Gilles tells Gamache of a day a number of years ago when he walked with his tree-cutting colleagues into the woods for a day of work and heard a whimpering that sounded like a baby animal. As the whimpering became louder and turned into a cry, then a scream, Gilles realized that this wasn\u2019t an animal sound at all. Furthermore, none of his companions could hear it.<\/p>\n
Something had changed overnight. I\u2019d changed. I could hear the trees. I think I could always hear their happiness. I think that\u2019s why I felt so happy myself in the forest. But now I could hear their terror too . . . Mostly trees are quiet. Just want to be left alone. Funny how I learned about freedom from creatures that are rooted in place.<\/strong><\/p>\n Gilles\u2019 life was changed, beginning with his understandably being fired from his lumberjacking job (if a lumberjack won\u2019t cut trees, what\u2019s the point?). Over time he became a woodworking artist, specializing in making chairs out of dead trees that he carefully selects after they have fallen; as Gamache says, Gilles makes his living giving dead trees new life. \u201cFunny how I learned about freedom from creatures that are rooted in place.\u201d In Tolkien\u2019s The Two Towers<\/b><\/em>, the middle book in his classic trilogy The Lord of the Rings<\/b><\/em>, the hobbits Merry and Pippin learn a similar lesson from Treebeard and the Ents, the oldest creatures in Middle Earth who are, for all intents and purposes, talking trees who have the ability to walk, think, and talk\u2014very, VERY slowly and deliberately. Merry and Pippin, running for their lives from a band of murderous orcs from whom they have just escaped, find themselves in middle of Fangorn Forest where the Ents live.<\/p>\n After hearing about the forces gathering for a classic battle between good and evil on the borders of their forest, Treebeard calls for an \u201cEntmoot,\u201d a council of Ents to decide what, if anything, they should do about these disturbing events. It takes days for the Ents to gather, and many more days for the debate to take place at a one-sentence-per-hour pace. Merry and Pippin are driven close to madness with impatience over the snail-like deliberateness of the Ents\u2014but when they finally choose to take a side in the battle, their participation sways the conflict, at least for a while, in the direction of the good guys.<\/p>\n In our American culture, freedom is often thought of as the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it, free from the interference of anyone other than me. Any perceived limitation on what I want to do, even if clearly in my own interest and that of others, is a violation of my \u201cfreedom.\u201d But philosophers have argued for centuries that this uninhibited throwing around of my deliberative weight is anything but true freedom.<\/p>\n Aristotle conceived of the life of freedom and moral excellence as a life constructed out of the virtues, good habits that, when cultivated, incline a person to do the right thing as a matter of developed character rather than conscious choice. More than two millennia later, Iris Murdoch provides a contemporary spin on Aristotle\u2019s insight in The Sovereignty of Good<\/b><\/em> by suggesting that it is in the small choices concerning what we pay attention to and adopt as centrally important that true freedom is to be found.<\/p>\n But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.<\/strong><\/p>\n True freedom, under this description, is acting in attunement with one\u2019s character and conscience\u2014items that are constructed slowly, deliberately, and in accord with one\u2019s best nature. A lot like a tree, in other words.<\/p>\n A human being can never entirely trade its animal survival strategy for the rootedness of a plant. But we can, as Gilles, Merry, and Pippin did, learn a lot about freedom and how to be in the world from a tree. But Luther\u2019s point was that at this moment\u00a0in his life, recanting his writings would be the same as ceasing to be Martin Luther. He can do no other because his character has rooted him in place. As Murdoch suggests, if one has paid attention to the incremental tiny choices that shape one\u2019s character and life over time, what to do at \u201ccrucial moments of choice\u201d will not only be clear\u2014it will be unavoidable. Be like a tree.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are two kinds of living things. They are distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing strategies and evolving tools to sidestep threats in more and more complex and sophisticated ways. We call this kind of living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":28770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14,20,42,48,61,68,73,76,86],"tags":[129,153,244,275,437],"class_list":["post-28758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-attention","category-books","category-change","category-happiness","category-human-nature","category-literature","category-mystery","category-philosophy","category-power","category-silence","tag-aristotle","tag-books","tag-goodness","tag-iris-murdoch","tag-silence"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2023\/01\/treebeard-300x225.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2023\/01\/here-i-stand-300x156.jpg\")
I used to wonder what Martin Luther meant when, at the Diet of Worms, he concluded his refusal to recant his heretical writings by saying \u201cHere I stand. I can do no other.\u201d Of course he could have done otherwise! I would complain. No one is forcing him not to recant.<\/p>\n