I wrote this piece two years ago on another one of my blogs, I think it’s appropriate to share it again, on this blog.

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I love Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I recently read it and discussed it with a dear friend of mine. Brilliant piece of work. It was controversial in its day, and I like that.

According to the Wikipedia entry,

“The late-1960s counterculture, popularized by the hippie movement, was influenced by its themes of individual liberty, self-responsibility, sexual freedom, and the influence of organized religion on human culture and government, and adopted the book as something of a manifesto.”

I hadn’t realized that beneath my highly professional veneer is a hippie just dying to come out….

But more than that, this book also brought some healing to my soul. While I was reading Stranger in a Strange Land, I was also reading the Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, and some deeply suppressed emotions were being brought forth as a result – some things I was unable to cope with by myself. I commented to my friend how sometimes I felt as if I had a great weight upon my shoulders that I wished I could cast off. My friend B from Tennessee was a little ahead of me in reading the book and when I told him, he immediately urged me to find the parts on the fallen caryatid. And I did, after I looked up what a caryatid was in the first place.

A caryatid is a Greek architectural column or pillar in the form of a sculpted female figure. Here’s what a caryatid is supposed to look like:

(image from The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Legacy of Greece)

The French sculptor, Auguste Rodin (you probably know his most famous sculpture of The Thinker), however, had sculpted his version of a caryatid.

(image from The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Legacy of Greece)

Heinlein beautifully deciphers the meaning of Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid through the eyes of Jubal Harshaw, the wise-but-cynical, “father-figure” character of the book:

This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl—look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods…and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it. But she’s more than just good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women—this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage…and victory. Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn’t give up…she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her…she’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.

~ Robert A. Heinlein,

Stranger in a Strange Land

I don’t know if my friend knew how much that passage meant to me. I am not sure if he truly knew how much pain I was in at the time, but what struck me was that he gave me something my heart and soul always longed for – the recognition and appreciation that I was carrying a load far too great for my shoulders. When I read the passage, tears poured out of me…and I felt so much relief, that finally, it was recognized that I had been carrying so much that grieved me and continued to affect me, even though I thought I left most of the bad stuff behind in the past.

That was a turning point for me…I no longer felt alone in my struggles to deal with the ghosts of the past, of the abuse and soul-crushing and dream-killing oppression I thought I left behind but that didn’t leave me. It was also the beginning of the illumination of the inner recesses of my Self, and who I am.