Book Review
From Place To Place. By Hannah Tillich. Stein and
Day Publishers, 1976. 223 pages.
Reviews by JH,
AT.
Hannah Tillich’s second autobiographical work,
From Place to Place, published in 1976, is a
whimsical compilation of vignettes and diary entries by
both Hannah and Paul Tillich. This work, at times non
sequitur in nature, gives us beautiful glimpses into
the lives of two very complicated people. The subtitle
to the book, “Travels with Paul Tillich/Travels without
Paul Tillich,” hints at the complicated nature of Hannah
and Paul’s marriage. After Paul’s death in 1965, Hannah
found a freedom to express such feelings, a freedom she
was not granted as the wife of a scholar in the middle
of the 20th century. In the beginning of the book, she
writes a short poem about the paradox of traveling with
and without Paul. She finishes the poem with a positive
affirmation of her new freedom. She writes, “But now I
shed my skin / after eight years without / I am alone
and my Self / without question” (18). But, like her life
with Paul, this freedom was also complex.
For Paul, traveling was an educational,
philosophical, and religious journey. He almost always
had tour guides, art historians, translators, and a slew
of other experts to increase his educational gain during
his travels. Hannah, on the other hand, did not travel
with this goal in mind. She traveled “…not so much
because [she] was seeking faith but a way out of any
faith and into what [she] call[s] freedom.” (19) This is
not to say Hannah was not educated or interested in
philosophy or spirituality. On the contrary, her diary
writings are steeped in philosophical and even mystical
language. Hannah seemed to find the mystical in more
embodied experiences; experiences such as dancing,
eating, sickness, interactions with people on the
street, or even a protests at Columbia University.
The book begins with poetry and then moves into a
vignette, in third person, titled “The Cathedral.” This
is a telling of her trip to Europe after Paul’s death, a
trip she took with her daughter and grandson, after some
coaxing. This trip was shadowed by the reception of
Hannah’s first book, From Time to Time, which her
family and friends strongly encouraged her not to
publish. While Hannah did not regret the book, because
she believed it was a representation of the truth about
her and Paul’s life together, she did not want it to
come between herself and her family.
Paul’s first diary entry in the book concerns their
trip to Egypt in 1963. At this point, Paul is
seventy-six, but still fascinated by the world around
him, receiving it with child-like wonder. From Egypt,
Paul and Hannah traveled to Israel. In Israel, Paul
writes that he is theologically unchanged as a result of
his trip but is strengthened in his belief of a
nonliteral understanding of the Bible. Paul writes,
“From now on, when I speak of ‘Jesus walking with his
disciples on the dusty road of Israel,’ I shall know
with visual intensity what that means. But the question
of what to think about him has not been brought nearer
to an answer by this knowledge” (59). Israel brought no
significant change in Paul’s theology but their trip to
Japan, discussed later, influenced him greatly.
There is a brief interlude of a Greek play by Hannah,
titled “The Misfit,” about the child, Ledinah, of Leda
and Zeus (75-84). Hannah explores the themes of
belonging and abandonment throughout this short play.
This is juxtaposed with a speech delivered by Paul on
Socrates. In this speech Paul discusses Socrates’
“ethical action.” Having these two pieces side by side
is an ingenious decision on Hannah’s part. It paints the
perfect picture of these two as a couple. Both use Greek
philosophy and myth to discuss their opinions, but they
are completely different in their approaches. Hannah
wants to mingle in the mess of metaphor and mysticism,
while Paul tries to keep everything in a system. This is
not the last time we get to see this dichotomy.
The next section covers Paul and Hannah’s trip to
Japan in 1960 and highlights the dichotomy mentioned
earlier. Paul had a rigorous schedule involving lectures
and numerous visits to temples and with spiritual
leaders (99). The difference between Paul and Hannah is
perhaps most poignant in their trip to the seven-hundred
year old Zen rock garden of Zen Master Hismatsu, who
Paul knew from Harvard (99). At the rock garden,
Hismatsu argued that the garden and the universe were
identical and Paul argued with him that they were not
identical but united by participation (99). Hannah, on
the other hand, not prone to philosophical arguments,
adopted a more poetic and contemplative approach and
“dream[ed] along with them and apart from them,
visualizing an old wall with little green moss pillows
between its cracks, where I played as a child” (118).
Perhaps there is a deeply personal wisdom in Hannah’s
likening the rock garden to her own experiences. For
Paul, however, Japan was an eye-opening experience that
brought inter-religious dialogue fully into his
theology. Paul writes in his journal, almost hesitantly,
“It seems to me that, although the principles are
mutually exclusive, the actual life of both
Christianity, especially in its Protestant form, and
Buddhism, especially in its monastic form, could receive
elements from each other without losing their basic
character” (105). Unfortunately, this breakthrough came
almost too late for Paul to act on these instincts
within his own systematic theology. Only in his final
volume, published three years after this trip, was he
able to include some of these ideas.
This section of Hannah’s diary also offers some
insight into the caring side of her relationship with
Paul. For example, in her Japanese diary, Hannah
recounts a story of Paul that is quite loving, recalling
a moment when Professor Mishitani and Paul were having a
discussion around the act of prayer. Paul argued that,
when we pray, God prays within us. Professor Mishitani
poses the question, “Who is praying, then?” Hannah notes
this was put forward as a Koan (119). She then recounts
that he went silent and physically bowed his head. She
writes, “Paul Tillich could not have answered the
question in a more genuine way then by this silent, true
testimony” (120). In the tender way Hannah recounts this
moment, we can see her love and admiration for Paul
despite their deep differences.
We see more of this compassion and forgiveness for
Paul in the next section, which are the diaries of
Hannah alone in India and Southeast Asia, a year after
Paul’s death. She meets with the Dalai Lama, to whom she
gives a small piece of bone from Paul’s ashes (132). She
writes, “The Dalai Lama took the burden of my husband’s
ashes from me, the burden of those aspects of his life
in our life that I had not been able to take into the
silence of my heart and dissolve by love” (132). Hannah
realized that Paul and she were never able to overcome
certain aspects of their relationship but, because of
her love for him, Hannah no longer wanted to hold onto
those things.
The next several passages deal with Hannah’s travels
alone in the Caribbean Islands in 1967 and in Mexico in
1968. During both of these trips, Hannah encountered
more of the real world outside of her bourgeois
lifestyle. Incidents include witnessing racial tensions
(154), police oppression, dumpster digging (158), and
beggars (162).
These passages are followed directly by Paul’s
diaries from 1936, the year the Axis Alliance was
formed, when he traveled back to Europe. Paul visited
friends and family in Holland, Paris, Switzerland, and
London (167-177). The passages are filled with the dark
reality of Nazism. The people he spoke with all suffered
in some way because of the changes in Germany, and
Hannah’s choice to put her own travels in a hostile and
depressed Central America alongside Paul’s visit to a
Europe on the brink of war is striking.
From this place of suffering, Hannah moves through
several more diary entries focused on suffering and
healing, ending with her diary entry from New Harmony,
the Indiana park dedicated to Paul. In 1975, 10 years
after Paul’s death, Hannah visits New Harmony, where his
ashes are buried (216). She finishes her visit by
walking a labyrinth and commenting on the landscape,
again being whisked back to her childhood, similar to
her dream in the rock garden in Japan.
Hannah Tillich’s book, From Place to Place, is
a charming amalgamation of stories that pertain to her
relationship and travels with Paul Tillich. Unlike Paul,
Hannah does not expound on her musings or insights. She
gives them to you as messy and human as they came to
her. This book gives us a perspective on Paul Tillich we
could get from no one else. A perspective that is raw
and complicated, just like their marriage. It is clear
that these are two very different people; Paul’s
perspectives are analytical, heady, and philosophical
attempts to develop his own thoughts, while Hannah’s
thoughts focus on embodiment, memories, dreams, and
glimpses, and she leaves them all in a pile for the
reader to sift.
Shortly after her 80th birthday, Hannah
Tillich’s second book found its way to bookstore shelves. She described the
volume as an attempt toward “reconciliation” with those who had been hurt or
offended by her first autobiography, From Time to Time, released
three years prior and which detailed Hannah’s life and turbulent marriage to
theologian Paul Tillich. Around that time The New York Times
published an interview about Tillich’s “olive branch,” and in which she
described her second biographical piece From Place to Place as a
collection of saved travelogues, unpublished essays, a play, poems, and
fragments from the family’s individual travel diaries. This was an effort to
clarify, not mitigate, the previous work that was received by some as
vengeful and even pornographic—the Tillichs’ daughter among those deeply
offended.
It is difficult to be sure how literally to take Mrs.
Tillich’s story. Everything signifies, but whether by interpretation of
facts, metaphor, or through creative fabrication, remains unclear. In fact,
there is very little clarity in this patchwork of travel reports and notes
prepared by this skillful poet and deft playwright. However, these fragments
lifted from the sedimental layers of Tillichian life found in these pages
should either be carefully interpreted as intentionally arranged or placed
back on the shelf amongst other, dustier esoterica. Happily, the dull
prospect of leafing through an apparently simple but fragmented memoir need
not be feared, and Tillich immediately prompts her readers to interpretation
and participation with a few early signals. Why, for instance, does Tillich
speak for nearly fifty of the opening pages in a (somewhat unsettling) third
person voice? The awkward and artificial effect is spectral. Tillich’s
stressed and frustrated attempt to repair relations with her daughter in
this chapter is haunted by the voyeur readers as much as by Paulus’ ghost
and her painful memories in From Time to Time. Here, she calls Paulus
a cathedral, a gothic tomb in which no one could really live, fit only for
ghosts. The reader is given secrets—not juicy gossip—the hard and painful
realities of love. Hannah’s idiosyncratic opening reads with a cool
detachment, as if the narrator exerted little or no influence at all on her
story, a sensation which may have been channeled through the daughter who
“felt she had taken no part in her life; it had simply occurred” (37). One
wonders again if Hannah felt similarly when she writes, “she [Hannah] had
somehow always just managed to come into her own, landing, after the fall,
on her feet like a cat, bruised but surviving” (45).
One need only read her first book to know Tillich is
partial to the concept of time. Here, though, she writes on space and place
with styles suddenly passionate or detached. Without reading too much of
Paulus into Hannah’s text, place has an estranged quality to it. Travels in
Egypt, Israel, Mexico, India, and Japan among others mark very little time
besides a few broad dates or the sometimes vague presence or absence of
Paulus. In fragments by Paulus Hannah is sometimes missing from the story
altogether. Even while in Egypt, Israel, and Japan, where the couple is most
obviously present in the same place, they are mostly estranged from each
other. In Israel, on Rosh Hashanah, the Tillichs visited a Caesarea kibbutz
and its synagogue. There Hannah recalls Paulus’ dancing with the Chasidic
Jews while she watched from behind the women’s cordon, clapping. In one
moment, both are enraptured by the Jewish tradition and its passionate
exercise. Later she would describe the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, “only
[as] weird relics from a dead past” (72).
In Japan Paulus gave several lectures. During their
travels the couple discussed with their hosts topics ranging from post-war
politics to Zen Buddhism and its relationship with Christianity. They made
time for good, traditional meals (Paulus was lousy with chopsticks) and for
clubbing (Paulus was better with strippers than with chopsticks). In Egypt
Hannah records she and Paulus attempted to keep cool while visiting the
tombs of ancient kings, both of them entranced by the corpses as much as the
Egyptian treasures. She writes of her travels, “it had all been in being
there, standing and looking, following the prearranged path,” she says,
a little cryptically. They were travels, especially the final trip with her
daughter, “of not remembering and not forgetting; the short pause between
inhaling and exhaling when all motion is suspended” (44). Indeed, travels
and memories were time framed and punctuated by space and vise versa. This
feeling reached an apogee following Paulus’ death and her encounters with
Indira Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, “I experienced a great shock” she writes,
“I was all in one piece and aware of it. My own being—my bones and flesh,
eyes ears, mouth, and digestive system. It was all there and it was mine. My
physical reactions had been haphazardly piecemeal, never as a unity. Now I
was, all by myself, all in one piece and knowing it. I was scared” (132).
Again, Tillich floods the text with seemingly irrelevant facts and items
each, when taken as specifically chosen, becomes saturate with meaning. It
is not for nothing, then, that following this experience she includes in her
notes on the Indian temple sculptures that “I had no film left for the king
putting his hand nonchalantly on the shoulder of his elected, while she
looked up to him inflamed” (133).
Among the memories, journal entries, and lists of
souvenirs chosen by the author is a peculiar play. Presumably penned by
Hannah, she gives us a particularly terse and poignant rendering of the
transition from paganism to Christianity with a cast of the Greek gods,
their mortal lovers, and the metamorphoses of thanatos, eros, and
philosophy under the new religion. The bizarre drama seems ambivalent
about both the old and the new, pitting merciless Greek deities against a
compassionate Christ who then seems to give false hope to the weak and
broken. The play is worth reading on its own terms. Its placement, however,
seems to prove the frustrating fact that although her buoyancy as an artist
is strong, ballasted or not by her husband’s fame, neither Hannah nor we can
say what her independence from Paulus would have yielded. The couple was a
complex and dramatic tangle of strong identities.
When read alone From Place to Place is what it
promises to be: travels with and without Paul Tillich, plain and simple,
with poems and drama for flavor. When read with the depth and rage of
From Time to Time in mind, one sees that even the most ecstatic of
passions plateau after a few years. This is no secret to those who, driven
by mad obsession, read, write and love with their chosen emotional poison
tucked closely by the book the, pen, or the bed. Only on the best days can
the passions be dealt with in due order. Thus, whereas the slow attrition of
the marriage built by the Tillichs was tragic, Hannah’s mild ambivalence and
resignation following his death seems even more troubling. It is as if a
gradual transfusion after years of passion finally sapped the last of it and
replaced some wild, bohemian blood type with the clear substance and
temperature of tap water. Like the gray mummies that fascinated the couple
on their Egyptian journey only a year before Paulus’ death— the glory fades,
preserved, leaving only ruins. As Hannah said in India when offered massage
to make her breasts more youthful, “I do not want to be loved any more, I am
glad I am no longer young” (127).
In the end, this fragmented text leaves me asking what
can generate a love so fierce with the feelings of time and space and death
but not, I wonder, stronger than them? Hardly appropriate speculation I
admit, but one called forth nonetheless by a narrative voice at times so
acerbic that one detects a recent note of bile on its breath, while at other
points, it is as kindly as one might imagine a devoted grandmother. The
effect this textual ambiguity delivers transfers a sense of sorrow that
would be incommunicable in direct, self-critical prose. This is especially
true as she closes the book with a walk through Paul Tillich Park writing,
“the Spirit would find new words to express the needs of the day; new words
to guide us through the mazes everywhere” (223). Exiting with Hannah this
labyrinth of travels, the reader, at least this young reader, couldn’t feel
more in step with the narrator as she articulates both freedom and
weariness, the wisdom of age and subtle forgiveness. Even so, although she
chronicles journeys both with and without Paulus, I get the feeling that at
least along the main roads of her life, this Tillich went mostly alone.
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