Midlife crisis: the first stirrings of a real awareness of
human mortality. Somewhere in our thirties the fact of death, individual and
intimate, begins to become a clear reality for us. In youth the same intuition
comes only in a few ways: in war, with premature disease, through deep religious feeling.... If it's
too severe to say that up to the moment of that intuition life is mere
frivolity, it's nonetheless fair to say that it lacks mass. It is a matter of
some curiosity that our culture seems only recently to have chosen to make of
this particular crisis of awareness a standardized rite of passage.
I wonder if I feel compelled any longer to search for
something, anything, that I can truthfully call substantial. It seems to me
that I felt such a compulsion once, perhaps when I was much younger, perhaps as
recently as last week. Living under necessity has detuned me. Often it seems to
me that I can no longer think, that whatever thoughtstuff I have available is
spent entirely in the exercise of a domestic routine. I admit offhand the
obvious: domestic routine patiently nurtured becomes domestic virtue and so
transformed is reward by nature. Good sense affirms this and I will not
doubt it. But that such patient virtue is the crowning achievement of human
struggle some intuition, stirred perhaps by minor devils and by deities
deposed, rails against, and I take warning. This thoughtlessness is lifelessness.
We must have our saints. We live in the shelter of their
imperfections.
We constantly face new terrors. Even in our most peaceful
moments, the catalogue of our fears is ever expanding. Condemned to deal with a
reality preternaturally out of scale, we find ourselves divorced from our own
bodies, the only place where anything even remotely like morality can be
rooted.
I can't remember
my father's ever
passing me without saying something to me, or tickling me, or
mussing my hair, or inquiring about
my health, or dragging me
to the floor to wrestle. He
seemed compelled to touch me somehow, in body or in spirit, which
I relished in my childhood,
wondered about in my youth, repulsed in
my adolescence, feared having
lost in my maturity.
Is it true that all this is the result of rebellion only,
the fruit of hard headedness? Can it be true that there is no way to commit to
reconciliation other than at last to collapse entirely into conformity with a
world we had hoped as youths that we would outgrow?
To be understood at all, America must be understood morally.
At its structural root, America
is designed to encourage the free operation of moral principles, that is, to
foster the exercise of natural moral understanding. America
prospers as her moral integrity flourishes; America declines as her moral
integrity declines. In the fundamental recesses of the soul, at that level at
which he understands beyond the possibility of articulation, the American is a
moralist. Intuitively he understands not only that he is capable of nothing but moral judgments but also
that his very existence therefore compels
him to make them. This compulsion of necessity demands "discrimination," a word thoughtlessly anathematized in the murk of the current social
lexicon --- an unfortunate circumstance that works to confuse his innate moral sense, restricting the scope of its
operation to the merely juridical. Hence his emphasis, short-sighted and pharisaic,
on fact.
It requires but little elaboration to demonstrate that the
world has expended a great deal of effort in institutionalizing death. The
phenomenon of death-in-life is adequately documented and is perfectly
observable anyway to those of us who do not wish to exhaust ourselves with the
documents. Life itself is always more elusive. Constitutionally antagonistic to
analysis, life flees that method which seeks to break it into its component
parts. Life is inherently synthetic, as any student of elementary biology will
attest; analysis is a particularly human phenomenon and frequently constitutes
the greatest misunderstanding and abuse of reason. Yet most of our history is
based on such analysis. For us, analysis always precedes synthesis; hence our
current premonitions of genetic engineering. The secrets of "life"
having been successfully analyzed, it now becomes the task of the scientist to
attempt the next logical step, that is, synthesis. That this is a false (as
well as a diabolical) reasoning seems scarcely to have occurred to anyone. If
ever there was reason for intelligent
and moral men to rise in furor, this is it. The error of human history lies
simply in attempting repeatedly to take the kingdom of heaven by storm, to
wrest from nature what is already ours if only we will permit it to develop
along its natural lines. The human mania for control is misplaced; were men to
control themselves, the extension of control to areas not within human scope
would be unnecessary. Failing in the attempt (failing to make the attempt) to
control themselves, men choose instead to control that which is exterior to
them, not realizing that this is a false, potentially fatal, pursuit.
America's fundamental principle is the
principle of religious liberty.
Regardless of the subsequent vagaries of her development, it remains defensible
to hold as true that America
was founded on the religious integrity of the individual. All else is an outgrowth
of this principle. Politically speaking (that is, speaking of the real, the
noumenal, distribution of power in its phenomenal manifestations) America is the
child not of the Enlightenment but of the Reformation. It is the testing ground
for the questions posed and the answers posited by the Reformation.
Weary of analysis, of vivisection, we turn slowly toward
some synthesis, some hope of unity which, in turn, grows as monstrous, as
wearying as that precedent paradigm from which we sought to escape.
Once I suffered from a fear, which did not materialize.
Some time later I suffered from a hope, which also did not materialize. I have
lived the greater part of
my life in the debris strewn between these two
moments.
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