out of the steamy dense jungle where the battle is  fought over glory and power and advantage--one escape from the snares and  obstacles you yourself have set up. And that is--to accept death.         The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will  hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak. Is this  the starting point of the road towards the union of your two dreams--to be  allowed in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart to mold it?         Openness to life grants a lightning--swift insight into the life situation  of others. What is necessary?--to wrestle with your problem until its  emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form--and then  act accordingly.         It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon  some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately  obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter  of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound  up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self--delusion is  necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of  the result? That we all--every one of us--take ourselves seriously is not  merely ridiculous.         He tends a garden, the borders of which have, without his knowledge, been  set by his own powers. His pride in tending it well and his blindness to  everything that lies outside its borders make him a little self-opinionated.  But is this any worse than that slightly irritable contempt of the man who  cannot so deceive himself and has therefore chosen to fight extra muros?         \". . . and have not charity.\" Isn't the fulfillment of our duty towards our  neighbor an expression of our deepest desire? It very well may be. In any  case, why torture ourselves in order to hurt others?         Praise nauseates you--but woe betide him who does not recognize your worth.         The Strait Road--to live for others in order to save one's soul. The  Broad--to live for others in order to save one's self--esteem.         So! We are to believe that misfortune is the fault of those it strikes--a  fault which sooner or later will blossom into crime, unless the unfortunate  one keeps silent about his fate.         You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play  with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty  without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden  tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.         If you don't speak ill of others more often that you do, this certainly  isn't from any lack of desire. But you know that malice only gives you  elbowroom when dispensed in carefully measured doses.         You are your own god--and are surprised when you find that the wolf pack is  hunting you across the desolate ice fields of winter.         \"Hallowed be Thy Name.\" When all your strength ought to be focused into one  pencil of light pointing up through the darkness, you allow it to be  dissipated in a moss fire where nothing is consumed, but all life is  suffocated.         When all becomes silent around you, and you recoil in terror--see that your  work has become a flight from suffering and responsibility, your  unselfishness a thinly disguised masochism; hear, throbbing within you, the  spiteful, cruel heart of the steppe wolf--do not then anesthetize yourself  by once again calling up the shouts and horns of the hunt, but gaze  steadfastly at the vision until you have plumbed its depths.         On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand  but seldom consulted. In the white-washed hour of birth, He is a jubilation  and a refreshing wind, too immediate for memory to catch. But when we are  compelled to look ourselves in the face--then He rises above us in  terrifying reality, beyond all argument and \"feeling,\" stronger than all  self--defensive forgetfulness.         The road to self--knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through  the self--knowledge we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of  our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is. How many  have been driven into our darkness by empty talk about faith as something to  be rationally comprehended, something \"true.\"         Our secret creative will divines its counterpart in others, experiencing its  own universality, and this intuition builds a road towards knowledge of the  power which is itself a spark within us.         1945-1949         Towards new shores--?         At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and  soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's.  But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the  elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all  those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which  you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from  casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the  consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.         Soaked, dark, wollen garments. Deprecating glances. Tired mouths. It is  late.    The business proceeds with indifference and dispatch. At the polished black  marble tombstone of the counter, many are still waiting.    A sexless light from white ramps is reflected in glass and enamel. Outside  stands the darkness. The street door bangs and a wave of raw dampness breaks  in upon the dry air, saturated with chemicals.    \"O Life, thou embracing, warm, rich, blessed word!\"    (Verner von Heidenstam)         Then he looks up from behind the scales on one of the high desks--wise,  good-natured, withdrawn in concentration. Deep wrinkles in a gray skin bear  witness to a gentle irony, born of experience and a long life within four  walls.    Here and now--only this is real:    The good face of an old man,    Caught naked in an unguarded moment,    Without past, without future.         She knew that nothing would get better, that it would never be any  different. He had lost interest in his work and no longer did anything.  Because, he said, he was not given a free hand. And now she was sitting  there praying for his freedom, praying because she so wanted to believe that  he was being unfairly treated, that, if only he was given his freedom, he  would become a man again. Wanted to believe it so that she might keep up her  belief in him. She knew what the true answer was, but she had to force  herself to listen to it: he was as free as anybody can be in the economic  mazes of a modern society, and any external change would only bring him  fresh disappointment. The situation would repeat itself, and he would  discover that everything was just as it had been before.    Yes, yes-- And she knew more: knew that there could never be a way out.  Because behind all his talk of freedom lay hidden a child's wish to conquer  death, a lack of interest in any piece of work the result of which would not  be his, even long after he was dead.-- And yet she sat there praying.         Before it became clear to us what had happened, he was already too far out.  We could do nothing. We only saw how the undertow was dragging him faster  and faster away from the shore. Saw his futile and exhausting struggle to  touch the bottom beneath his feet.    It was only blind instinct which drove him to try and save his life: in his  mind he had cut himself off from reality. When, in spite of this, a flash of  knowledge as to his situation forced itself upon him, he told himself that  the rest of us were even worse off. And then we still took the whole matter  so lightly! He would certainly still be clutching this conviction at the  last moment when the gurgling whirlpool sucked him down.    It had always been this way. Dependent like a child upon admiring affection,  he had always taken uncritical friendship for granted, even with those who  were indifferent or actually hostile. He had always acted upon this  assumption--yet, in an unconscious effort to create friendships which  perhaps did not exist, not without a certain compliance towards the  interests of others, and, at the same time, a fear of collision with reality  which might rend asunder his web of illusions. When things he had said were  quoted against him, he denied having ever said them. And when this denial  was called by its right name, he interpreted this as a symptom of his  critic's lack of mental balance: as time went on, psychosis became an ever  commoner word on his lips.    Just what was it we felt when, for the first time, we realized that he had  gone too far out ever to be able to get back?         What is one to do on a bleak day but drift for a while through the  streets--drift with the stream?    Slowly, with the gravity of an inanimate object, now coming to a standstill,  now turning, where currents meet, in listless leisurely gyrations. Slow--and  gray. The November day has reached the hour when the light is dying behind a  low cold bank of cloud, but the twilight brings no promise of mitigation or  peace.    Slow and gray-- He searches every face. But the people aimlessly streaming  along the gray ditches of the streets are all like himself--atoms in whom  the radioactivity is extinct, and force has tied its endless chain around  nothing.         \"That one may be translated into light and song.\" (Erick Bloomberg) To let  go of the image which, in the eyes of this world, bears your name, the image  fashioned in your consciousness by social ambition and sheer force of will.  To let go and fall, fall--in trust and blind devotion. Towards another,  another. . . .         To take the risk--    In the dim light he searches every face, but sees only endless variations on  his own meanness. So might Dante have imagined the punishment of those who  had never taken the risk. --To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by  one, through the death of self-effacement. And, on this side of it, he will  never find the way to anyone who has passed through it.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300903833829,"sku":"NP9780307277428","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277428.jpg?v=1767732277","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/markings-isbn-9780307277428","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}