Building an Interior World
At 68 years of age, Dr. Edith Bone emerged from her Budapest prison near the end of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, her spirit intact. Walking through the prison gates following her seven-year sentence, Bone was encircled by photographers and journalists, at the ready to describe and capture and image of an aging woman left desolate and downcast, just like others before her.
It wasn’t to be. As she moved through them and onto the bus that would take her to the British Embassy, she smiled. They walked away disappointed but impressed.
Dr. Bone had been a medical doctor, prioritizing her life around care for the poor and distressed. Eventually she journeyed to England for 16 years, but returned to Budapest in 1949, the Second World War now over. But the government suspected, after her time in England, the she was a spy, bringing her in for an interview. Despite her denials, they threw her into a tiny cell in the basement and became immediately annoyed when she laid down and fell quickly to sleep.
The next seven years were times of starvation and sickness. She spent one six-month period in a cell in total darkness for the entire time. But she had made a firm decision that she wouldn’t fall into insanity or despair, as others around her were doing. She did so by building what she later termed her “interior world” – far different from what was going on outside of her cell. Bone began recounting pieces of poetry and prose she knew by memory and even began concocting her own made up verses in her mind. She imagined walking through certain cities and reflected on her younger years.
Essentially, she began constructing a world within herself that reflected the values she knew and cherished. She thought of good and noble things and treated her captors with a kindness totally unusual. The more they cut her off from the world, the more she built her own and grew comfortable in her own decaying skin. While others went mad, the doctor became more peaceful and peaceable.
When I came upon her story recently, I felt a compelling desire to do what she did – build a noble, compassionate and rational place in my own being that could better withstand the immediacy and materialistic compulsion of our modern world. There was the desire to think more – not by listening to my audiobooks or reading as I always do, but to do a better job at creating my own world – not the one I always pick up from other information sources. What do I believe? What is my creed for how I treat others? Can I acknowledge my weaknesses and personally work on them instead of avoiding them and hoping others don’t notice? Why is religious faith important to me and do I honestly give it enough time in my own life? And why this penchant to serve others, that so often drives my decisions but which I clearly could do better?
We each have our own such questions, but prefer to look outward for answers or inward in a self-centered and narcissistic manner that places us at the core of the world and frustrated that it doesn’t correspond to our wants and needs.
The reality is that we need to transcend our everyday world – not always, but enough to build the world inside of us that we sincerely desire to build in our surroundings. Is the “us” we see in the mirror each day really us, or the one we wish people to see?
The great interior writings of history remind us that those who increasingly construct a strong inner world become far better at judging things with a spirit of understanding, generosity of spirit and truth. But those same writings remind us that if we spend our lives attempting to carve out a place for ourselves in the world without taking the time to do so in our minds and spirits, then the world will always encroach in on us and we spend our days adapting instead of building.
Our pasts can’t be changed, but they can, through clearer insight, be seen in a new way. Our present can be refined, but only through the tools of reflection and inner exploration. And the future? Well, it will be what it will be, but it will be better managed because of what we have learned of ourselves along the way. If we can learn to build lives that transcend our modern pressures, then we discover that we have been released even before the cell door is finally opened. Just as Dr. Edith Bone discovered during a revolution.