Rain and the Rhinoceros

Nature as the language of life, and social conformity as death.

This year’s Realisation Festival went well again, but I’m not sure how to write about it without a nauseating sense of self-congratulation. I’ve written a post-event commentary for the last five years, so this year I’m processing the experience differently, sublimating it through a text that I re-read yesterday after more than twenty years, which came back into my life like a long-lost friend in the middle of a heatwave. It’s an essay called *Rain and the Rhinoceros* by Thomas Merton, a celebrated American monk, and it’s about nature, time, consumerism, conformity, God, Fascism and everything in between. The rain is the pulse of unmediated nature, while the rhinoceros refers to the famous play by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco in 1959 about gaslighting in the face of fascism, which feels more relevant than ever. Although Merton’s essay was first published in 1965, it feels alive in 2025, and directly relevant to the conundrums I am living with and working on. In its own way, it deals with the prospect of ecological collapse in the context of fascism. What Merton fears is that in the absence of the provision and celebration, and discipline of solitude, people will stop thinking because social conventions will overpower us. I also appreciate Merton’s non-dual perspective, which chimes with Cynthia Bourgeault’s writing and practices about “putting the mind in the heart”. Merton is also a fierce social critic, and he speaks of the challenge of being trapped in our “collective myth” and the need to be born from our “social womb”. I read the essay aloud below, but I would encourage everyone to read the original text, which is widely available online. Some of the lines are exquisite.

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Yesterday was sweaty and ominous, the culmination of a heatwave in London, with temperatures just shy of 35 degrees Celsius. That is hotter than we are used to. The family coped by making electric fans our new whispering house guests, we carried water bottles as if they were gas masks, and we stayed inside behind curtains as if respecting the sun’s privacy. I am aware that many places have it much worse, including sibling cities like Paris, Berlin, and others on the east coast of the USA. In the Middle East and the southern hemisphere, temperatures are, of course, even hotter. Sometimes it looks like billions of people are destined to be broiled. Today’s rain felt like a relief, and I wish that same relief for everyone who needs it.

The increasingly deadly heat around the world is still reported as an anomaly, but it is already baked in as pattern, prognosis, and prophecy. In fiction, the harrowing opening chapter of The Ministry for the Future features a massive loss of life in Northern India through a phenomenon we will sadly be hearing more about in real life: Wet Bulb Temperatures. A wet bulb temperature refers to the combined impact of temperature and humidity that makes it impossible to cool the body down by sweating. And when you can’t sweat, sooner or later, you’ll struggle to breathe. Kim Stanley Robinson depicts it like this:

Ordinary town in Uttar Pradesh, 6 AM. He looked at his phone: 38 degrees. In Fahrenheit that was - he tapped - 103 degrees. Humidity about 35 percent. The combination was the thing. A few years ago it would have been among the hottest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded. Now just a Wednesday morning. Wails of dismay cut the air, coming from the rooftop across the street. Cries of distress, a pair of young women leaning over the wall calling down to the street. Someone on the roof was not waking up…With the dawn, people were discovering sleepers in distress, finding those who would never wake up from the long hot night.

So when the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, describes the shift from global warming to global boiling he is not guilty of gratuitous rhetoric or doomerism. No, sadly, he is being descriptive. There have already been wet bulb temperatures in remote areas, but they will soon be experienced in populated areas, with major geopolitical effects. After all, when it happens somewhere like Delhi, with a population of around 35 million people, will it not be experienced as an act of slow-burning war, or mass murder by perpetual negligence? Did we, the Imperial North, not inflict this avoidable heat death on the Colonised South, also known as the global majority?

It’s not that simple, I know. We cannot ascribe agency and causation so easily, and certainly not in law. Nor does it help to think of vengeance. But would our taste for complexity be quite so keen if a newborn baby were to bless our family, only to suffocate a few days later from unreasonable heat? What if we had good reason to believe that heat was obliquely, yes, but undeniably, knowingly, perhaps even wilfully, caused by the actions of people thousands of miles away? Those people and their governments who could be charged with systemic murder typically disavow their responsibility. And they remain relatively free from the consequences of their action, or more precisely, their inaction. But as wet bulb anguish becomes a new normal, I wonder how long our norms around collective guilt and innocence will hold.

So let it rain. Let it rain again, far and wide. Let not the drought hasten the flood, but let there be enough water to keep us cool. And when it rains, let it be magical again, let it fall like universal memory and unbidden gifts.

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As it rained today, I remembered something unexpected, rarely associated with rain: the rhinoceros. More precisely, I remembered the title of Thomas Merton’s celebrated essay, The Rain and the Rhinoceros, first published in The Holiday magazine in 1965. I first read this celebrated case for solitude, ecological sensibility and the resistance to conformity in a creative non-fiction writing class when I was a master’s student at Harvard in 2003.

Thomas Merton

I enjoyed reconnecting with the text, and I read it out loud in a series of one-take sections below. I think this practice of allowing a piece of writing to find you, and then thanking it by reading it aloud, helps to keep us moored as we struggle with fissiparous information. We can and should do the same with poetry and our favourite sections from books. There is something about the soul-to-soul transmission through voice and ears that looks like it’s ready for a comeback. I don’t expect you all to listen to the full 20+ minutes, but I hope you’ll at least take a dip:

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Rain and the Rhinoceros by Thomas Merton:

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Merton’s essay mentions ‘festival’ a few times, but with a different sense of the term, as if it were an activity of nature. His essay also alludes to the difference between city and country life, which is part of the charm of the realisation festival, in both senses. And he relates to rain as a kind of language, which I am told was spoken on the first night of the festival, though mostly it was dry and hot.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

Technology is also a shared theme. Merton could hardly have imagined the advent of the internet-enabled smartphone, AI and the algorithmic society, but his awareness of the strength of that coming storm is palpable. On the Saturday morning at the festival, sixty years later, we explored with Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein whether we might forge a new relationship with emergent intelligences, based on a new metaphysics and a subject-to-subject relationship to reanimate the world by recasting large language models that are otherwise seen and used as mere tools for extractive purposes. I am not sure what Merton would have made of all that, but I think he would be sceptical, to put it mildly.

Thoreau sat in HIS cabin and criticized the railways. I sit in mine and wonder about a world that has, well, progressed. I must read Walden again, and see if Thoreau already guessed that he was part of what he thought he could escape. But it is not a matter of “escaping.” It is not even a matter of protesting very audibly. Technology is here, even in the cabin. True, the utility line is not here yet, and so G.E. is not here yet either. When the utilities and G.E. enter my cabin arm-in-arm it will be nobody’s fault but my own. I admit it. I am not kidding anybody, even myself. I will suffer their bluff and patronizing complacencies in silence. I will let them think they know what I am doing here.

Sixty years later, the “meta-relational” inquiry into AI is tough for the uninitiated, but those who are already familiar with the challenges of providing character education and epistemic training for large language models might enjoy the following conversation that took place before the festival in preparation for the Saturday session. (If you are confused after the first twenty minutes or so, I’d encourage you to stay with it - it begins to make more sense towards the end. I share more context about this video here.)

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Rain and the Rhinoceros is most fundamentally about the discipline of solitude as a method for resisting conformity.

One who is not “alone” says Philoxenos, has not discovered his identity. He seems to be alone, perhaps, for he experiences himself as “individual.” But because he is willingly enclosed and limited by the laws and illusions of collective existence, he has no more identity than an unborn child in the womb. He is not yet conscious. He is alien to his own truth. He has senses, but he cannot use them. He has life, but no identity. To have an identity, he has to be awake, and aware. But to be awake, he has to accept vulnerability and death. Not for their own sake: not out of stoicism or despair – only for the sake of the invulnerable inner reality which we cannot recognize (which we can only be) but to which we awaken only when we see the unreality of our vulnerable shell. The discovery of this inner self is an act and affirmation of solitude.

Merton has alluded to this “invulnerable inner reality” elsewhere, for instance, in his classic account of religious experience on The Corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

That paragraph follows a description of a religious experience, which I prefer to read in full:

But Merton is also a fierce social critic, highlighting how one illusion builds on another until we become collectively deluded. I have to be selective in the quoting, but here are some of the key lines that serve as a critique of the psychological foundations of consumer capitalism.

Now if we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves,” that is to say, regarded as objects…

Such is the ignorance which is taken to be the axiomatic foundation of all knowledge in the human collectivity: in order to experience yourself as real, you have to suppress the awareness of your contingency, your unreality, your state of radical need…

You have needs; but if you behave and conform you can participate in the collective power. You can then satisfy all your needs. Meanwhile, in order to increase its power over you, the collectivity increases your needs. It also tightens its demand for conformity. Thus you can become all the more committed to the collective illusion in proportion to becoming more hopelessly mortgaged to collective power.

How does this work? The collectivity informs and shapes your will to happiness (“have fun”) by presenting you with irresistible images of yourself as you would like to be: having fun that is so perfectly credible that it allows no interference of conscious doubt…

Merton then moves into birth metaphors:

Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, our freedom remains abortive. Our capacities for joy, peace, and truth are never liberated. They can never be used. We are prisoners of a process, a dialectic of false promises and real deception ending in futility. “The unborn child,” says Philoxenos, “is already perfect and fully constituted in his nature, with all his senses, and limbs, but he cannot make use of them in their natural functions, because, in the womb, he cannot strengthen or develop them for such use.” Now, since all things have their season, there is a time to be unborn. We must begin, indeed, in the social womb. There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually “born” as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by the systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and then “satisfy” them.

I was struck by the idea of living in a social womb, which Merton develops further by moving from theology to existential philosophy, reflecting on the main character, Berenger, in Ionesco’s play, The Rhinoceros. The play moves through three acts in a French village, in which one person after the other at first denies and then downplays and gradually accepts the other rhinos, and gradually almost everyone becomes a rhinoceros. This is how Ionesco chose to represent gaslighting in the face of the spread of fascism, through the theatre of the absurd.

Yet the metaphor is entirely serious, and the rhinoceros is depicted as a creature that is not merely a monster but also a demented utility maximiser, captive to operational logics.

Such is the problem which Ionesco sets us in his tragic irony; solitude and dissent become more and more impossible, more and more absurd…Ionesco protested that the New York production of Rhinoceros as a farce was a complete misunderstanding of his intention. It is a play not merely against conformism but about totalitarianism. The rhinoceros is not an amiable beast, and with him around the fun ceases and things begin to get serious. Everything has to make sense and be totally useful to the totally obsessive operation… “In all the cities of the world, it is the same,” says Ionesco. “The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e., a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden.

And, finally, a profound and memorable line by Ionesco himself, now widely quoted:

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots. . . .

I am not sure where that leaves us exactly, and it would surely be useless to speculate…

The weather is predicted to be hot again tomorrow, so I will play us out with Annie Lennox live in Central Park in New York, singing one of her signature songs: Here Comes the Rain Again.

Well, let’s hope so…