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Foreword
- University of Michigan Press
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Foreword Asked by a friend why and when I became interested in Dag Hammarskj öld, I could find no beginning. There must have been one; I’ve walked with him for decades now, though I don’t imagine he’s noticed. He is long since gone. He was the second secretary-general of the United Nations , serving in the years 1953–61, formidable in his time, somewhat forgotten now. The publication of this book falls soon after the fiftieth anniversary of his death in an air crash while on duty in central Africa. It was September 18th, 1961, in the dark of night, for reasons once explained as pilot error, now an open question. I must have read of his death in the newspaper. I could not have missed the wave of sadness that passed over much of the world. The sound of public life in early days after the fatal crash was stunned eulogy; many stepped forward to say what they felt, what they knew of the lost world leader. Even that left no trace on me. Hammarskjöld was not yet close. Then Markings was published, first in Swedish in 1963, the following year in English translation. You may recall that this is Hammarskjöld’s private journal, found on a bedside table in his New York apartment with a note leaving the decision to publish or not to a friend. It revealed a person whom scarcely anyone had known: a religious seeker taking his lead from Albert Schweitzer for ethics and from medieval Christian mystics for the conduct and direction of inner life. He proved to be Pascal-like in his critique of self and society, Montaigne-like in his questioning, Augustine-like in his need and willingness to chronicle his hard journey. He was a sufferer, a doubter, a discoverer; a man who had encountered transcendent warmth and solace at the edge of experience; an incisive, troubled, prayerful mind and heart at work on the deepest issues facing human beings. With the publication of Markings, the portrait of Dag Hammarskj öld abruptly doubled in size and scope: there was the great statesman and peacemaker, the man of unshakeable integrity who had dueled with Khrushchev, negotiated with Ben-Gurion and Nasser, faced the wrath of de Gaulle, rebuked great nations, nurtured small nations, and kept something resembling order in what he called “this house,” the United Nations. And there was another: a vulnerable, questing man of spirit, among his generational peers more like the martyred pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer or the monk and author Thomas Merton than like his politi- xii Hammarskjöld | A Life cal peers. What they explored in seclusion, in prison and monastery, he explored in glare at the highest level of public life. I read Markings soon after publication, and it went at once to the shelves of “real books” in my library—a select company to which I return, confident that they record fundamental truths and experiences with unrestrained eloquence, fearlessly. Occupying fewer shelves than you might think, they form neighborhoods. For example, there is a neighborhood for ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and another for translations of the Bible, plus the Greek New Testament and a general concordance. That neighborhood extends as far as Meister Eckhart, a key source for Hammarskjöld, and to a treasure of English medieval spirituality, The Cloud of Unknowing (again well known to Hammarskjöld—he cared enough for it to send a copy to David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel, who was both a stubborn negotiating partner and a kindred spirit). Nearby are Pascal’s Pensées, the Mathnawi of Rumi, the Gita and Upanishads, the Tibetan Life of Milarepa, early Chinese classics, Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, and much else. What a feast of knowledge, of attention to reality, all familiar to Hammarskjöld. His book fit right in. It was the personal record of a mind both ferocious and sensitive. Its “world” encompassed many worlds, from cool clouds of unknowing to hot zones of war. In 1954, after serving as United Nations secretary-general for a year or so, he described his world in much this way in the privacy of his journal. “Blood, grime, sweat, earth—where are these in your world of will?” And he continued: “Everywhere —the ground from which the flame ascends straight upward.” The mutual dependence of inner and outer, lower and higher, ground and flame, is evident in these few poetic words echoing both Winston...