(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
There are words we think we know and therefore do not make a bigger number out of. gentleness, in Danish 'tenderness' or 'gentleness', is one of them. The gentleness must find its voice. We cannot take it for granted, either as something we understand or as something we go through. Dufourmantelle's book therefore consists of a series of tableaux which, in small linguistic thoughtful scenes, paint themselves into what is not possible to think in one concept, but which gradually becomes possible to think. In itself pretty amazing. A painting script. Children who play with a naivety statue, the twisted wings of a butterfly in protective cocoon, the flat stone pillars arranged as sacred stones in a garden. Everyone demands that they be gentle. And little by little, the tenderness takes shape.
A secret virtue
A sleeping child has always been a universal image of tenderness. However, tenderness is not pure nature. It has to be learned. Maybe just a virtue. It is always a crime to attack the gentleness and tenderness. It is the power of secret life. And yes, it is the secret name of childhood. The name of discovery and exploration, a reservoir for a secret bond with the world. Without it, there would be no life: the first movements of the newborn fetus and later childhood. No child gets through this one without care.
Healing power
"The gentleness is," Dufourmantelle writes, "the life that sleeps in each of our cells, hoping to return, impossible as it is, to the lost world that rocked us long before the motherly arms." the word proates with 'humble' and 'meek'. Of this, the biblical: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Navah in Hebrew refers to the humble. Kindness, she continues, is an attribute of God before it becomes human! But we need to go back to Sanskrit to find the connection between spiritual charity and gentleness in the heart. It is the element of water. In the songs of the Vedas, the grace of receptivity is heard. A sense of imperceptibility that life is like a flowing river. A sense of "the quiet transformation". That things change every moment (Chinese philosophy). What we in the West have so hard to understand. "We have much to learn from the East's sense of tenderness without sentimentality." Here is a caring healing power og a resistance.
Resistance
In the Vedas and Gandhi, tenderness is associated with nonviolent resistance. For Gandhi, affection has a symbolic power. In three places he drew inspiration for his political opposition: Tolstoy's idea of non-violence, Ruskin's idea of the dignity of the craft, and Thoreau's idea of always pursuing the truth and not obeying bad governance.
Awareness is the power of the secret life and the secret name of childhood.
Behind the tenderness, a common light, a sacred light, does not burn a religion, a high holy God, but a listening generosity. The strength of the healing power is precisely that it does not come from knowledge and power, but from an embrace of the other's fragility. This acceptance is its strength. A care for the soul that spurs responsibility for the world around us. And if we ask what are the contradictions of tenderness, we have no doubt: violence, aggressiveness.
Its own worst enemy
But here comes the book's surprise: The adversary of loneliness is ... the loneliness. Simulated sugary kindness, nauseating sentimentality, the passivity sold to us through new age techniques, the stress industry and 'zen'. A kindness that you don't really feel, but which seems like another name for a careless authentic kindness. We see it in many forms. «Loneliness lives under two different forms of social control. One, the sensual, is degraded to silence, the other, the spiritual in new age packages and competitive methods is satisfied that we have to believe in them so that everything works. Theories of self-realization and the pursuit of happiness contribute to their will in a marketplace for 'well-being' which refuses to include negativity, confusion and fear, as essential human elements, thereby paralyzing both the future and the present. ”
The dialectic of humility
The gentleness is a tension that plays out the nuances of reality and fades out in even the darkest colors. Lethargy belongs to both thought and touch. A "primary intelligence" that carries with it life and reinforces a relationship with the world carried by amazement, not possession. Both tenderness, erotic play as well as the abandonment of the dying man is letting go.
By focusing on happiness, truth and security, we shield ourselves from what hurts, what requires effort.
There is tenderness in our goodbyes to life, in our interruption, abandonment, loss of loss and sorrow. But there is also tenderness in the sweetness of life, a sense of being alive personified in Anita Ekberg's dance in La Dolce Vitathat invites both madness and sensuality. The sweetness of tenderness requires a temperate atmosphere that left its mark on the Renaissance, which was later expressed through the art of conversation, the exchange of ideas, new ways of thinking, speaking and exploring the desire. A life of ease often associated with new breaks in art and culture that break with norms and create a different way of life. But is this setting achievable today? Can we rise above the daily rage, envy and mischief? Can we acclimate to the power of tenderness?
The power of gentleness
But what is so tenderness? Not quite the same as kindness, gentleness, generosity, as goodness, as sweet, as soft, as the quality of velvet, as subtle secret. But all these things at the same time without being one more than the other. It is a paradox that tenderness is the power of gentleness, a noble humility, an intelligent sweetness, a discreet yet striking thought, a fragility with the potential to rock the status quo. By focusing on happiness, truth, and security, we shield ourselves from what hurts, what requires effort. In this way, we are kept trapped in constantly affirming and living through the three deities of time: efficiency, speed and profit. But in doing so, we are depriving ourselves of the life-affirming ability and approach offered by true tenderness and generous gentleness.
The book can be read as a very important alternative in my view to the robustness industry, as a corrective to the critically smiling, yes-hat culture that permeates working life today and the imperative of constantly having to produce. A feel-good attitude that has become like a thick web over many things and created a smiling culture of kindness that is more thoughtless and insensitive than good.
