‘Markings’: The Musings of a Beautiful Mind
A review of ‘Markings’, by Dag Hammarskjöld; Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
Where even to begin with Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings? However you think about it, it is an odd little book. Which is not to say it is a bad book, not at all. It isn’t. The opposite, in fact. This part-diary, part spiritual reflection; this porridge of poetry and prayer and (à la Pascal) pensées — is a window, if you like, into the soul of the author. And its author was the Secretary-General of the United Nations: a man with a rich inner life and an outer life marked by the stresses and strains of global leadership. His jottings-down add up to his attempts to find some peace. It is not, to put things more simply, your ordinary memoir.
As you may have gathered, Markings has no real structure. There is no plot, no arc, no narrative thread to follow. It is a collection of thoughts, jotted down over many years, stretching across Hammarskjöld’s entire working life and more than a little of the one that came before. No one — not even the editor who published the book after Hammarskjöld’s death — has tried to pull them together. So if you arrived hoping for his take on, say, Cold War brinkmanship or some knotty UN resolution, prepare to be let down. His reflections are decidedly unworldly, and they come together to form a rich tapestry that represents his inner life. The first part of his book covers roughly the years up to his election in 1953 as UN Secretary-General; the second, from the point of his election till his death in 61. His entries are deeply personal, and deal chiefly with his struggle to bring his public duties and private quest for spiritual peace into harmony.
His reflections are decidedly unworldly, and they come together to form a rich tapestry that represents his inner life.
And this — the search for a sense of internal order in a world of chaos — is, I suppose, his ruling theme. Dag was known for his stoic calm in the face of sundry international crises — at Suez, in the Congo, in Lebanon, in Hungary … His writings mention and cite liberally from the great Christian mystics: St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart. And what is really quite striking is that at no point did Hammarskjöld consider stepping down from his role. You do not find him ‘stepping way for a time to focus on his mental health’, as we are now used to hearing. His sense of duty was vast and unyielding. He sees his role as an honour, a calling, as a means of serving humanity.
Loneliness crops up quite a bit; but it is not the kind that comes from solitude. Hammarskjöld was rarely alone in any literal sense. The loneliness here is sharper, more structural. It is the distance of a man who is out of step with the rest of the world. His entries paint a picture of a man who is profoundly cut off, and one who seems to retreat into a sort of private mysticism. We could call it the loneliness of power — that careful distance leaders keep, lest they slip. Or, if we were feeling less delicate, the loneliness of the closeted man, that tired old theory. Possibly both. Possibly neither. But the gap remains.
Your mileage for aphorisms, diary entries, notes-to-self, and what Nicolas López-Dávila called scolia might differ from mine, reader, but I like them. They have a way of getting to the heart of what and how someone thinks and who he is, even when they are not simple self-disclosures. Oakeshott’s Notebooks, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Taleb’s Bed of Procrustes and López-Dávila’s The Authentic Reactionary — books like these are charged with meaning. But I suppose the lack of a clear connecting thread that runs through works like these, and runs through Markings, will irritate some.
They have a way of capturing the essence of what and how someone thinks.
The translator’s name escapes me, but he ought to be congratulated for rendering something written in Swedish in such a way that it still comes across as poetic in English. Dag’s style is sparing, even sparse; profound, melancholy, meditative, disciplined. Perhaps that style reflects the chaos of his working life, or a search for order. His entries range from brief aphorisms to longer reflections, and all are infused with this sense of searching — for order, yes; but also for meaning and for the meaning of the wider world. It of course goes without saying that the book comes across as absolutely honest, if cryptic: Dag was, after all, writing only for himself.
Markings, as mentioned, is an odd little book — odd, but deep, and oddly compelling. It reads like a spiritual memoir, though not one written for your benefit. It is personal, but never confessional. We see his life as through a veil rather than in the spotlight. By the end, we feel we know Hammarskjöld better than if he had sat down and told us his life story. He circles, reflects, broods. He picks apart duty, solitude, faith, and that ever-tricky fault line between who we are and the roles we play. It is the work of a man with great responsibility and great interiority. If we were feeling generous (or perhaps just dramatic) we might say it is the product of a beautiful mind.
