DAG

"It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self--delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all--every one of us--take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous."

"He tends a garden, the borders of which have, without his knowledge, been set by his own powers. His pride in tending it well and his blindness to everything that lies outside its borders make him a little self-opinionated. But is this any worse than that slightly irritable contempt of the man who cannot so deceive himself and has therefore chosen to fight extra muros?"

". . . and have not charity." Isn't the fulfillment of our duty towards our neighbor an expression of our deepest desire? It very well may be. In any case, why torture ourselves in order to hurt others?"

"So! We are to believe that misfortune is the fault of those it strikes--a fault which sooner or later will blossom into crime, unless the unfortunate one keeps silent about his fate."


"You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds".





The alluring smell of honeysuckle wafts a heavenly, sweet jasmine-like fragrance. Ambient light, without a visible source, the blue gray of dawn gives way to the pale gold of a new day. Low bushes, their soft silk-gray leaves silvered with dew. All over the hills, the cool red of the cat's-foot in flower. An iridescent blue horizon. Emerging from the ravine where a brook runs under a canopy of leaves, I walk out onto a wide open slope. Drops, sprinkled by swaying branches, glitter on my hands, cool my forehead, and evaporate in the gentle morning breeze."

The above paragraph really is a bastardized "quote". But now that I've added a little of my own life's experience to it. My innermost thoughts have merged with his. Now it has become a part of me, and how can I give it back? Yet it is only a human observation that belongs to the common mind, and is in part, kindred to us all.
Color me crazy, but this gave me a kind of strange mystical feeling; as if we were all standing there together, at that very same moment in time.

"Take a moment to pause and allow life to meet you where you are; where it is. The moment is your best and constant teacher."

Forgive me Dag Hammarskjold, wherever you are.


Before the Kennedy assassination, the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was the headline of the day. Like the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories surrounded the suspicious plane crash that took Hammarksjold's life.

The CIA and allied intelligence agencies were involved in countless political events around the globe. I knew one of the men who was with Howard Hunt in the rail yard west of the grassy knoll! As an field grade officer in the U.S. Army's Special Forces Group (SOG) he went on to help orchestrate under William Colby, the notorious Phoenix program in South Vietnam. (however, one cannot be too careful in examining claims like that.


Dag Hammarskjold was born in Jonkoping, Sweden, in 1905, and died near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, on September 18, 1961, in an air crash while flying there to negotiate a cease-fire between United Nations and Katanga forces.

The son of the Swedish prime minister during World War I, Hammarskjold studied law and economics at the universities of Uppsala and Stockholm. He quickly gained prominence in his own country as secretary and then chairman of the board of governors of the Bank of Sweden; he was undersecretary of the Swedish department of finance from 1936 to 1945. In 1946 he entered the foreign ministry as financial adviser and became chief Swedish delegate to the OEEC in 1948. In 1951 he was the vice chairman of the Swedish delegation to the United Nations, in 1952 he was chairman, and in 1953 he was elected Secretary-General and re-elected in 1957.

Widely read in literature and philosophy, Dag Hammarskjold translated the poetry of St.-John Perse into Swedish. He was made a member of the Swedish Academy in 1954.


From "MARKINGS" the Hardcover edition.



"On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted. In the white-washed hour of birth, He is a jubilation and a refreshing wind, too immediate for memory to catch. But when we are compelled to look ourselves in the face--then He rises above us in terrifying reality, beyond all argument and "feeling," stronger than all self--defensive forgetfulness."