Category Archives: personal essay

Ein tag im Jahr . . .

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Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.

I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.

It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.

On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.

But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world

—and it was well.

Adam’s Curse

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We’re just back from a long weekend in Chicago that we mostly spent going to museums. But we had a few interesting and pleasant encounters with fellow travelers as well. Here’s one.

We stay at the Essex on Michigan Avenue since we discovered it a few years ago when we had waited too long to get into the Hilton across the street for the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. It’s a nice simple hotel, friendly to commercial travelers and vacationers alike. One pays a bit of a premium for its location on the south loop, but not as much as one pays for grander digs at the Hilton or the Blackstone.

On the afternoon of our arrival we took a walk along the edge of Grant Park and as we returned to the hotel fell in with an extended family group who seemed to be waiting for the hotel shuttle. At their center was a cluster of children of various ages, including a small boy who had attracted the attention of one of the women in the group. They seemed to be talking about the fact that the boy played the fiddle.

I would have guessed his age at about nine, old enough to speak up for himself but young enough still that he hadn’t yet passed that age when little boys sometimes turn into hellions. His aunt, as I guessed her to be, was saying to him that he could play his fiddle on the street in front of the hotel and make himself some money whilst they were there. His reply to her was that he might do it and then spend all the money he made buying video games.

We chuckled at the exchange, nodded to the grownups in the group as we walked by, and didn’t think about it again until the next morning. We had eaten breakfast in the little Brasserie that opens off the hotel lobby and were settling down to wait for another shuttle to take us to the Art Institute when we spied the small boy sitting in a chair just outside the hotel entrance playing a three quarter size cello with his instrument case open in front of him.

I walked outside to listen, and instead of the squawing I expected heard the surpassingly beautiful strains of a portion of of one of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. I stood close by and listened to the boy’s playing for a bit then took some bills out of my pocket and put them in his instrument case, noticing as I did that he had already collected quite a reasonable fee. He thanked me politely without breaking his stride, and then I noticed two adults sitting on a concrete tree surround not far away and walked over to them.

“Is he your son?” I asked. The mother beamed and said he was. She then told me that he was eight years old and had been studying the cello since he was four. I speculated that with that beginning he might very well become a professional musician. The mother demurred a bit, saying that careers in classical music are hard. I mentioned young friends of mine who play in symphony orchestras by way of saying that such careers are still possible. Both parents smiled in a way that said to me how proud they were of this little boy, bravely playing his “fiddle” on the street and planning to spend all the money he made on video games.

As we talked on, they allowed as how the adventure had been his idea and that they had been against it at first but had given in because he had seemed very enthusiastic. What struck me, aside from his impeccable and beautiful playing, was the little boy’s confidence. And watching them all together I thought what a fine thing it was that there are still such little boys and such parents in the world, parents willing to nourish a child’s talent without regard for whether it might ever make him any money, parents who understood the preciousness of his gift.

For he had already learned a very important thing about who he was and what he was for. His music was already imbedded in his being; he tossed it off as though it were a slight thing, though of course his abillity to do so bespoke hours of toil and practice. I thought of Yeats’s wonderful poem:

. . . . . . . . ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I did not ask his name. It was blessing enough to have encountered him and his parents anonymously. The memory of his playing now resides in my mind among other archtypes that speak of the love of life and find me still rejoicing in the worth of the world.

in memoriam

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For a long time I refused to believe that the world had changed on September 11, 2001. I now think I was wrong, though I still feel no solidarity with the belief that “they” attacked us because “they” hate “our” freedom. But I’m not going to make a list of the ways I now think the world has changed. I’m rather going to observe that it’s sometimes well to remember what was there before, without embellishment or romantic enhancement. The thumbnail on the left links to a photograph of the World Trade Center towers as they appeared to one photographer in March, 2001. No drama, no klieg lights. I have included it as a rather large file for the sake of clarity (Source: Wikipedia Commons).

The towers’ presence in this memorial bespeaks an absence as profound as that which sent me in search of the poetry of my country twelve years ago, words from Carl Sandburg, William Allen White, Henry Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, James Agee, Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, the prince of all our poets. They speak of a once and future republic, of our collective triumphs and our failures, from which they (mostly) do not shrink. They do not speak with one voice. I grew up singing Lowell’s hymn in response to the Mexican-American War right along side “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” each of which has had its jingoistic uses.

But there is poetry in the memory of those great towers. I experienced them for the first time as a disembarked subway passenger, walking a board path through the great hollow darkness underneath them building, here and there lit with fires in big oil drums and the sparks from toiling arc welders. That memory shades their absence for me now. I may one day see the new Center, but it will not replace the former in my mind or do anything to fill the hole in the world that the absence of the towers inscribes upon my mental landscape. For that I can only mourn.

But I reached for poetry for a reason more profound than mourning, and I am thinking as I reach for it now of a sentence of the late Richard Rorty’s: “[I]t is only those who agree with Hölderlin that ‘what abides was founded by poets’ who are still capable of liberal hope.”† For Rorty, our country’s founding poet was Walt Whitman. Perhaps it is not by accident that at the center of my reflections twelve years ago I found these lines from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whitman believed in democracy. He thought democracy held the key to human flourishing and human happiness. And not mere political democracy, but social democracy shaped and guided by social justice, wherein the goods of this life are available to the least as to the great. Utopian, perhaps; flawed, certainly. But it is the dream that built our cities, our systems of transportation, our schools, colleges, libraries and other cultural institutions, our networks of homes and businesses, and much, much more without which the people perish.

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Rorty reminds us that Emerson distinguished between the party of memory and the party of hope. I think of Whitman returning to Brooklyn at twilight and how his imaging of his beloved New York is parceled into persons, some his human countrymen, some their built works before him and behind him on the water and in time. I am mostly of the party of hope. For me the absent towers of the World Trade Center furnish their parts towards the soul of the republic of my dreams, still to be achieved.

†In Achieving Our Country, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998) 139-140.

The Gift Outright

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I sometimes sign online petitions.

Not that I sign all that come my way, and I don’t sign frivolously. Since I have once or twice walked into online hoaxes, I’m careful to check what I support, and I avoid petitions that strike me as extreme or merely inflammatory. I’m as skeptical as anyone else about the potential for effectiveness of some of the petitions I sign, and I don’t delude myself by thinking that I’m participating in grassroots democracy. But I think I have at least a couple of good reasons for signing petitions for causes I think are good.

One reason is, of course, that I think some causes are good. As a rule I support causes online to which I also contribute financially. It seems to me that very confusing and chaotic times such as ours call for the opposite of quietism. I sometimes think that it may be immoral not to take positions in times like these (perhaps even in the best of times as well). Certainly if one takes no position one has no skin in the game, as it were. It’s been a long time since I participated in an act of civil disobedience, but in lending my support to various small Internet insurrections I voluntarily assume a certain political risk.

For political hazard is different from mere financial risk, because it involves what Kierkegaard termed the suspension of the ethical. It has the potential to put one at odds with one’s friends and acquaintances. I’m squeamish about “sharing” my political participation online at Facebook, Twitter, etc., because in doing so I lay myself open to flaming replies from folks I know who disagree with me. And the most common reproof I receive accuses me of engaging in thoughtless, mob action—a charge to which I am sensitive. But it’s interesting, to say the least, to be accused of failing to stand up for one’s beliefs because one stands up for one’s beliefs in a public manner that makes use of one of the tools of popular culture.

Last evening a friend and I listened with absorption and pleasure as Richard Cohen and Morris Dees spoke of their work with the Southern Poverty Law Center to an audience at the Sheldon Concert Hall. I needed such a reminder that the work of preserving and extending the gains of the civil rights movement continues and sometimes succeeds. As my friend and I drove out to the League of Women Voters office to pick up my beloved for dinner afterwards—she had to skip the speeches for a meeting—we found ourselves remembering the work of another hero of the era of civil rights, Pope John, XXIII whose work, like that of Dr. King, is a favorite right-wing target. My friend (a Jesuit priest and one of God’s soldiers if ever there were such) and I surprised ourselves with the conviction that the work of John XXIII will survive present attempts to undo it.

The Jesus of Luke is said to have claimed in last Sunday’s gospel (Revised Common Lectionary) that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” I take this hard teaching to propound a choice like that of Abraham, when God demanded that he sacrifice his son, Isaac. In order to accede to God’s command Abraham must not only sacrifice his beloved son, but he must also abandon the ethical universe wherein dwell parents and spouses, children and siblings, friends and neighbors. It’s the call to heroic action, easy enough to deconstruct as hubris or self-will—or mere silliness.

I’m willing to be silly in a good cause, I guess. For Abraham gains the ethical by renouncing it. The justice envisioned by liberal hope is unattainable on its face. But as Kierkegaard’s Abraham morphs into The Knight of Faith, his choice proclaims that with God all things are possible. There was a good deal of snarky criticism of last month’s reenactment of the March for Jobs and Justice. If I were ten years younger, I’d have gone to Washington to stand in solidarity with others there. As it was, I contributed financially and expressed solidarity virtually. I continue to believe in the possibility, however remote, that our collective choices might turn towards the good in us and the world we have been given—in this life, on this planet.

None of us, after all, is here forever. But the world, and the gift of it, a gift that Robert Frost called “The Gift Outright,” though they may not be forever, will remain long after we and our categories are gone.