I had thought to return to talking about politics this year. The plight of the poor and the weak among us seems urgent to me, as does the plight of our infrastructure and of our treasury of cultural institutions in these hateful political times. But I have searched my soul and found that I’ve already said most of what I have to say about these things.

I’m also concerned that many in my my country seem determined to promulgate a false history to rising generations in a time when authentic memory of the terrors of slavery and the native American genocide are fading as the generations die. But no appeal to a more honestly usable past can save us from true believing folk who imagine that the cosmos is only about six thousand years old; and it doesn’t help that many of these people are good and dear, and that I love them.

I long ago resigned from these arguments. I may return to politics, but if any of my friends are still comforted by the belief that they will not meet me in heaven, I wish them comfort and decline to pursue that issue further. Besides, winter is dragging on. I don’t mind the cold and snow we’ve had recently, but lately we’re in the grip of the sort of indifferent, soggy, in-between weather that keeps one indoors in spite of warming temperatures. I don’t trust this weather any more than I trust my country’s politics.

Over last weekend we had balmy days. The cosmic world stayed the same in spite of the hour we lost as political and commercial spheres shifted to Daylight Saving Time. I’ll be glad for the light in the evening hours as spring and summer return and envelop us. I look forward to cooking outdoors again and to watching the summer fire flies from my back porch. But we’re not there yet, and I’m thinking we’re in for at least one more cold snap before the season advances. Of course I have no idea about this. Weather Underground is forecasting mild temperatures through the middle of the month, but the Farmer’s Almanac is less optimistic and suggests we may have one more snow before April. As I’ve said more than once before in these pages, I’m feeling the pull of the cosmic cycle more and more every year, every season. Perhaps I take this indifferent weather, if not as a portent, at least as a memento mori. One of the home truths of my time of life is that every so often it dawns on me that I’m not immortal.

I hesitate to talk about intimations of mortality for fear that people I love will rush to my side to comfort me or otherwise persuade me to stop being morbid. I don’t feel old, but I know that at two years shy of eighty I am almost as old as dirt; and I know I need a strategy for dealing with the remainder of my life. I don’t mean to call up the usual bureaucratic end-of-life specters. I have a living will and a regular will and a caring spouse who has my power of attorney and children who love me. I have no fear of being subjected to mechanistic horrors as I leave the world.

But I need a strategy for living in the shadow of death in a new way, because my own death is closer to me now. Not that I am suffocated by the thought of it or overwhelmed by fear. My need is rather an inner need that reflects my awareness of that part of myself that corresponds to the real world into which we are born and in which we love and hate and into which we bring our children and through whose environs we struggle with ourselves and others and search for happiness and fulfillment and goodness and meaning and God, a world more real to me now than its symbols and rituals. I stress that I am not looking for pie in the sky. But I am indeed looking for something that isn’t exactly cultural, though it certainly has a cultural dimension.

I’ve been reading Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life. After I was ill last summer I re-read his Way of the Physician. I had first read it years ago as a possible subject for a Dallas Morning News Book review. I didn’t review it and now don’t remember why, but Needleman’s willingness to face up to basic questions of life and death without resorting to conventional pieties, particularly bureaucratic pieties, drew me to him. This new book (new to me; it was published in 1994) argues that we should take money more seriously than we do, since it is the chief organizing engine of our worldly life.

Quite so: though Needleman’s real project is to persuade us that there is a higher life than the life of money that is only accessible after we have paid our debt to Caesar. I am drawn to this view, though not to Needleman’s theosophy or his interest in Gurdjieff. Nor do I necessarily think the other life, the not-money life, is higher. I think it is other. I think it is the pearl of great price. I agree that the obsession with money blinds us to it, blinds both rich and poor. Access to the not-money life requires, I believe, the fact as well as the understanding that one has enough.

It may require other things as well. It may require particularly the realization that one’s own good is intertwined with and dependent upon the good of others, perhaps the good of all. And not merely the good of all humans, but perhaps the good of all creatures great and small, as that lovely hymn sings to us. It may require an ethic such as that we are attempting to envision in present-day conversations about sustainability.

Sustainability is not a new idea, but it rests upon a vision of community that has never seemed attainable within the framework of modern capitalistic conceptions of the world. Sustainability orders the world according to need; capitalism, according to desire. Sustainability might ultimately conceive the withering away of money as shared wealth took the place of individualistic acquisitiveness and avarice.

But my purpose isn’t to propose a Utopia, either as a social goal or as a satiric heuristic. My point is to suggest a need in myself for a new framing of the ancient ideal of seeking the Kingdom of God. The love of money yields as abstract a life as any degenerate monasticism. The Kingdom of God is existential, here and now if it is anywhere. So far, the most telling evocation of the Kingdom of God for me is Wendell Berry’s essay, “Two Economies.”

We know from our own experience that it is possible to live in the present in such a way as to diminish the future practically as well as spiritually. By laying up “much goods” in the present—and, in the process, using up such goods as topsoil, fossil fuel, and fossil water—we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay. That is, we diminish the future by deeds that we call “use” but that the future will call “theft.” We may say, then, that we seek the Kingdom of God, in part, by our economic behavior, and we fail to find it if that behavior is wrong.

I think we may have reached a point in the history of life on this planet when something like sustainability may be forced upon us by our own excesses. Our cities are rotting, no matter what their chambers of commerce say. I will not live to see it, but we shall soon, as a people, begin to experience a loss of habitat similar to that we have visited upon our planet’s non-human creatures—as oceans rise and the planet’s surface becomes less habitable.

Cities have never been sustainable. Our present-day landfills are but the latest iteration of the refuse heaps by which cities have been known for centuries. Perhaps this is one reason why the dream of community tends to be agrarian, as it is with Berry. Nor is there any sense of a sustainable human community in the Utopias of the past; though perhaps the Eucharist and similar ritual meals symbolize the aspiration towards such a thing. Tim Burke has two excellent discussions on his blog right now of what it might mean to think of sustainability in terms of the needs of modern urban societies and bureaucracies. He concludes that it’s hard to imagine what such a thing might look like.

So here I am, an aging man living in an old house whose builders had no idea of me, in the midst of a city that had no idea of me in the past and has precious little idea of me now. If I followed the normal path many Americans my age follow I would discard my house and move to a “retirement” community soon. At some point I will likely be forced to make that move as my ability to manage my small economy (see Berry) declines, as I become less and less able to climb stairs, for instance. The question of sustainability for me is now less a question of trying to imagine the future of my city at large than of forming and maintaining a particular intentionality as I regard the prospect of my city’s departure from me personally.

I’m not planning to let go gently, and as I think about staying in my house as long as I can my cosmic life and my abstract life coincide. I could wish, with St. Paul, for a continuing city to come, but I don’t. The prospect of an eternity of consciousness in an unchanging place isn’t attractive to me. And at this point I realize what my thinking has left out. I have loved my life, loved places, loved the sheer presence of mountain and ocean and prairie, loved seasons and tides and the sun and moon. St. Francis praised these things as his brothers and sisters. But I have loved my city too, some manifestations more than others. In Denton it will always be sunset in McKenna Park and I will always be pushing my little son in the swing there as we look across the prairie towards Decatur.

In Dallas it will always be the end of an evening when Giles Mitchell and I walked along Snider Plaza trying to dance like Anthony Quinn, having just seen Zorba the Greek at the Fine Arts theatre. In Raleigh I will always be jaywalking with Shelby Stephenson in search of the Executive Mansion the night Sam Ragan was awarded the North Carolina Medal. I shook Jim Hunt’s hand that night, but laughing with my friend as we got lost (or didn’t) meant more. And here in this old city whose river is a strong, brown god, and where I have fallen in love with life and my beloved all over again, I think I am a citizen of no mean place, to borrow from St. Paul another time. Even hollowed out and given over to corruption of every kind Saint Louis is a consummately human place, rich with the sorrows and laughter of many languages. It will certainly outlast me.

And the Kingdom of God? It contains the ten thousand things and the joys and terrors of them partly because it is full of death. It is the awareness of death around me that provides me with the conscious will to live; and it is the knowledge that my life is finite that makes it a life at all. This is a real knowledge to be distinguished from the forms of abstract knowledge that have occupied most of my attention all these many years. For the truth about the cosmos and me is that I shall finally be abandoned, or recycled, as the cosmic stream moves on. My city, like my life, struggles against abandonment. In the end the only real issue is how to lose—and so I think again of Cavafy’s poem:

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession, . . .

Paul Tillich is buried in a small grove of trees in New Harmony, Indiana. The grove is called Paul Tillich Park, and it sits just across the street from Phillip Johnson’s Roofless Church. Tillich helped to plan the site which, like the Roofless Church, was a project of philanthropist, Jane Owen. Owen had been Tillich’s student—the restoration and enhancement of New Harmony were her life’s work. I took the photo at the head of this essay about ten years ago in Paul Tillich Park. It is one of several of his sayings the philosopher/theologian chose to be displayed there along with this bust. Jane Owen died recently, but I like to think her work goes on as her legacy, and Tillich’s, continue in New Harmony.

I told my class last week that being in sight of eighty years I’m delighted that I have no idea when my own life will end. I am also very fortunate: to be in good health, and to come from a family inclined to longevity. Still, aside from the usual caveats faced by people my age, particularly the warnings my body periodically sends me not to take it for granted, I’m aware of being at a real juncture, a place that seems to require a pause not so much to take stock as to take new breath.

I’m suffering from something like information overload this year, though it isn’t exactly that. It’s more like Mrs. Moore’s muddledom in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, in which history, temperament, old age, political consciousness, metaphysical uncertainty, all seem to conspire to to suggest a profound anomaly, to wit: the world has changed unalterably and become unrecognizable; and simultaneously, the world hardly ever changes—it is I who have changed.

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.

My condition isn’t hopeless, as I think Forster thought Mrs. Moore’s condition to be, but it places before me a complex of questions, drops them on my plate like Proufrock’s works and days of hands. What may yet be done? What may it still be possible to think? How shall I bear myself towards a world that more and more seems to be characterized by irreconcilable disputes and wrongs without remedy? And somewhat less urgently, though equally relevant to my present condition, how shall I bear myself towards the prospect of my own unbeing?

I am an intuitive person. My thinking life—note that I don’t say intellectual life; that’s something else—has proceeded by fits and starts. I am seldom aware of the major movements of my mind until they are well begun. I approach them in medias res. I am, moreover, a literary person. What I know of what has been thought and said in my language, and to some lesser extent in a few other languages, opens resonant spaces in my thinking, supplies me with the fundamental categories of what I have learned from Richard Rorty to call my final vocabulary, though perhaps not all of its categories. As a result, thinking is for me an exploration and a sounding of those resonant spaces in hopeful anticipation of occasional release into more nearly original utterance. Original to myself, of course; I long ago understood that I arrive at new places in my thinking only to realize that others have been there before me. I cherish the hope as well that my literariness is not mere pedantry or belleletrism; albeit, it is so much a part of my nature that I can hardly hope to escape it.

Back to Mrs. Moore, whose untimely death occurs as an anti-resolution of the primary conflict of Forster’s novel. The muddle that does her in contains elements that resemble some of the dilemmas of postmodern times. She is a woman with advanced ideas, able to befriend Dr. Aziz, the novel’s Muslim Indian protagonist, resistant to the bigotry of other British characters for whom the Raj is a projection of the falsehood of Anglo superiority. She is also religiously unprejudiced, able to find God in the mosque where she first meets Aziz. Her own Passage to India, the combination of culture shock (symbolized by the echo in the Marabar caves), old age, the loss and grief contingent upon various personal betrayals, and perhaps simple exhaustion, proves too much for her, overcomes what might have been a heroic spirit. Before her death she is unable to help Aziz in his trouble, though she is certain of his innocence, perhaps partly because it is her friend, Adela Quested, who has accused Aziz of sexual assault.

Like Mrs. Moore I’m unable to defeat my own muddledom or to rise above it. In fact I don’t wish to do either thing. Neither religion nor ideology nor my social grounding offers me meaningful triumph, consolation, or even escape. But unlike Mrs. Moore I am unwilling (and I stress that word) to drift away into a fog of anomie. What I seek is to find the center of my muddle and to take up a position there. Like Wendell Berry I believe that the center is a position rather than an abdication. What I have begun in this essay, and will continue to do in subsequent essays, is attempt to address some matters that are contingent upon my having taken it up as well as being immanent in my thinking life and in my memories. As Montaigne wrote, “To philosophize is to learn to die”; or to paraphrase Berry in a different context, I seek to prepare myself for a world in which I will be dead, but not to avoid living as meaningfully as I am able all the way out to the end of whatever there is.

We’ve not visited New Harmony, Indiana, since 2008. At that time some favorite places were gone, notably the Golden Raintree Bookstore, where we had spent a good many happy hours and where I once found a beautiful copy of Drums, by James Boyd. The town’s remarkable public library remains, though. Denominated the Working Men’s Institute, it serves as the town’s chief reminder of New Harmony’s brief ownership by Scottish industialist Robert Owen, of a past grounded in Utopian idealism and the earliest stages of the international labor movement.

New Harmony—from Paul Tillich Park, a monument to the most privileged and elite European education in the person of one of the finest products of the prewar German university system, to the Working Men’s Institute, a forceful reminder of the ideal of universal education, of the joining of practical learning with the impulse to philosophy in the broadest sense. And the two just a brisk walk from one another.