The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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hours. Almost as much as for The World's Religion, Huston is known for being a professionally lovely man. When the TV interviewer Bill Moyers met Huston, Moyers was so charmed that he created a five-part TV series on Huston for PBS. The Wisdom of Huston Smith showed the correlation between the man and the knowledge, between Huston's worldview (he prefers that word over religion) and how he embodied that worldview in day-to-day life. We might thus want to steal a glance through the window, to first gain a personal sense of the living thinker behind his written-down thoughts.
For a full portrait of Huston the place to look is his memoirs, Tales of Wonder. Given the limited space here, I propose doing something far more modest. If I recall my first encounters with Huston, it is because they are of small, manageable size and have the advantage that I know about them. They also have the advantage of being typical. Everyone, I gather, reports something similar when first meeting Huston.
Our first meeting happened almost by chance. My publisher sent Huston a manuscript of mine requesting a blurb, which he with characteristic generosity supplied; Huston also wrote me personally and ended his note with a polite, “If you are ever in the Bay Area, stop by.”
I was going to the Bay Area, for one day before heading to Northern California, so—what the hell—I phoned him. Hardly surprising, he was unavailable that particular day: he was famous and on the go, especially for someone already past his eighty-fifth year. I let the prospect drop, but in his cracking voice he said, “No, wait. If you are going to Northern California, you have to come back. What day back?”
That day he would be there, but the problem was, though Huston began going deaf in his early fifties and can read lips perfectly, he cannot lip-read over the telephone. Unable to hear, he said, “I will now proceed down the hours of the day. Stop me at the right one. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. One. Two. Three—” “That one,” I yelled.
At three P.M. on that day Huston was waiting at the Berkeley BART station. He was charming from the word go. “So you're not just a writer,” he joked. “You're a human being, too.” Huston started the car, saying, “On the drive home, we'll observe the Buddha's Noble Silence. That way, who knows, maybe we'll get there alive.” Someone else might have whined, Too damned old, can't talk and drive at the same time, but Huston, with his allusion to the Buddha, converted it into something of a game. At his house, as he got out of the car osteoporosis had his body hunched over practically in the shape of a question mark. He saw me looking and said, “I know. But it's workable.”
Once inside, conversation ranged. No subject was off-limits. Huston told of the tragedy much on his mind, of his beloved granddaughter's murder (described at length in Tales of Wonder). He described how a reporter had rudely asked him, “Is your faith in God shaken now?” Huston considered it the most foolish question ever put to him: Human tragedies do not invalidate the possibility of hallowed sacredness but, to the contrary, make it more necessary. Switching from his private life to his work, Huston reported just finishing The Soul of Christianity, and he had, he said, two more books in him to write. After that he would break his pencil, or rather turn off his computer, and read everything that he had never had time to. At present he was reading a wonderful book, Don Quixote. Before driving me back to the BART station, he asked, “Would you want the manuscript of The Soul of Christianity? Or too cumbersome for the plane?” It seemed more than mere hospitality to a passing guest. The question appeared quietly addressed as much to himself: What else can I do? How can I enhance this present moment, to nudge it toward indelibility? Every turn of the day presents either an obstacle or an opportunity, and Huston wants to maximize each, including this one, into an opportunity realized.
Obstacles metamorphose into opportunities? I recalled how over the phone Huston had arranged our appointment time: semi-deafness was not to be an obstacle. Nor was his inability to converse on the drive home; nor was his osteoporosis. Huston is a modern religious figure who shows that religion is more than theological truths and greater than moral precepts. Religion, for Huston, seems to be what allows you to take the difficult, the unacceptable, the unthinkable (such as his granddaughter's death), and, denying nothing, allows you to bear it, sorrow as the tragic other side of love. Such was my reflection as I got on the BART train.
Our next visit came about when I was to interview Huston for a magazine article about spirituality and aging. He was by then more housebound, no need to designate an hour, just say that on such-and-such a day I'd be coming. But such-and-such a day followed, as sometimes happens, after such-and-such a night. That morning I awoke too debauched to interview a groundhog. But I roused myself and once at his house talked of this and that, and in a superficial way it could hardly have been more pleasant. At the end Huston exclaimed, “So enjoyable. This wasn't an interview. It was a social occasion. And what a wonderful one!”
How gracious was Huston's remark, especially considering—though it sounded like a compliment—I could detect his disappointment. Although eighty-eight he still wanted the intellectual give-and-take, wanted to be stimulated and challenged: his mind wanted a symposium. The visit (though embarrassing to me) showed the powerlessness of age to diminish the eagerness and engagement of his mind. As for the magazine article, Huston had given me, without my needing to ask a single question, a demonstration of the vigor of spirituality and aging.
The following year his publisher asked me if I would work with Huston on his memoirs. I would have done it for free. I wanted to take down the dictation of ninety years of a better way to live, to learn the secrets of remaking adversity into its opposite. The World's Religions (and the world religions) exist out there: this would like taking a front-row seat—as the reader here has such a seat—and seeing the mind behind them from within.
To return to the beginning. For the life arc Huston was to traverse there was no earlier precedent. From the vantage point of a century ago, his career would have been flatly inconceivable. He grew up a missionary's son in a Chinese village that had no electricity, no running water, no movies, no radio, and no newspaper. Saint Augustine or Plutarch would not have suffered future shock there. As a missionary's son, Huston was a devout Christian with an unshakable faith. Today, some ninety years later, he is a devout Christian with faith unshakable. The beginning and the ending, though they sound similar, are worlds apart. Worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) is a favorite word of Huston's, for good reason. To get from point A to point Z, from there to here, he had to discard one worldview after another, the way a gangly youth sheds clothes he's outgrown. Or to use a different metaphor: A historical building, because of zoning regulations, retains its old facade but is entirely renovated inside. Likewise, his serene childhood Christianity Huston has refurbished from within, with panelings and moldings hardly known to Christianity before.
At age sixteen Huston left China to attend college in America. His ship sailing across the Pacific crossed centuries, from a missionary backwater in Asia to high-tech America, with its wheels turning and churning, all science and rationality and material progress. At age sixteen Huston felt that this-worldly sleek modernity was heaven on earth, salvation in secular terms. He mastered this secularized salvation oddly from a theologian, the renowned Henry Wieman, his professor at the University of Chicago (and subsequently his father-in-law), who had advanced religion to the point where it could dispense with, well, religion. Unitarians—so runs an old joke—believe in one God at most. In Wieman's theology the Creator has been replaced by the creative process, which is extraordinary but not supernatural; Christ the Redeemer, replaced by a Jesus who catalyzes his disciples’ creative ability to transcend societal limitations. In his twenties Huston believed in this heavenly city in the earthly here and now where everyone would be educated, equal, materially satisfied, and emotionally content. This is the modern Enlightenment (and for a while Huston's) vision: remove theological distraction, focus on what we can rationally control, and we may improve this present world until we need no other. All the founding fathers of the modern world, from Lenin and Sun Yat-sen to Atatürk and Nehru, had subscribed to some version of this beautiful secular dream.
Huston watched that semi-utopian dream—so new, so shining, so promising—shatter into pieces. All the world, Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was expected to xerox into secular middle-class replicas of Euro-America. The purveyors of this visionary