Wednesday
The talk with my son that I described in Monday’s post reminded me of talks with my own father where I was sure he was wrong. I’ve since concluded that I was not as right as I thought I was and that our disagreements came down to our different life arcs. Our arguments came to mind as Darien explained to me where I had gone astray.
Our discussion was a version of the interaction described in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas:
“The opinions of children and parents, of the young and the old, are naturally opposite, by the contrary effects of hope and despondency, of expectation and experience, without crime or folly on either side. The colours of life in youth and age appear different, as the face of Nature in spring and winter. And how can children credit the assertions of parents which their own eyes show them to be false?
Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives. The old man trusts wholly to slow contrivance and gradual progression; the youth expects to force his way by genius, vigour, and precipitance. The old man pays regard to riches, and the youth reverences virtue. The old man deifies prudence; the youth commits himself to magnanimity and chance.
Today I apologize belatedly to my father, who died five years ago, since I now understand more what he was saying. He was a fatalistic determinist who didn’t, at least in theory, believe that we had any control over our lives. At the same time, he devoted his life to social justice and could point to some notable accomplishments. He played a key role in desegregating Sewanee (both college and community) and also fought effectively against sexism and homophobia. He also made helped preserve Sewanee’s forests.
Knowing all this, I couldn’t understand his determinism. Didn’t his very behavior contradict his professed beliefs? I pointed this out to him numerous times and couldn’t understand why he didn’t see the contradiction.
A talk with my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar provided new insight. Dolar sometimes teaches a Kafka-Beckett class at the University of Chicago, and in our conversations he explained that Beckett actually is an optimist, even though he writes plays about people waiting for someone who never shows up or characters buried up to their necks in sand. Mladen’s point is that such characters show resilience even when everything around them militates against it. Here’s a passage from Westword Ho!
Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.”
I myself have never warmed to Beckett but my father was a fan, teaching him often in his French literature classes. In reflecting upon my father’s history, I better see where he was coming from.
After all, he was a man who witnessed Dachau three days after it was liberated. Stationed in Munich during the final months of World War II, he took Germans through the concentration camp so that they couldn’t dismiss it as American propaganda.
All this happened when he was 22, a very impressionable age at which one’s view of the world is largely set. (To understand a poet, Emory professor Jerome Beaty once told me, look at what is going on when he or she was 21.) My father witnessed the horrors of World War II and then saw it end with the atomic bomb. He had every reason to be skeptical of humans’ potential for good.
Rather than drag him down, however, his fatalism kept him from despair, as it did a fellow soldier in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Interestingly, his fatalism bolstered him against surrender. If nothing matters, he seems to have reasoned, then I might as well try to do good in the world. I now understand better his affinity for Pascal and Sartre, both of whom he taught regularly.
Pascal’s wager is that, since we can’t know for sure whether or not there is a God, we should hedge our bets and act as though God exists. Sartre’s existential answer is similar: if the universe is absurd, choose a personal code and act upon it. So my father reasoned, to the befuddlement of his eldest son.
My own vision was formed during “the age of the great prosperity,” as Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the 1950’s and 1960s. Even though the Vietnam War had been underway for years when I turned 21, we were still confident that (as Martin Luther King had said) the arc of history bends towards justice. For me, social justice and optimism were bound up with each other. As I saw it, fatalism was just a psychological coping mechanism designed to shield oneself against disappointment.
I can’t characterize my son’s worldview as of yet, but I could see that he is sometimes frustrated by my bookish approach to the nation’s issues. He wants to shape the nation’s politics directly, not wait for a college English professor to show students how reading masterworks will help them become better voters (to cite Martha Nussbaum). Why should I listen to you, he all but said, when there are others with a better grasp of how Amercan politics work. I’m just a distant spectator, not a participant, and he’s wants people who are more engaged.
In this way, our differences may be less historical and more like what Johnson describes:
The old man trusts wholly to slow contrivance and gradual progression; the youth expects to force his way by genius, vigor, and precipitance.
I don’t claim that either one of us is right. To quote Tennyson’s Ulysses, “He works his work, I mine.” Indeed, I am relieved that he is willing to go into areas that feel beyond me and know that he needs other guides to help him. I will assist him in whatever ways I can, which include lending a sympathetic ear. Of course, I’ll also alert him to works of literature whenever they appear relevant.
The greatest gift he can give me is flourishing in the world. Then I will know for sure that I raised him right.
