Category Archives: personal essay

annus mirabilis: facing east and west

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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.

Yet once more . . .

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And I am crushed by the knowledge that another black man has been lynched, this time in Minneapolis in full view of spectators who were able to film at least part of it. At a time when I am numb with outrage already, yet another detestable, brutal, violent injustice. And I reach for words—because I am old, I feel impotent as a citizen, I am shamed.

All the usual responses are in evidence, as if prepared. Police who lynched George Floyd have been fired but are yet to be charged with any crime. Protests began almost immediately and continue, eliciting predictable responses from local police, who have denied reports of rubber bullets, but cannot deny reports of fire hoses and tear gas. Social media again fill with support for the protestors side by side with now familiar attempts to exonerate fired police. Black lives matter memes circulate widely; no doubt there will also be memes asserting the primacy of blue lives once a justification of this new murder coalesces on the political right.

Now, notice of Larry Kramer’s death reminds me that the pandemic goes on, that my doctor yesterday reminded me to get a pneumonia vaccination when even massive suffering and death can no longer move many of my fellow Americans, as it failed (or fails) to move many during the continuing AIDS crisis, which has killed 675,000 since its beginning and continues to kill some 13,000 people each year. I’ll get my pneumonia vaccination the next time I can visit a doctor in person, and I’ll continue to be shamed by the cesspool my country has become. How is it that we tolerate this present regime as lynchings, mass murders, antisemitism, and the other trappings of fascism surround us daily. I want to scream, to run into the streets with the protesters. I find myself understanding, perhaps for the first time in my life, the impulse to throw a bomb.

It takes training to return violence with violence, force with force. I lack such training, but I begin to understand how one might become so desperate as to go in search of it. I am developing some new understanding of what it might mean to become radicalized. And at the same time, I’m troubled to be using such language. Do I really want to incite violence? Normally, I’d have answered “No” with alacrity, but today I am angry, and my anger puts me at odds with myself. In order to write my anger I should have to overcome my own stoicism and in the act of that face the question, “Do I really want to do this?” I don’t want to face that question, but perhaps I should.

What I am describing is the dilemma that gave rise to Stevens’ “Mozart 1935,” a poem I’ve written about before in the aftermath of the Michael Brown verdict. As I read back over what I wrote then, I find that I used Stevens’ poem to image a feeling of being marooned that is similar to what I feel today, and I remember something Isaiah Berlin Says of Verdi.

He was the last master to paint with positive, clear, primary colors, to give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion; grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, faith—the passions that all men know.

Verdi, as praised by Berlin, was perhaps the last Major European humanist who was not at war with himself.

When Haemon asks his father Creon if it is reasonable never to listen to reason as the catastrophe of Antigone unfolds, the answer is obvious—the question is merely rhetorical. But in our time perhaps a different answer might be returned. In a time when even God can be put on trial, as in Guenter Rutenborn’s The Sign of Jonah, when the world as we know it seems poised on the brink of a new era of Fascist strife, and nobody seems able to stop it, and “good” people seem determined to inflict it upon the rest of us, perhaps it is no longer reasonable to listen to reason.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.

Perhaps ours is less a time to ‘return to Mozart’

He was young, and we, we are old.

than to join the stone throwers.

Loveliest of Trees

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I wish I could have thought to post this back when cherry trees were blooming. Still, perhaps somewhere a lone cherry tree still blooms like the one at the end of my mind.

Mack Harrell said once in my presence that great poetry doesn’t make for good songs. It seems a truism. Great poetry is complete in itself. A musical setting could add nothing to a great poem.

But I think it may be a rule that admits of exceptions. I certainly make some. I am still haunted by Hugo Wolf’s setting of Goethe’s little meditation on Anakreons Grab, so haunted indeed that I once sought to remedy what I thought to be the fault of the little poem’s common English translations which seemed to me to falsify its utter simplicity. Here’s my translation.

The Happy Poet

The damask rose blooms here
laurel and scuppernong knot
cricket climbs as ringdove croons

wherever gods themselves have planted
Anacreon rests.

The happy poet laughed his way
through springtime, summer and autumn before
winter finally laid him under the hill.

And here it is in a 1952 performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.

Wolf understood this poem, I like to think, and took his inspiration from its last couplet, which is as follows (Goethe’s Hügel likely refers to a little grave mound).

Frühling, Sommer und Herbst genoss der glückliche Dichter;
Vor dem Winter hat ihn endlich der Hügel geschützt.

And just now in the kitchen as I was loading the dishwasher and congratulating myself on my last in a current round of virtual doctor visits, I began to sing to myself John Duke’s wonderful setting of Houseman’s “Loveliest of Trees.” And I realized that I can now never recall that poem without John Duke’s music. Here it is in a performance by American Tenor, James Taylor. The pianist is Donald Sulzen.

I love the way the primary vocal melody returns at the end of the song (cf. Duke’s treatment of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . .” with his treatment of “About the woodland I will go . . . .” The speaker has seen his own end and found it a trifling matter, whether his present springtime adventure is a one-off or one of many. And I am thinking that such poetry, that is poetry that lends itself to song, may be characterized by a voice without apparent self awareness or consciousness of a rift between itself and its milieu. Schiller called such poetry naive and distinguished it from sentimental poetry which he averred must perforce create that nature it strives to limn across the boundary of the poet’s self awareness.

You could read Schiller’s once famous Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung. Better yet, you could read Isaiah Berlin’s 1979 essay entitled “The ‘Naiveté’ of Verdi,” whom Berlin calls “the last of the great naive masters of Western music,” though he recognizes that Verdi is “not without ideology.” Interestingly Berlin dedicated this essay to W. H. Auden, whose “Hymn to St. Cecilia” contains a few lines that attempt a description of the naive:

I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play . . .

but which is finally a sentimental poem, wearing “its tribulation like a rose.” Or perhaps Auden had Shiller’s distinction in mind and perhaps that is a part of what the “Hymn to St. Cecilia” is about. I first encountered Auden’s poem in Benjamin Britten’s famous setting, and that setting comes to mind when I think of the Hymn or reread it, but music does not come essentially to mind  as it does with John Duke’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

So, whether there were cherries blooming anywhere around the world today, I had my woodland ride with Houseman and Goethe, with Wolf and Duke and Anacreon, whom Goethe calls

—The Happy Poet.

Doomsday scenarios

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We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead; . . .

The other day at Facebook I shared a New Yorker commentary by Jonathan Franzen, whose subtitle is “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” To which a friend immediately appended a lengthy tweet from Sarah Kaplan that begins with this observation: “I’m not linking to that Jonathan Franzen essay (which is not only poorly argued but completely mischaracterizes the scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts on society),” and then ends up more or less agreeing with Franzen. Apparently Kaplan prefers other doomsday scenarios projected by Kate Marvel and Dan Zak, but her complaint strikes me as a distinction without a difference, as we used to say. The core of her argument with Franzen, that his essay urges a retreat from the world is itself a mischaracterization, as is an attempt to sensationalize both that has just appeared in The Nation.

But this not-quite-dispute puts me in mind of something I had read a few weeks ago in a Washington Post essay by Elizabeth Breunig that contains an interview with Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church and one of our president’s most ardent supporters. By way of explaining his many defenses of the president against moral criticisms lodged by liberals, Jeffress explained:

As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns, If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. . . . I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.

I also thought of an essay I had written not long ago in which I was able to find no real hope for our civilization or our planet short of a miracle. That essay is here, if you want to read it. I’m far from sharing Jeffress’ understanding of scripture but allowing for the difference in how Christian humanists such as myself and evangelicals identify the causes of our respective doomsday scenarios, one may venture to point out that we share a conviction that the world is poised upon the cusp of a monumental happening. Whether that happening is to be viewed as a disaster or not is one of the many things that divide liberals and evangelicals culturally. It’s easy to deny everything from science to the cookie monster if one views present stresses as a prelude to the end times. But we have just had a foretaste of what lies ahead of us from my perspective in the fact that the president seized command of weather forecasting even as hurricane Dorian wreaked death and destruction upon the Bahamas on its way up the east coast towards the Carolinas and the Maritime provinces.

As if the well-established prospect of climate disaster weren’t enough, we in the United States have now to fear the collapse of our social safety net, the erosion or downright loss of the rule of law and the system of political norms we have built up over a long history of corporate self-discovery, together with the entire system of international alliances we have built up since the second world war. Internationally, the world is being upended by migration on a scale we have not seen since late antiquity, by the renewal of age-old ethnic and religious hostilities and the threat of new hostilities between nations and social classes as a result of short-sighted and venal attempts by governments and corporations to control and/or shape the future to produce one set of projected outcomes or another in order to serve the interests of one set of beneficiaries or another. The world stage is set, it seems to me, for the end of the epoch in which I have lived all my life.

But it is a more than moral certainty that the future will be shaped by historical forces and developments we lack present ability to discern and that projections whether from science or scripture or from the study of history, however deep, amount to seeing through a glass darkly. The present question seems to me to be what to make of whatever interim we have, a question that will present itself with differing urgencies and imperatives depending upon one’s perceived position in the scheme of things. Refugees and members of oppressed classes will understand this question differently from the many of us whose affluence affords a safe view—by safe I mean relatively safe, of course. Many of our fellow humans whose lives were recently lost in the Bahamas believed themselves to be safe, even as the hurricane descended upon them. The lesson from Dorian for those who have an ear, as Jesus said, is that all our lives, indeed all human energies and enterprises, hang by a thread.

I’ve recently had a series of experiences that have brought this truth home to me in an intensely personal way. Last fall I learned that I had a kind of heart failure that made it necessary that I change my life. Then, before I had a chance to accommodate to the changes that were necessary, I had a stroke that left me struggling with blood pressure that was too high one day, too low the next. Now, just day before yesterday I have fallen down the stairs in my house, a stairway comprising some thirteen steps, fourteen if I count the step up from the landing at the top. Fortunately I broke no bones and escaped with a few cuts and bruises, the cuts having been caused by the shattering of a tempered glass coffee cup I was carrying as I commenced my fall. The most frightening memory I have of the experience is the memory of my legs giving way underneath me and my inability to control my fall, like my stroke a calamity that could recur at any time. Somewhere in these pages I have mentioned that my old friend, A. C. Greene from Abilene once told me he believed one should have a personal reason for whatever convictions one held. At the time I discounted the thought as trivial, but I hadn’t yet lived as long as A. C., who was facing a heart transplant at the time of that remark.

I find it impossible now to separate my thoughts about the future of life in the world around me from my expectation of death. I don’t mean this in a morbid way. Indeed, as I was falling downstairs the other day I was fully conscious and have no memory of thinking anything like, “Oh God, this is it!” though my family tells me that I cried out that I was dying. Rather I thought before I hit bottom, “Oh shit, what am I going to do now!” I recall the truly terrifying loss of my legs’ ability to feel and to hold me up as I stepped from the top landing onto the first step coming down. I remember being unable to feel my left knee for a bit with the hand I found myself resting on it at the bottom of the stairs and then feeling my son’s hands massaging my ankles and calves after I cried out that I couldn’t feel my legs. I was the one who suggested that I not be moved and that we summon an ambulance; and after my deep gratitude to my beloved and my son, who is staying with us for a time, I am profoundly grateful for the professionalism of the Saint Louis firefighters and paramedics. I understand that I experienced their grace under pressure and ability to size things up and cope with me not as one of a succession of victims they see in a day’s work but as a person who it turned out was not gravely injured but might have been. They, and the teams of medical professionals who treated me at Saint Louis University Hospital, quite literally saved my life in a circumstance with which I and my family were momentarily unable to cope. As I think about it all at the remove of a couple of days from the existential crisis I find myself thinking that saving my life meant returning my autonomy as a person to me, but I also realize that their professionalism could have coped with the eventuality of my losing the ability to function autonomously and that indeed a good part of their professionalism entailed the ability to know the difference between someone like me and that other someone I was not, whose case required  levels of care that I did not require. Though my first trauma center experience involved being placed in a neck brace and having boards rammed underneath me so that X-rays could be made of my spine, it was only after these were supplemented by a CT scan that the neck brace was removed and my wounds were treated.

Several codes were called in the trauma center during  my stay that were accompanied by staff rushing one way or another. At one point I remember overhearing someone describe a nearby patient who had used up two cans of Narcan spray without regaining consciousness. Today, in the aftermath of having my life saved by timely intervention, I find that I remain more or less indifferent to the prospect of my death as I have been since I began to think about it some years ago. I plan not to descend the stairs again at home until we are able to install a chair lift; which is to say that if I fear anything it is the prospect of falling again. I know I need to resume a certain level of participation in the various communities that make up my social life, something I had ceased to do since my stroke. I especially need to return to something like my pre-stroke level of exercise. Perhaps falling downstairs was a memento mori, for it has reminded me that for some time I have had the desire to write about what ageing feels like. My normal writing pose is, I think, ageless. Most friends and family tell me that I am not old. Still, I think there is something about my time of life that I would like to seize upon and perhaps affirm, something that has escaped me so far. I have no interest in my life story as a narrative of decline or progress. I’ve lived through various ups and downs in my checkered career, as my old friend Sam Ragan used to say, and I have enjoyed it all richly. Recently I read a New Yorker essay by Ceridwen Dovey entitled “What Old age is Really Like” that may have fueled my desire to write about ageing. Dovey, who is young, nevertheless writes engagingly and perceptively about the elderly in a way I can relate to my own lived experience. But there is something missing from her analysis. I only realized what it was when I began to realize today that I have both aesthetic and moral expectations about death that reveal themselves only as I think about the prospect of planetary death as well as my own.

Midway in her argument, Dovey mentions the work of Kate Rossiter, “Who advocates fostering ‘ethical responsibility’ rather than empathy in medical practitioners.” Dovey is on her way to explaining a comment by a friend, who became a geriatric specialist, to the effect that “There’s something almost greedy about empathy because it relies on the notion that we can somehow assimilate the other.” While I can understand a preference for professional responsibility over empathy in medical practitioners—certainly the professionalism I have noted among the many folk who intervened to save my life was not empathy. Indeed empathy might have stood in the way of that professionalism. But I am finding the rest of Dovey’s friend’s comment about empathy incomprehensible. Empathy is what binds us together as a human community, the love that Jesus urged as the second great commandment. It is a thing that medical practitioners, especially surgeons, have to learn to restrain; but woe to the practitioner who entirely loses the ability to identify with the other. “A respectful and thoughtful distance” may be “part of what enables us to respond to the other’s needs,” but it is empathy, with all its potential for enabling harm and misunderstanding, that calls the other to our attention as a fellow human. Please understand that I make no exclusive claims for Christianity, but I note that after the first and great commandment to love God, Jesus taught the love of neighbor—and his formalization of the commandment is specifically to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. That’s a pretty good definition of empathy.

Which is why I have never been able to reconcile myself to Pastor Jeffress’ understanding of the world. It requires me willingly to consign the great mass of humanity to perdition. But I still have to understand why it is that contemplating the prospect of my own death takes on meaning as I view that prospect in light of the possibility of the loss of earth. I doubt that Franzen or Kaplan or any of the other writers I mention in my opening statement really believes that time has run out for our planet. But they all accept as an ever more probable certainty that our children’s children will inherit a ruined planet plagued by cataclysmic disaster, largely unfriendly to life as we have known it; and that this circumstance is being brought ever closer to us by our commitment to the extractive practices upon which we depend to sustain economic growth. It’s not my intention to pursue this argument further except to point out that it is human nature that persuades Franzen that human kind is incapable of doing the necessary work to combat climate change. I have no belief in a personal god, but it has been an article of faith for me that life will survive my death, that generations will survive to remember, if not me, then at least my time, that earth, wonderful beyond any power of mine to imagine it; as I say, earth, wonderful, generative, infinitely various and inventive earth, and the cosmos beyond, “When I consider the heavens” the psalmist wrote: and all of time and the great and wonderful planetary systems with their stars and comets and deep black holes—that all of this will survive my death. And it will, of course. What happens on this small planet in no way cancels the great scheme of time and the universe. But how shall I bear myself towards death when my small planet and my beloved country may indeed be destroyed by human error and mendacity; that is the question I ask myself now.

During the cold war we were fearful that nuclear war would destroy the planet. Now, the cold war has returned to threaten us with death by a thousand cuts. I feared this in the aftermath of 9/11 as we charged pell-mell into an ever more culturally and morally debilitating endless war that has paralyzed us now in webs of ever more intrusive surveillance and militarism and laid the groundwork for a massive, worldwide loss of personhood hardly contemplated in former times. I cannot, in this circumstance, withhold empathy from any human being. We are all of us, liberal, evangelical, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jew, black and brown and pink like me, male, female, queer, trans and genderless, Dine, Lakota and the many tribes, bound together in the community of those who will die in uncertain times. Alice Major is Edmonton’s Poet Laureate. I was put on to her recent book “Welcome to the Anthropocene” by the Dan Zak essay I cite above. Her prologue begins “Alas. poor child, you’re born / in medias res — the stage is set / with swirling depictions of a globe / in panic, . . . /  And you have got to figure out the script. / It’s that recurrent nightmare / of being unprepared, of never / having studied, and now it’s curtain time.” But as the poem continues it seems to imagine at least the possibility of some better dream that is “just our human / situation — the only plot we’ve got / in this play without an author.” The poem’s speaker takes her leave with an apology, ” . . . I can’t help you. I am just / another figure in the chorus / of greying heads, wringing her hands / or pointing to a star.” And then this:

. . . Don’t look for gods
descending in a basket,
or prompters in the wings.
Declaim one memorable soliloquy.
Turn a spotlight. Or pick up
pelting litter from the stage.
There is no ending, happy
or otherwise.  Just play your part.

We are like the “dear white children” in Auden’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia” playing, casual as birds “among the ruined languages.” Perhaps the best we can hope for the story of our time is that it tell of our promise and our death. Or perhaps it might tell of our promise only and leave the death to God. We are like the astronauts in Michener’s Space, trapped on the moon with no possibility of return, whose last words evoke the humanist dream of Walter Miller’s classic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, wherein a band of monks is able to replicate the whole of human civilization after the bomb from a fragment of a grocery list left to them by Leibowitz, their founder.

—Blessed Saint Leibowitz, keep ’em dreamin’ down there . . . you know the rest.