SUNDAY READING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5597, 26 March 1943, Page 6

SUNDAY READING

LIFE’S. ISOLATIONS “It is not good that the man should be alone.” When this ancient, Edenic pronouncement was made it related to man’s prospective union with woman. But, without abating its truth, it is capable of more wide, more varied, interpretation; it is not straining its meaning to treat it as a generalisation. Save in circumstances and individuals that are abnormal, the principle is applicable. There are, however, broad exceptions whose existence must be recognised. Some isolations are deliberately wilful; some are perfectly natural. Certain people seem essentially solitary; they are deficient in the gregarious instinct. In many vital relationships they are isolated and do not mind it; they appear to prefer it. On the other hand many good intelligent men and women suffer it and are secretly at a loss to understand it. There seems something lacking in their psychological makeup. It is for them to extract whatever solace they can from the fact that some of the greatest figures: in history were solitary. Each “soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”

In normal experience, however, life is largely a series of undesigned but inevitable isolations. Some few of childhood’s contacts may continue, but adolescence usually means that interest in former associates and activities becomes exhausted. Increasing years can be isolating in their influence; if correctives are not cultivated age may become acutly separated from youth. Even in the sacred relationship of mother and children there arrives a time when the former becomes conscious of being just slightly isolated. She never loses the children’s confidence, but when their affections begin to reach out in other directions, to some youth, to some maiden, mother suffers a sense of isolation she would not confess even to herself. It is probably because certain mothers have at this stage shown a lack of wisdom that mothers-in-law have, as a class, acquired an unfortunate reputation. In wider spheres the process operates. The snob is a double-edged isolationist. He is sensitive to exclusion from circles he longs to enter; he isolates himself from those he elects to consider inferior. He is a lineal descendant of the Pharisee who went up into the temple and thanked God he was “not as other men are”; but always with the addendum that he is prepared to conduct himself obsequiously towards the members of any social hierarchy.

The pages of history freely attest the evil that has been wrought, not at all by want of thought but by the spirit of isolation malignantly expressed. Scotland’s Highlanders practised all the manly virtues, but strictly within the clan’s orbit. Beyond it the isolationist spirit led them to regard all other clains with implacable hatred. England can look back upon centuries of acute class cleavage. The privileged held themselves aloof, not so much callously as proudly. Between poverty and wealth was a great gulf fixed. In his now remote* day the patriarch Job exclaimed: “If I have eaten my morsel myself alone and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof, then let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade.” It was a vehement repudiation of individual communal isolation. To partake alone of any kind or social morsel is to identify oneself with the animal. The test and proof of civilisation are to be sought in the wholesomeness of its fellowships and in the discriminating choice of its isolations.

For it may not be ignored that frequently there emerge situations in which isolation is demanded; there are occasions on which it is not merely expedient but imperative. The isolations Nature imposes in the form of race and speech are gradually being bridged. Providence, by means of its hand maid Science, is diminishing the isolations of distance through the media of wireless and aviation. In the realm of the human spirit, however, isolation survives and may be the grossest form of selfishness or the loftiest ideal of self-denial; it may be made the supreme weapon for moral defence or attack. Socially, nationally, internationally, there are still rampant manifestations of injustice and arrogance. When active resistance to them seems reduced to impotence the positive and negative power inherent in isolation may justly be invoked. “Come out from among them and be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing.” The summons demands response, not only from every Christian but from every man or woman who aspires to be a decent citizen. To the extent that life’s isolations are purely racial, geographical and social they are indefensible; to the extent that men everywhere, irrespective of frontiers, band themselves together to overthrow the forces of unrighteousness they are standing in line with the saints and heroes of all the ages. The chief hope for the world’s future therefore would seem to lie in individuals and nations alike having a sound moral, spiritual basis for their associations and isolations.