When I was 17, working part-time in the Edmonton public library, I was allowed to take home any books slated for discard. One, which I still have on my shelves, was Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. It is the story of Larry through the eyes of a narrator, ostensibly the author himself, who catches glimpses of Larry’s quest over a number of years. Larry came back from the war with an altered sense of values. The norms and goals that had been self-evident before, and still were to his contemporaries, did not any longer make any sense for him. He leaves, to loaf (as he says) and study. Eventually we see that he has found answers in the mystics, and through a stay with a saint in an Indian ashram. What is most surprising in this story, in retrospect, is that Larry was presented from the beginning, of all the characters, the most at ease in the world, the most well-adjusted and at peace. From when we first meet him his demeanor is entirely natural, in contrast to the artifice of those who fit compliantly into their station and its duties.
The book’s title page has a quote from the Upanishads, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; … the path to Salvation is hard”. Underneath I wrote a quote from Herodotus, “Our fortunes lie on a razor’s edge …; for freedom or for bondage ….”. But Larry did not pass through sloughs of despond, his life was blessed, the razor’s edge was passed not in an upheaval but as growth.
Today I would be quite critical, the book has much that does not ring true. It raised a question for me, however, that I still have, and that has had only unsatisfactory answers.
The public library was located close to the Hotel Macdonald, at the time the only high-rise, overlooking the Saskatchewan River ravine. One evening, going home late, I took the path on the hillside below the hotel. There was an older man drinking from a bottle half-hidden in a paper bag. I sat down near him. He did not offer me a drink, but after a while he began to talk. He was, I guess you would say, a semi-vagrant, finding seasonal work. “There isn’t a place for me here”, he said, “me, French Canadian”. I wondered, was he like Larry? Was he changed from when he was young, if not by a war then by a world where he did not fit? A moment later he turned to me, as if he had heard me asking, and said “I’m fine”.
The dividing line between freedom and bondage, though, is not a razor’s edge; for every step into freedom there is a tether unbroken. Once I was invited to lecture in Puerto Rico, and I added a week or so to my stay to see the island. As I was driving on my way to a high point in El Yunque rain forest I saw a young woman by the road, thumb out for a lift. As she got in I had the impression that she was distinctly grimy. Perhaps she had been working in a field or garden, or perhaps hygiene just wasn’t her thing. Where was she going, was there another village still up ahead? No, she told me, there is a commune, you can’t see it from the road.
Though this was some time after the sixties, it was still not so unusual for people to drop out, as they would say. She asked to be let out quite high up, at a track with not much to mark it. Before she stepped out, she asked when I thought I would be returning. About four hours later she was in fact waiting there in the same place to catch a ride back. I was rather intrigued, asked how she normally got about. “We live without money” she said, “we’re done with all that”. Very reluctantly she gave some vague answers. They had vegetables, they worked for food and other things, yes, she had been there for a few years now. For all she told me, she was a person with no past. I asked what the food might be like there out in the country. I’d be happy to treat her, if she wanted to stop for a meal. When we were in the cafe she told me to have a dish, which turned out to be very plain, just plantains, rice, and beans. “I don’t want anything to eat”, she said, “but if it is ok I would like a glass of wine”. It sounded like a concession, something that would be obtained with money. With her reluctance to talk so obvious, I found myself tongue-tied. Having dropped out, was she free, free from a bondage that characterized my own life? A freedom that was in any way like what Larry had sought? I could not find a good way to ask it.
In the years around 1980 I went three times to Mexico City: for a lecture, for a four-week seminar, and for a conference up in the mountains to honor Hilary Putnam. It was on the first occasion that I took an extra week to explore the city. On the first day I went out to the Teotihuacan Pyramids north of the city. After a while, rather tired, I sat down on the steps of one of the smaller pyramids near the Pyramid of the Moon, close to a couple that I had seen sitting there for a while. The man, distinctive because he was wearing two hats one on top of the other, had been sketching. He called over, sounding American, and asked if I’d like half a sandwich? I said I had brought some snacks, but could I look at what he had been drawing?
We ended up spending the week together. I had a car, so we went to the see Our Lady of Guadaloupe, in Tepeyac on the outskirts of the city. And I trouped around with them, in the marrkets, where he would trade his drawings for food and sometimes money. He sketched quickly, easily catching a likeness to someone at a stall — people were friendly, and liked to have the sketches. There we would eat hot boiled corn on the cob with crumbly white cheese, or tamales wrapped in corn husk leaves. The girl, about fifteen, spoke no English and I no Spanish, but the artist, Jack, was happy to tell his story.
Jack had been a mortuary supplies salesman, with a wife and children, till at the age of thirty he decided to quit and go on a vast bicycling tour of the Western states. He did not return home, he took a bus to Mexico, where he had an uncle — he dropped out. Although he thought he might stay to live with his uncle, he made sure not to spend the money for a bus trip back to the states. But two guys he was talking with in a bar, very friendly, came out with him and pulled a gun. We’re really sorry, they said, but we need it more than you do. After a while the uncle told him he would not put up with him any more. Since then he had lived on more or less a dollar a day, he told me.
In the morning I would go to where they lived, a garage with a single light bulb and a water tap outside, part of a row of garages. We went to see a family in a make-shift hut with a large couch and a television set. Their five year old girl, Jack told me proudly, was a good student already. She would go and get the milk for her family and some neighbors at dawn, before going to school.
Later I sent him art supplies, and he sent me some drawings. But how can I see him? Did that conscious decision to drop out, to leave the familiar world behind, lead him to freedom? It certainly did not lead him to saintliness. The girl he was with then (and according to one letter, later replaced by another) had been in a school for advanced students, and left it to travel with him; not something that raised any question of conscience. As we can surely understand, his days were preoccupied with the question of money. Unlike the young woman in Puerto Rico he did not belong to a commune that had learned how to live without money. Although he was friendly enough with me, I could also see that he was on the whole rather surly, inclined to sound nasty. We talked about Our Lady of Guadaloupe, but he saw her only as a tourist would. I asked him in various ways how the change in his life had changed his life. At one point he would exclaim that he would never go back, that his salesman’s life had been a living death. At another he would be talking vividly about going back to America, getting casual labor, have a car again.
So, my real encounters with people whose story might have been like Larry’s, brought no inkling at all of what Larry’s way might have been. Each of the three were poor, in the sense of money-less, nevertheless content in their way, but not projecting any sense of peace. Should I be cynical, and conclude that the salient difference was Larry’s “three thousand a year”, which allowed him to live without working? With such a resource it may still be as hard to find inner peace or enlightenment as it is to pass over the edge of a razor. But without it, is there any way at all to arrive there?
I remember a story “Learning to Fall”. It ends with “Aim for grace”.
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 