Falling out of Time

Falling out of Time:

The Afterlife of a Left-Leaning Humanist

Our pathetic fear of death, our suppression of every thought of death: it’s evident in our behind-the-scenes burials and our bankrupting medical expenditures to ward off death for one more year, one more day.  It’s a fear as pervasive as the repression of Victorian-era sex. The latter surreptitiously drew moths to its flame of lust, just as our fear of death dovetails with tragic youth suicides. I like to tell myself that I’m above this irrational fear, that I’ve faced and overcome it. I agree with Socrates that a dreamless sleep is the state one should enter after a day well spent—or a final night of torment. At my age (75), we are all on death row. How we take it depends on constitutions as innate as eye color. There are unhappy constitutions that might commit suicide after a windfall, and happy ones that, if sentenced to die at dawn, could nonetheless take pleasure in a glorious sunrise. We are all in between, but I’m closer to the second pole.

But has my day been well spent? If the question is asked of me as the member of a generation, of the human race, the answer is no, it has not been well spent. The world that we leave behind is in a terrible state. It need not have been. Nothing can exonerate us for our near destruction of this planet: whole swathes of continents despoiled, oceans awash in plastic and garbage, sustainable patterns of life disrupted. Specialism, the lifeblood of nationalism and egotism, blinds us all. If our consumerism fuels planetary destruction, we tell ourselves that it’s happening elsewhere. Individual striving, as opposed to cooperation, is the thrust we give all our actions. Are those who, like me, came closest to an awareness of their collective responsibility, who did have an awareness of the vacuity of egotistical and materialistic striving: are we less or are we more culpable for having known better?

My sense, equal parts secularized biblical guilt and the formative influence of the Existentialist philosophy of my youth, tells me that there is no erasing our collective guilt, certainly not by claiming that it was inevitable, much less by Jesus wiping our slates clean. Even in a crowd of convicts, every crime is distinct and, as Sartre would have it, committed freely. I would like to recall the moments of recognition when I knew I was not obliged to remain part of the crowd. What was best in my life was inseparable from what might have been just good. I know the Scylla and Charybdis of our universal voyage. In order to act ethically we have to break with the crowd. In order to act effectively we have to rejoin it. The delusion of oppositional humanists like me lies in our self-satisfaction for having gotten halfway there. Halfway is nowhere.

With this self-assessment in mind, I’ll try to sum up a certain theme and its variants. The theme gives my unexceptional life some particularity, and it might also denote our present place in the universal journey. As it happens, there is a certain kind of out-of-the-ordinary experience that has preoccupied me for most of my life. I’ve studied it in literature and history, theorized about it in publications, and sought it in my life experience. It is the occurrence of an unexpectedly heightened meaning associated with so-called mysticism and often identical with the peripetiae of introspective narrative. Since this experience stands out in the continuity of time, it divides a before from an after. It sometimes coincides with a fundamental decision. At its most decisive and most ineffable, it counts as a mystical conversion. I am convinced that a susceptibility to or belief in this sort of experience distinguishes me from the less reflective; and that it also separates my generation from later ones. Its absence distinguishes contemporary society from its antecedents.

The great nineteenth-century novelists understood more clearly than us the historicity of the mystical experiences of their protagonists. Their inner world-historical dramas would eventually be reduced, first, to mere psychological affect and eventually to a blind psycho-chemical event. We think of those states of mind as timeless psychological events which might even be induced by drugs. But states of mind are filters that sort out and focus realities. We should pay attention to what they tell us. Their focus of the reality of unique historical situations distinguishes the heightened meaningfulness that I have in mind from the esoteric associations of the so-called mystical. Mysticism claims transcendent authority from above or beyond. Meaningfulness is what we discern and confirm in the here and now. It’s our gifted creative reading of our existence. We seize it and build upon it, thereby realizing who and why we are. What I have in mind is an apt subject for literature because it is the individual’s own proto-narrative of self-invention. It’s how we overcome conformity to become what we have in us to be.

Take two of the greatest historical novelists of their century: Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo. Since casual readers might be inclined to read Tolstoy as a moralist and Hugo as a sentimentalist, it must be noted that either author positions the extraordinary experience of his characters squarely in history. War and Peace and Les Misérables are constructed to encompass the sweep of the nineteenth century.  Either novel focuses the moral transition projected for the nineteenth century within the exceptional and transitory experience of a central character and in counterpoint to the historical turning points over which the individual has no control: Prince Andrei at the Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace or Jean Valjeanin the Restauration and, adjunct to his personal plot thread, in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Readers might recoil at the sentimentalism of Hugo’s work, his manner of stacking the moralistic deck to proclaim the overwhelming power of evil and the underdog force of the good.

Two things must be said on Hugo’s behalf. First of all, his deck stacking serves to illustrate an essential problem, one like those contrived by the moral philosophers who invented the street car fatality that could be prevented by a hypothetical subject’s throwing an innocent bystander in the path of an approaching juggernaut. For Hugo, the question is, Can good prevail in a world where everything is arrayed against it? Second, Hugo’s historical panorama of his age interpolates this moral question as the fulcrum of the century. “Monseigneur Bienvenu, l’évêque de Digne,” who launches Jean Valjean on the path to goodness, embodies the pure core of a corrupted French nobility and Catholic clergy. Can their erstwhile spark of nobility be rekindled in the tormented superior individual of a new proletarian class? Can the social rifts and mortal wounds of history be healed? Can goodness be resurrected in a human nature afflicted with oppression and injustice? Among today’s wretched of the earth, struggling to find peace and light, there are surely enough Jean Valjeans. Poverty and oppression breed solidarity and generosity as well as viciousness.

In the developed world, we are more often oppressed by conformism, mediocrity, and materialism than by persecution and poverty. Nonetheless, the likelihood of a conversion to selflessness is no less improbable. Aware of this improbability, Hugo has recourse to the language of medieval mysticism in rationalizing the conversion of his hero. Jean Valjean is “illuminated” by a divine “spark” of the soul, “une  première étincelle, un élément divin, incorruptible dans ce monde, immortel dans l’autre.” Why this nod toward the ineffable? Since Hugo knows the improbability of his protagonist’s moral awakening and perseverance, the narrator subjects him to all the twists and turns of conscience and leads him through mortal struggles and an anguished dream of icy alienation and death. The author is aware that being good is almost impossibly difficult. No one need object that Hugo manipulates, exaggerates, and relies on impossible coincidences and caricatures of virtue and vice. All of that serves to highlight the notion of an epochal conversion capable of affecting the world. Paradigms don’t require naturalism or facility. Questions aren’t mandated to be answers. Answers have to come from us.

A second quasi-mystical epiphany illustrates the compression of an entire century in the inner transition of a momentary experience. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei is an adjutant to the panic-stricken Russian general as the Napoleonic army overwhelms the Russian and Austrian forces at Austerlitz. Duty-bound, Andrei leads a desperate but inspiring charge against the French line. As he charges forward in the face of death, he enters the dreamy state of those facing extreme peril. He wonders at the theater of the absurd of a Russian and a French soldier battling like children over possession of a meaningless object, a cannon mop. After being knocked off his feet by an invisible blow, he lies, immobile and gravely wounded, on his back, marveling at the sight of the infinite calm sky above. It seems to Prince Andrei that this is the sole object of importance, absurdly unnoticed and ignored until now. Human strife and striving have lost all meaning in view of some overarching truth. In the space of a few instants, Tolstoy’s protagonist transitions from the glory and heroism of the Napoleonic era to the pacifism and social criticism that anticipate a subsequent age. It is a mystical passage but also historically specific, concrete in detail, yet also eternal in its scope. For Tolstoy, the durability of the conviction will depend on what one makes of it.

The German or Russian literature that I read as a teenager was replete with such passages. In Anna Karenina, the aristocratic protagonist Levin spends a day toiling to harvest hay with the peasants and spends the night bedded on a haystack, transfixed by the starry sky. The Russian Orthodox priest in Alexander Kuprin’s short story Anathema clandestinely reads Tolstoi but upon receiving instructions to pronounce the latter anathema instead lays aside his clerical vestments and sets off to embrace the life of the common people. In Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, the aging merchant, bereaved by the loss of his son and heir, experiences a mystical oneness with all humanity while reading Schopenhauer in his garden.

I, too, devoured Schopenhauer. I understood his condemnation of all striving as well as old Buddenbrook’s apotheosis of resignation and mystical union with all humanity. I could cite many similar literary examples. I was hardly alone in reading literature in pursuit of mystical illumination, and I am not entirely alone in transitioning from quietism to the radical activism of my generation, toward an engagement that sought egalitarian solidarity and opposed war and mercenary individualism. The dynamic of those literary passages morphed into a radical political stance, bolstered by Marxism and by disdain for the cultural philistinism of twentieth-century America. I was certainly not alone in this transition. The intelligentsia skews left and skews literary. This is not always, yet often enough the case to raise the question whether there isn’t some deeper connection between reading literature and resisting the status quo. Literature represents an intensification of experience, be it representational or imagined. Lyric poetry embodies and activates an intense personal absorption. Film, theater, and dance collectivize artistic experience without erasing its personal core.

Banality is our nemesis. Anything intensely imagined stands in opposition to the unreflectively conformist state of mind with which every radical of the Left or Right is at odds. Intellect is by definition aloof, even when it is in quest of reunion with the commonplace. The type of the autonomous reader, my type, harbors within himself the above-mentioned oppositional intellectual who stands apart from the crowd but does not succeed in rejoining or leading it, those like me, the halfway-nowhere radicals whose presence is legion. Conversely, however, the disappearance of us autonomous readers threatens to weaken the inner truth-seeking compass that guides the mind and enables the “breakthroughs” of those mystical conversions. The term breakthrough originated in the medieval mysticism of Meister Eckhart. The concept assumes that there are segregated spheres of being whose partitions the questing mind penetrates in a moment of transcendent recognition. We live in a public universe in which everything is supposed to be accessible and transparent, yet we are as segregated from the experience of the harried migrant, the lifer inmate, or impoverished fellow citizen, as segregated as the bourgeois readers of Hugo’s Les Misérables from the poor whose stories he told.

Now that I am daily contemplating a death by ALS, a death not unlike that of the historian Tony Judt and perhaps comparable to the near-death experience of Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, immobilized and bereft on the battlefield of Austerlitz, I see an ultimate vision coming into focus. It is of a world infinitely fascinating in its details and interconnections yet no less vulnerable to waste, destruction, desolation, and cosmic death. There are infinite combinations and there are truths. The world I intuit is not owned by some to the exclusion of others, not demarcated by any valid lines of nation and property, not built by the rich and despoiled by the poor. The world is raw material for profit-driven capitalism, for the rule of selfishness and obliviousness. The machine must be controlled or turned off before it consumes us all.

What about mystical experience? What lent that deeper and more intense meaning to all those breakthrough experiences? They were imagined ex post facto. The conversion experience is constituted retrospectively. You have tried a hundred times to quit smoking, using every trick and ritual, but when you casually let that last cigarette be the last, the moment is set to appear in hindsight as a sacred turning point. You were charmed a dozen times by romantic encounters, but perhaps the least dramatic of them which nonetheless led to a life-changing relationship became in hindsight a magical moment, its every detail glowing with portent. If my last mystical insight acquires real meaning it will have to be through the actions of others. I wish them courage, solidarity, and joy.

Andrew Weeks, September 30, 2022