Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
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how could one bring together a monastic life on the edge of the polis (atopos) and an active life within it?28
During “a year of reflection” at Pendle Hill,29 with weekly breaks to attend a seminar on Arnold Toynbee30 in New York City, Brijen's interest in the relationship of “withdrawal” and “return” was sharpened by Toynbee's ideas, by conversations with Dorothy Day, and by his reading of Thomas Merton's recently published The Sign of Jonas. Later he would fall back on Koestler's contrast between “change from without” and “change from within” and Bernard McGinn's contrast between “flight” and “commitment” to articulate this struggle to be a “hermit in the water of life.”31
This struggle also arose from Brijen's relationship with his homeland.
“After Yale I made a quick trip to India to visit my parents and Radhakrishnan. Radhakrishnan was quite upset at my plans. He called me something of an aimless wanderer, dismissed me uncharacteristically without offering a meal, and I do not think he ever replied to my notes thereafter or agreed to see me again. His son, Sarvepalli Gopal, a distinguished historian, also grew quite hostile to me over the years, and he berated me at two conferences. I have al—ready told you that I had lost Beena's friendship a year earlier, though had gained Bharati's.
“By the summer of 1954 I realized that my ties to India—to family, friends, politics, and philosophy—were both attenuating and changing. Muste and Scott Buchanan32 had replaced Radhakrishnan. The Labor Action crowd of Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Hal Draper, and Michael Harrington had replaced my socialist friends in India. Also the troubled Bayard Rustin. And in a superficial sense, Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker, Muste and Liberal Quakers had taken the place of Mother Anandamayi. Why I hung around Muste and Dorothy Day remains an unexplained mystery to me. Their mysticism was Christ-centered and their faith in Christianity unshakeable. Yet here I was, totally rejecting Christianity and Christ. Though I had utopian ideals, the Kingdom of Heaven was not my goal.
“September found me settled in a cozy little room at Pendle Hill. Henry Cadbury and Howard Brinton were also in residence; Gilbert Kilpack and Peter Docili ran the ‘academic’ curriculum. Every morning there was an hour of silent worship. I found these times greatly strengthening. Peter introduced me to Simone Weil and her pamphlet on the Iliad, published under the Pendle Hill imprint in 1956. My commitment to peace and pacifism grew even stronger. In the spring of 1955 Gwen Catchpool (recently widowed) and Horace Alexander came to Pendle Hill, and the three of us ran a seminar on the Gandhian tradition.
“Thanks to unlimited free postal privileges, I managed a lively correspondence with many people. The year helped me not only extend the frontiers of my knowledge but be at greater peace with myself. I felt that I was destined to establish a new Pendle Hill—not a transient but a permanent intentional community, without the academic rigors of an Institute for Advanced Study and faithful to Martin Buber's vision. In this I found an ally, pioneer, and mentor in Ralph Borsodi, whose romantic agrarianism I found compelling. A friend of Dorothy Day, he was about to close his institute in Suffern, New York, and move to Melbourne, Florida. For the next few years we kept up a lively correspondence.”
I was keen to know more about the impact of Marx on Brijen's thinking, and how he reconciled his pacifism with his views on overcoming the world's social injustices, inequalities, and structural violence.
“During that critical year at Pendle Hill,” Brijen replied, “I came across Marx's Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, commonly known as the Paris Manuscripts—the notebooks of a very young Marx. This volume led me to Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and both these books firmed up my view that industrial societies create an alienated man, and unless human beings returned to what Borsodi called romantic agrarianism, Gandhi called rural socialism, or Buber envisaged in the Israeli kibbutz, humanity was doomed to a culture of internecine violence. This idea I would later refine under the influsence of Christopher Lasch, who taught me that family was a haven in a heartless world.
“Quakerism influenced me but did not fulfill. Even in my encounters with Muste and Day, I remained a liberal agnostic humanist at heart. The Labor Action crowd of Max Schachtman, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Hal Draper firmly instilled in me the idea of social justice: that until utopia was achieved, I had the duty to do whatever I could to further human rights and social justice, but it was incumbent upon me to be a witness for nonviolence, if not pacifism. Milton Mayer's essay on Muste, ‘The Christer,’33 moved me. On several occasions, Milton and I appeared in Quaker-arranged institutes, and his opposition to the Second World War, even though he was a Jew, greatly touched my life.
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