It is not easy being a lazy person in today’s world. Mind you, this is in fact true of almost every age. The bustling mob has no appreciation of the effort it takes to be idle. It demands patience and application and a stubborn refusal to listen to reason. Only we will ever know what discipline and dedication is required to further our art. It is our burden to bear alone, alas, alas.
Still, today we are assailed ever more ruthlessly with the injunction to make ourselves better – to look better, to tell the truth more often, to drink less, to be one with the angels.
Once when I was younger and more active, I too turned to the world to seek the secret of a more perfect life. I travelled to South America, to Chile and the hot wastes of the Atacama desert, where I heard tell of a wise man who lived in the mountains. I couldn’t miss him, the locals said, pointing to a narrow footpath that led up between the bleached-white rocks into the o’er-looming crags. He was old and bearded and would probably appear on top of a rock and pelt me with mangoes when I got to the really steep part.
“Where does he find mangoes in the middle of the desert?” I asked. The locals lowered their gaze and drew patterns in the sand with their toes.
“The old man of the mountains works in mysterious ways,” they said.
So I packed a knapsack and a waterproof jacket and headed for the hills. It was hot and dry, but that is what you expect of a desert. When I reached the really steep part, I pulled the waterproof jacket over my head. No one likes to be pelted with mangoes. But as I climbed higher and higher up the really steep part, I couldn’t help noticing that the old man of the mountains had not appeared. How was I to find the old man of the mountains, if he wasn’t going to attack me with sun-ripened tropical fruit? And this was the first piece of wisdom the old man of the mountains taught me:
I was expecting the worst, but now that the worst has not arrived, I am disappointed. I am the architect of my own dismay.
Actually, that was the second piece of wisdom. The first was:
If you are climbing the really steep part of a mountain with a waterproof jacket over your head, you cannot see where you are going and consequently it should come as no surprise if you bark your shin on a rock.
So I removed my waterproof jacket from my head, and as I stood rubbing my shin I saw that before me was a rocky ledge, and sitting there, legs crossed and eyes closed, was a ragged old man with a long ragged beard. I gasped and dropped to his feet, partly from reverence, partly because it had been a long climb in the thin air and none of the locals had wanted to sell me any coca leaves. When the dry heaves stopped, I thought of this important life lesson:
If we are not afraid of tropical fruits falling on our heads, we will be better able to see the riches in front of us.
I wrote it in the sand with my finger, in case I forgot it later.
I wasn’t sure how to approach the old man of the mountains. His eyes were still closed and his breathing was deep and regular, as is common with mountain sages and also didgeridoo players. I reached out a trembling hand and tugged at the hem of his loincloth.
The old man of the mountains gave a little start and a snuffle and opened his eyes. They were molten and golden, like brimming cups of bourbon. He raised his eyes unto the sky and uttered these words: “What the hell?”
“I am your humble pilgrim,” I said, rubbing my hair against his feet.
“How did you get up the really steep part without me hearing you?” demanded the old man of the mountains, kicking me in the head.
I was startled, but not shocked. Ragged old sages can be notoriously prickly. My good friend Chunko once visited a sage in the steaming jungles of Laos who lost his temper after a game of backgammon and beat Chunko about the head and shoulders with a length of bamboo, and also with a brick. “Sometimes,” says Chunko sadly, “sages have to teach you the hard way.”
Meanwhile, I was scrawling another life lesson in the dust with my forefinger:
Do not be afraid of discovering that your idols have feet of clay. If they have clay feet, it won’t hurt so much when they kick you in the head.
Happily, the old man of the mountains soon stopped kicking me in the head. He settled back to catch some more shut-eye. “Master,” I implored, “I am your servant.”
“If you’re my servant,” he said, adjusting his loincloth, “go keep an eye open for any more pilgrims coming up the path. I have a week’s supply of mangoes, and I don’t want them to spoil.”
“But Master,” I said, “I am here to learn from you.” He tried to kick me in the head again, but I seized his leg and twisted it and wrestled him to the ground. It was an awkward situation, of course, but there was nothing for it but to keep going, pausing only to write this life lesson in the sand:
Wisdom does not drop from the sky like mangoes. Sometimes you need to wrestle with wisdom and put it in a half-nelson. Do not be afraid of wrestling with wisdom: if it has been sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop for any considerable length of time, it will probably be slightly malnourished and easily manhandled.
“Okay, okay,” said the old man of the mountains in a muffled voice, “if you let me up I’ll answer your questions.”
So we sat facing each other, and an air of great calm settled between us.
“How,” I asked, “does one become a wise old man of the mountains?”
He shrugged and sniffed and swished his beard in the air. “Not much to it,” he said, and told this story:
“I was a young man, much like yourself, seeking enlightenment. I met a man who claimed to be Carlos Castaneda, although looking back, I realise it might have been Carlos Santana. Everybody said he was a very wise man and played a nifty guitar, and he gave me a piece of cactus to chew on. At the time I thought: ‘If this man is so wise, why doesn’t he remove the thorns from the cactus before chewing it?’, but I was young then, and easily swayed by the offer of hallucinogenic drugs.
“So I ate the cactus and a number of extraordinary things happened. I was vouchsafed a vision of the inner workings of life and eternity. I scribbled it down in the sand with my forefinger, because I knew I would forget later, but you know how it goes with scribbling things in the sand. It’s all very well, but you can’t take it with you.
“And then, once the vision of the inner workings of life and eternity had passed, it was replaced by a sharp-toothed demon visiting me in the guise of Snoopy.”
I had to interrupt. “Snoopy?” I said.
“Yes, Snoopy. He’s not as innocent as he looks, that dog. Snoopy chased me, and I fled. I fled from Central America. I fled with that hound of hell at my heels, until finally I fetched up here. By that time, I don’t know, I guess the cactus had worn off. Snoopy had vanished. But I was pretty tired, as you can imagine, so I decided to rest up a spell. Rental is not as cheap as you would imagine in Chile, so I found this rocky ledge and here I am. It’s comfortable enough, except when it rains and when rattlesnakes come looking for warmth and try to curl up in my armpits on chilly nights.”
“Does it rain much?” I asked.
“Not for the last twenty years,” he said, with the smug look of a man who has invested wisely in real estate.
“But what about being a sage?” I persisted.
“Oh, that,” he shrugged. “I had been up here a while, eating the eggs from a condor nest and wondering what I should do next. I was thinking of going down to Patagonia to write a travel book, or maybe New York to try my hand at musical comedy, when I heard a commotion from below. Three locals came clambering up carrying a basket of foodstuffs, including a big wheel of llama cheese. I do love llama cheese.”
“Really?” I said. “I find it too tangy.”
“Not at all, kid. You need to learn to appreciate cheese. Anyway, they gave me that food in return for any words of wisdom I might have. I told them I didn’t really have any, and offered to recite the first two verses of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ instead. They nodded and bowed, so I did. Then they went away, nudging each other with their elbows. And then I realised they didn’t speak English. But it didn’t seem to matter. Each day different villagers came to visit, carrying a basket of foodstuffs, and they would sit and listen to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, or sometimes, if I was in the mood, the Beatles’ ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’.”
I nodded at his tale, and as I nodded I wrote this life lesson in the sand:
Sometimes it is not necessary to learn wisdom by being taught wisdom. Sometimes it is enough merely to be in the proximity of wisdom. Sometimes wisdom doesn’t even have to make sense.
But to tell you the truth, I was getting a little tired of writing down these life lessons. And I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of listening much longer to the wise old man of the mountains. I was ready to go. “One last thing,” I said. “Why the mangoes?”
The old man of the mountains tapped his nose and winked. “Everybody has to have a gimmick,” he said. “There’s a travelling salesman who makes deliveries once a week. He comes up the back way, so the locals can’t see him. There’s actually a road back there – he just drives on up in his Peugeot. He’s trying to persuade me to switch to papaya. They are more expensive, but they are squishier; plus he can supply me with canned papaya, which keeps for longer.”
I nodded and slowly set off down the long path to the world below. I had a bad feeling that I knew what was going to happen next. I was right. He had a good arm for a raggedy old man – he had beaned me with four papayas and what felt like a yam before I was even halfway down the really steep part. I couldn’t really blame him, I suppose – no one likes being put in a half-nelson – but I do wish he had taken the papayas out of their cans first.
How I wish that were the end of the story. Sadly it is not. I roamed the world for some years, seeking wisdom in a more and more desultory fashion, until one day, swaying in a hammock on a squid fishing boat being lashed by a monsoon in the South China Sea, I thought to myself: “Sod it. I’m going home. It’s warm there, and I can watch television.”
So I bought my ticket. But as I stood in the airport book-shop, waiting for my flight to be called, my eye happened to alight on the best-seller rack. And on the rack was a book, and on the cover of the book was the photograph of a man’s face. Hang about! I thought. I know that face!
And I did know that face, although the last time I had seen it, it had been rather more grimy and streaked with dirt from being on the wrong end of a half-nelson. The book was titled Go Tell It on the Mountain, and on the cover it had a little red sticker in the shape of a star, with the words “Over one million copies sold” written in white letters.
The book was subtitled: Ten lessons learnt from a life more perfect. I could scarcely bring myself to open it, but I did. The first chapter began with these words:
“If we are not afraid of tropical fruits falling on our heads, we will be better able to see the riches in front of us.”
I closed the book and caught my flight, and I memorised this final life lesson, which I shall never write in the sand, and which I shall never forget:
If you have no wisdom of your own, reading self-help books will not help you. You will have to write them instead.