I have promised a memoir. Here is the opening chapter as it exists today.

I begin this narrative in June, 2020. Around me the COVID-19 pandemic rages even though our Republican governor has now declared Missouri officially reopened. I remain housebound amidst the collapse of my country around a failed leadership that may mark our decline into a new fascism. More hopefully, just across the street last evening, some of my fellow citizens waved signs emblazoned with the Black Lives Matter legend at passing cars and elicited a round of solidarity honks through the evening. I opened the front door and waved for a while.

The house I now occupy with my beloved, my son, and a dog named Maxie sits on the west side of Compton Avenue in Saint Louis and thus faces east towards the Mississippi about three miles away, though you can’t get there as the crow flies. The Gateway Arch is not visible from here, but it comes into view a half mile or so up the street as the Compton Avenue viaduct rises across old and new railroad tracks and structures, some derelict, some new, beneath it on the way to midtown. Of the Arch and its designer, Eero Sarinen, Daniel Richter opined in a 2003 book entitled Facing East from Indian Country:

Sarinen intended his monument to be viewed from the opposite direction, facing west, from the Illinois side of the river. But unless they can walk on water, all who actually visit must approach it the way I looked through it, facing east.

Pace Daniel Richter, the Arch can be viewed from many places on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. It greets travelers from the east somewhere around Cahokia, superimposed upon the cityscape. An ongoing redevelopment of the Gateway Arch National Park includes both sides of the river, but since 2009 it has been possible to view the Arch from Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park, a 33 acre park on the East St. Louis riverfront. Popular riverboat and helicopter rides made it unnecessary to walk on water to view the Arch from many eastern perspectives even as far back as 2003. Moreover, there exists a vantage point on the Missouri side of the river from which one can look west through the Arch and see the Dred Scott courthouse framed in it up a long grassy slope, which vista was part of Sarinen’s original conception. To one marooned, as I think I am, in my house at this time when all seem to agree that some dreadful reckoning is happening around us, the Arch seems to stand for the fearful ironies of that reckoning.

For the Arch’s symbolism has always been at least double, open as it is to the rising sun and all that betokens in a city whose church steeples still prick the morning sky, almost more numerous than the skyscrapers that rise behind them, all their altars facing east. A priest friend once expressed pride of place by telling me that Saint Louis is a Catholic town. That could be seen at the time in a piece of sculpture on the Saint Louis University campus depicting a Jesuit father holding a cross like a weapon over the head of a stock figure native American whilst conferring upon him all the blessings of Catholic Christianity. That sculpture has since been removed to a Jesuit museum, a reminder that its symbolism even in its own time was already decadent. But the Arch also faces west and evokes the decades of land hungry white colonizers who set out from Saint Louis, some by land along the Santa Fe trail with its links to the Mormon and California trails, some following Louis and Clark along the Missouri river to Independence from whence they followed the Oregon trail to the Pacific northwest. We used to call these colonizers settlers, but that term carries with it too much of the canard that the west was unsettled, empty of inhabitants, that accompanied the old myths of manifest destiny.
The east side of the river, too, what eventually became the city of East Saint Louis, has its own history as both a terminus and a beginning, home to railroads, steel, aluminum, and meat packing enterprises over the years, to name a few. Like Saint Louis, Illinoistown, as it was first known, has been home to series of in-migrations as various immigrant groups came to work in its industries. East Saint Louis, like the city across the river, was one destination for the great migration of African Americans after 1910 and was the site of one of the nation’s fiercest race riots in 1917. Estimates of African Americans killed are disputed still and range between 39 and 250.

But I’ll write about Saint Louis only glancingly because I’m not qualified to do more; I didn’t go to high school here; being able to claim a Saint Louis high school is the chief mark of the native in this place, though Saint Louis is no less my home for all that. I’ve chosen Saint Louis’s answer to the Statue of Liberty as a beginning point for my own journey because, though my own life has faced mostly westward, it has its own eastward face. I spent fifteen years of that life making my home in North Carolina, for instance. But my personal impulse to make a home in the east likely began when I left West Texas to attend college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Dallas being about as far away from West Texas as I was brave enough to attempt at first. Later, I attended graduate schools at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, thinking like the southwestern boy I still was in those days, that the intellectual center of my country was to the east of wherever I was. My intellectual journey in those days produced a strange animal whose learning was in some crucial sense grafted on. It wasn’t mine. It took me many years after I left North Carolina to make it so.

What could be called a typical American life? certainly not one so discontinuous as mine has been. But only recently I’ve become aware of a personal need to reconcile myself to the fact that I have lived a life of inherited privilege stemming from both of my country’s original sins. Perhaps in this I differ but little from all other white Americans, but I’ve never thought of myself as privileged. In fact, if I’m honest with myself I’ve mostly thought of myself as inferior to the more learned, to the Doctors and Professors who have been my tutors and often my colleagues. But I have a direct familial connection to slavery through my mother’s family, to the overturning of reconstruction in the south by the Ku Klux Klan and a generation of “redemption” politicians of whom my mother’s great grandfather was one (“redemption” encompassing lynching with all its phenomenology of horror). I grew up in the Jim Crow era in a town more southern than not, in a family more southern than not. But I have been reintroduced in recent years, as I have done some research into my father’s family history, to the fact that I have a direct familial connection to what we used to call Indian removal. My father’s people migrated into western Oklahoma in the last days of the Oklahoma land rush.

In part this awareness stems from a course on dismantling racism sponsored by my church, for which I traveled to Iowa City and spent the better part of a week wrestling with the full-blown dawning of something many of my colleagues in the faith at the time couldn’t find it in their hearts to admit to themselves. That was 2006. Since that year I have ‘sidled up’ as we say in West Texas, to direct confrontation with the fact of white privilege. It does me no good to protest that I had nothing to do with my country’s past. I have been forced to understand that my life has been sheltered and fostered by an inherited privilege conferred upon me by no merit other than the accident of my white skin (which isn’t white except by contrast with the skin tones of people of color). What am I to make of this now, especially since ‘wokeness’ has well-nigh become a cult amongst parts of the white establishment. Some will think me arrogant to claim such an ambivalence. So set it down here that I recognize my privilege and the arrogance of my privileged recognition, but I also realize these involve me in an endless loop of ambivalence that has no end in the realm of practical reason.

My father’s death in the second world war remains a primary datum for me, though I have now outlived him by fifty years and more. I don’t think my mother ever quite recovered from the loss, and that may be one reason for my own inability to dismiss it, though I have recently been reminded that my father’s kin share that inability with me. For a long time I had lost contact with my father’s family, but recently that contact has been renewed no thanks to me, by cousins of mine whose lives stem from Guam (more about that later). Just this Memorial Day weekend I talked on the phone for an hour or more with a cousin who now lives in Los Angeles and called to wish me well on Memorial Day. My heart jerked as I first heard her voice, an acknowledgement of the distance between us, more to be explained by the radical discontinuity in our family history than by physical distance. I have a collection of my father’s correspondence with my mother and other letters pertaining to his death. I have read some of it and propose to myself the task of reading the rest before I die. But I will not read what remains of their correspondence now, primarily because, as long as I am engaged in this work of memory I don’t want to risk losing or altering my lifetime’s sense of my father’s absence, which still broods over my conception of the order of things.

Like many of my fellow citizens I’m suffering from something like information overload this year, though it isn’t exactly that. It’s more like Mrs. Moore’s spiritual muddle in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, in which history, temperament, old age, political consciousness, metaphysical uncertainty, all seem to conspire 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 space. 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 now 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 muddle or to rise above it. In fact I don’t wish to do either thing. Not 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 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.

My main title comes from a poem by John Dryden, published in 1667, that created a fashion for naming years in which humankind was stricken with catastrophe. 1666 had been a plague year. Dryden had left London in order to escape the plague, but his poem celebrates both the disastrous great fire of London that took place that same year and a few English sea victories that are less remarkable. Though he called his poem “annus mirabilis” or “year of Wonders,” he seems not to have regarded the plague he escaped as a wonder. But the fact of the plague has associated itself with that name over the years. Geraldine Brooks’s fine novel Year of Wonders, explores the effect of the plague on a small English village whose citizens collectively decide to isolate themselves in order to protect others.

It’s that sort of reckoning that’s going on around us now. These essays record my own process of coming to terms with that reckoning and my part in it. We’ve become accustomed to hearing that our time is a perfect storm, combining a pandemic with economic and political collapse on a scale we have never seen before in American life and a rising popular demand for police reform. As if these weren’t enough, behind them all looms the threat of environmental disaster. And I add now that my own experience has combined aging with a series of personal health crises that have complicated my sense of the acute peril we face. At the end of my life, I find that I have become an American Midwesterner, one of a series of reinventions of myself that have spanned the time since my early boyhood in New Mexico. When I retired for the second time in 2016, I wrote as follows about living in Saint Louis:

“I guess I’m trying to school myself to think of old age as an invitation not to design an immortality strategy but still to live with as much gusto as I can muster for the remaining time I have. I’m aware of my huge good fortune in possessing good health, though I need to take off a few pounds (actually more than a few). So my prescription for myself is contingent upon continued good health and therefore is for myself alone; though you’re welcome to stop by, if you like. We can have a coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck if it’s late enough in the day, and talk about whatever’s in the air.

“I think I may be reconciled to living in the city I have in the here and now, not in another one to come (pace Plato and St. Paul). The Academy was in some ways my city to come, to be sought or founded in the realm of discourse. But nobody can really live in such a place, and one thing I may have learned from this perception is that it is the very accidental character of real cities that makes them fit for human habitation, just as it is uncertainty that makes human life bearable and sometimes joyous; though I don’t carry the argument so far as Marilynn Robinson does, arguing from Johathan Edwards that the apparent arbitrariness of the world bespeaks a creator.

“My life has also been fortunate in that I’ve never been denied culture, never lacked means or opportunity to refashion myself when I needed to do so. It’s sometimes comforting to think that given the world as it seems I’d live the same life, ask for the same jobs, over again—though I know I wouldn’t. I’ve refashioned myself sufficiently and often enough to be aware that self-creation is surrounded by a thick matrix of contingency. A friend used to like to paraphrase Heraclitus: ‘You can’t step in the same river once.’ One isn’t guaranteed the world as it seems, not tomorrow, maybe not even yesterday.

“So that one founds oneself in the realm of discourse as the world rushes by—and one is fortunate if the real city one lives in affords hidey holes, places to escape, and lots of unsupervised spaces for play. The real and contingent city is as febrile as a summer street dance, as brief on the wind as a smile and a shoeshine, thick with possibility and empty of information about itself as a week-old newspaper. One dwells in it upon sufferance—I’ll go that far with Robinson, since I know neither my beginning nor my end.”

That was before a diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction and three strokes, before the sociopathic presidency of Donald Trump had begun its destructive progress through the land, before the coronavirus pandemic, with its death tolls now in the tens of thousands and its catastrophic economic destruction.

The president’s depraved indifference to our present humanitarian crisis is reinforced by his Republican supporters in congress and in the electorate. A distressing sign of these times is that the more the deaths pile up the more Trump supporters proclaim their right to demand those deaths. The social pathology that expressed itself in cries of “Lock her up!” at the Trump rallies in 2016 has now morphed into a grisly determination on the part of the Trump alliance to destroy the country, and the rest of us with it, rather than give up power. Witness the near destruction of the United States Postal Service.

Marilynn Robinson, in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books wrote that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by”—not a hopeful prospect. I don’t want to give up on my life or my country. Perhaps the day will come again for coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck, but for today Covid-19 is in the air, and the lesson this perfect storm has for me is that, white privilege or no, I face for the first time in my life a prospect that may require me to risk my life in order to vote.