NO, I’m not writing on Hemingway. I’ve just borrowed his very famous title and using it for a few stray incidents I noticed while attending a seminar with seventeen speakers! Yes, seventeen speakers, each given five minutes to express their views. All knowledgeable men and women, quite well known to the audience. ‘When you exceed your five minutes,’ they were told, ‘a bell will ring, telling you to wind up!’
And as the speeches started quite often it was a disappointment to find the bell tolling just as an interesting observation was made. ‘Being responsive to the bell,” said the moderator, ‘is an act of submission!’
Yes indeed, because the bell did not spare anyone, whatever his or her standing. You could be that someone carrying the Book of Knowledge or Britannica in your head but when the gong went, you bowed out. Or maybe he’d travelled some distance to reach the venue on quite a rainy day as it was, the bell couldn’t care less.
But alas, despite the warnings, there were a few who disregarded it’s ringing. The audience and bell ringer watched with dismay as these callous ones ploughed on for two or sometimes three times the time given to them, and I for one, though disgusted, was fascinated by their indifference and disregard to the tolling of the bell. Why fascinated? Because in their attitude of contempt I did not see strength but weakness. Weakness not just in the fact that they were not able to express their thoughts in a concise manner, but weakness because submission needs strength. In their disdain for the bell, I heard their silent voice screaming, ‘Do you know who I am?’ or ‘Do you know how important my speech is?’ or, ‘Listen to me, even if you are bored!’
Pitiful voices! But it is not just at meetings we see a disregard for the bell, I see it in the moneyed man who breaks the law, the political leader who is a bully. I see it in the breaking of traffic rules, or in keeping with the decorum needed in a quiet place, where one hears loud voices. The bell was not there just to discipline, it was there to tell each person that they were part of a gathering larger than themselves and they were all part of a whole.
Discipline we need to remind ourselves, is not to put us in fetters but make us conscious of the rights of others. I end quoting from John Donne’s poem, again called, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’: No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. Yes, indeed, the bell reminds us we are only a part of the main..!
