The adults among whom I grew up were somewhat mysterious to me. They weren’t like other kids’ parents. But they were hyper-intelligent, at home in a world of emigrés – including the women who served as my European role models – as well as people you might call “Americans in high degree.” (Not necessarily a matter of social class.)

That said, I early formed an intuitive resolve not to live on my inheritance. Not to be what the French call a rentier – who lives off the rents paid by inherited tenants. Though I loved my parents and adored – thrived in – their world, I needed to find something like bedrock to stand on independently.

I found at least two ideal exemplars of what I had in mind: the Thoreau of Walden Pond and M. K. Gandhi with his satyagraha (truth-force). Okay okay, I know. The apostle of self-sufficiency depended on Mrs. (Ralph Waldo) Emerson to pick up and take care of his laundry. And, of the great Indian leader, it was said that, “It takes an awful lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty.”

So I was aware, even then, that the role models of my first youth bore traces of ordinary humanity. They were not cartoon cutouts but mixed characters like ourselves.

What was ideal about them, to my mind, was that they tried actually to be what they said they were. Their relative simplicity was fascinating to me. I didn’t want to be deeply shadowed by torment and “interesting” – like, for example, the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Like Gandhi and Thoreau, I too wanted to be … just who I said I was! Or, where there was a discrepancy – a gap between word and deed – to know the reasons why. Or like the characters implicitly aimed at in Socratic dialogues, where again the point is to be who you say you are! If that were easy, there would’ve been no need for a Socrates.

Question: Is there anything off kilter in my illustrative cases?

Anything that rings wrong?

Well yes, three things: 

1. Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson did Henry David Thoreau’s personal laundry once a week, although we never see her tiptoe discretely across the ground that lies back of Walden Pond.
2. Pre-adolescent girls, children of the grownups in the ashram, were placed naked alongside Gandhi in the bed where he slept each night. The Mahatma claimed that this was a fail-safe way for him to test his commitment to celibacy. So far as I know, the mature women, who in childhood had furnished this test, continued to maintain a loyal (though possibly embarrassed) silence.
3. Socrates sent away the mourning women (including his soon-to-be widowed wife Xantippe) before conducting the final dialogue with his disciples that’s recorded in The Phaedo. At the conclusion of that conversation, he drank the lethal hemlock to which the Athenian jury had condemned him.

In the first case, the erasure simplifies the real story somewhat. In the second case, one wonders if the erasure conceals personal ambivalence or at least psychological unfairness. In the third case, the erasure of the women (though culturally-sanctioned in that place and time), deletes one human facet of the suffering brought about by the court-ordered execution of Socrates.

These three men – Thoreau, Gandhi and Socrates – were players in some of the best-known Adventures of Humanity with Highest Things. It takes nothing from their contributions to remark that the record has yet to show

how in future 

women could appear

in all their own imperfect reality

inside equivalent adventures.

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