Normally I love crowds. I crave for crowds. But one day I thought that an hour's sojourn in quietness might amuse me, and leaving the busy city behind I climbed the mountain. On the way up I saw a man who had been on his way down and who now was washing his feet in a stream. The path was narrow and crossed the stream where the man was washing. There was no other path I assure you.
I called out a greeting quite boldly. He replied in equal voice. It turned out he was an intelligent man, articulate, even a family man. He may have been a lawyer, a business-owner, I liked him straight away.
As he jovially sat and waved his feet about in the air to dry them, I felt a need to address him thus: "I greeted you just now; and you being the gentleman that I see you are, of course greeted me in return. I am sure we have never met before' - he looked at me and smiled gently - 'and of course as you must surely know, I would not have addressed you had we met in a quiet street down there in the city, no matter how pleasant I found you to be. And yet on this landscape of ours I force a rude greeting on you. Why do we people do this?
''Now; all of us are aware of the trite wisdom that we think we have - on a lonely road we do what we do from a barely-aware impulse to reassure. You address me in passing in order to reassure me that you will not attack."
The pleasing man smiled more broadly and said : "Good Lord man; you have no reason to fear me. I have beaten nobody."
I offered him a smile in return, "And yet" I continued "I'm here to impress 'complication' upon you. For trite 'understanding' is just that. One of us may greet another on quiet paths, up quiet mountains, for one reason; and another of us utter the same greeting for a completely different reason. This whole 'assurance' business is not part of what I'm doing today at all; I do not seek to give you an assurance that I mean no harm, and I seek no such assurance from you. No, quite differently I greet you for, quite selfishly, I wish to express to another man my enjoyment at being up here; my climb; my happiness, and I wish you who are also happy on the mountain, to see my enjoyment and place it, so to speak, carefully on the table next to your own."
The man's wife who was a slower walker than he and had been taking her time to descend, came up to us and I was introduced. All three of us found the others agreeable, but soon we needed to continue our walks. We uttered our goodbyes and parted. The woman let me shake her by the hand.
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