The way that is away is not a way

It took us a whole day driving up there but eventually, after a few stutters and false starts, we got to Kalam, Swat. Three days of quiet: these were the days before Blackberry, online books, wi-fi, facebook and other irritants. Simple living: basic food, a roof over our heads and bare furniture. This was it. The real deal. No relatives, no politics, no thoughts of the state of the world. Via negativa? 

After three days Ubo said: sod this! I don't think I can take any more of this quiet. We've seen nature. All very beautiful and all that but now what?!

There was this line from Glenn Gould's radio programme that I liked a lot: you cannot find holiness in the city.  Was that the line? Or was it: you cannot find holiness apart from the city, in isolation? To talk of 'holiness' already leads in the wrong direction...

there are these nice thoughts by Thomas Merton, someone who Bob on the overgrown path constantly points us to...

'There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.'

Yes.

John Burnside continues, citing Emerson:

'we require such solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the streets and in palaces...it is not the circumstances of seeing more or fewer people but the readiness of sympathy that imports.'

Of course, blogland is a strange place to be writing about solitude, 'aloneness'. 

Is there a point at which you are at the right distance from the world, a place from which you can look at it from the right angle? Not too close to be drowned in it or drawn to it; but not too distant to lose oneself in one own's trivial and petty thoughts or anxieties? If there is a false inwardness then there is also a false worldliness. Degrees of freedom. 

I think, with time...who thinks with time? I think, with time, I am less sure of what I want to say about religion. Very little, actually, except to spite the atheists now and then.