Learning by Heart by Tony Wagner

Author:Tony Wagner [Wagner, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

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CONNEMARA’S THESIS WAS ACCEPTED in the spring of 1969, and she received her Friends World diploma in the mail. In June we were married at the San Francisco Quaker Meeting, where we had been attending services throughout the year. Immediately after the wedding, we packed up my Volvo and headed back east. We wanted to live in the country, and my faculty adviser had encouraged me to pursue my newfound interest in ecology through an internship at a demonstration woodlot in East Barnard, Vermont, called Hawk’s Hill.

On the way, Connemara and I made a detour to attend the War Resisters’ International tricentennial conference at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. It was the centennial year of the birth of Gandhi, and the theme of the meeting was “Gandhi’s Heritage: Liberation and Revolution.” Having felt alienated from the hippies, yippies, and other assorted political types in the Bay Area, I hoped to find a community among this group of people who opposed war in any and all forms. I was also curious to see to what extent the organization’s members were thinking about the ecology crisis. But the keynotes and small group discussions mostly focused on the need to resist the Vietnam War. There was nothing on the agenda about the environment.

I saw an opportunity to change this at the closing plenary session. I raised my hand to speak, and the moderator actually called on me. My knees like jelly, I got up in front of the hundreds of people who had gathered for the conference and briefly explained the connection I saw between the war machine and the plundering of the planet, and I proposed that the WRI form an ecology commission. Much to my surprise, my motion was immediately passed, and I was asked to chair the new body.

The most important moment of the conference for me, though, was a chance to talk with Narayan Desai, the son of Gandhi’s personal secretary. Desai had grown up in Gandhi’s ashram, and had become one of the young leaders of the Indian Peace Brigade. He agreed to meet with three of us in his room late one afternoon, near the end of the conference.

Sunlight poured through the open window of the cramped dorm room where Desai sat on the bare wood floor hunched over a small portable spinning wheel. In his midforties, he was dressed in a plain, white, loose-fitting jacket and pants that looked like pajamas. We were invited to sit on the floor beside him. For the entire conversation, his eyes stayed focused on the thin, uneven thread in front of him, which emerged, almost by magic, from a lump of coarse cotton he held in one hand while he turned the crank of the spinning wheel with the other.

He explained that he was spinning a type of cotton, called khadi, a practice Gandhi had urged the Indian people to take up as an act of resistance against the British colonial government. If the people had native-made

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