Preface
When those who live in an age peer out from the sticky morass of compelling moments and memories and attempt to define that age, they may be startled by the difficulty of what seemed self-evident. The vitality of being is a strong filament but a partial one. For, to begin with, how do people know they live in a certain age, an age being more than the rule of a king or a leader, an age being some sort of metaphysical entity writ large in time? Is Zeitgeist like air and water, something that naturally gets into everyone’s system? The pervasiveness of the modern seems especially specious. In usage since the sixteenth century, the invincible word has been a totem to indicate the up-to-date, the contemporary, the with-it. How much better it is to be conversant with what is new and technologically happening, to say nothing of being alive rather than dead. How good it is to be modern! A smug yet perky aura of self-congratulation predominates: “I’m modern and good. You’re old-fashioned and bad.”
That aura forms a strong contrast to the woe that much of humanity experienced in the past century. (I write this on the hundredth anniversary of the onset of the “Great War” that haunts these essays.) The inventive impetus that gave humanity jet engines, television, and smart phones among other excitements also gave humanity the atomic bomb, poisonous gas, and drone strikes. To take a philosophical, win-some-lose-some attitude about the gifts of invention risked a ruinous passivity, as if a human being were nothing more than the lucky or unlucky recipient of whatever technology happened down the road. The term “couch potato” is humorous but, as a vision of human stature, not so funny. For every endorsement about how thrilling it was to be a modern person, there was a counter-statement about being a member of a very lonely, very threatened crowd.
The word modern has been buzzing around my head for a lifetime. I wanted to pull that buzz into further words and find out what was there. What I discovered, among many things, was an equation: the greater the feeling of dispossession, the more intense the identification with the modern. As traditions, locales, habits, even foods and clothes fell to the wayside of time, what filled those voids was Something New—an ideology, a product, a vacation destination, an outlook on life, a mate. The possibilities seemed more or less endless. Never had abundance been so abundant. The commissar, the avant-garde artist, the ad-man, and the nuclear engineer were all on the same inventive page. Fright and exhilaration did the fox trot, the cha-cha, and the jitterbug through the modern night. They were, in the now-bloody, now-smiling annals they wrote together, quite a couple.
I have ventured an equation but to reduce the welter of modern times to a formula would be a terrible reduction. I am of the era not above it. The essay, that equivocal lancet that Montaigne forged, has afforded me a handy means of confining large matters in small spaces. My goal is not that different from his—to locate my own dignity within the flux of heedless purpose. Though I have not inserted myself into each essay, I am there trying to figure out where to turn, thus asking the question, “Is this a way to live?” To say that life goes on is a poor answer and a summons to write essays.
My verbs trundle back and forth between the present matter and the enormity of the twentieth century, between what is and what was. What was informs everything about what is yet remains the Past, that country that beckons but says nothing. Whether past or present, daily life feigns plausibility, yet to those who opine to any assertion, “It was always so,” all I can say is go read an account of Hiroshima or thalidomide children or the myriad killing fields. Then ponder the number of people on the planet and the accelerated, resource-draining demands that population is making. The mysteries of emotion remain but the means those emotions may seize upon, in the name of whatever shibboleth, have been hugely magnified. Modern times have never lacked for intensity.
For that very reason—what might be called “the wages of friction”—they will not go on forever. My coda points to what I see as a further human chapter. We could be less automatic and more aware. We could esteem being as much as doing. We could value soul as much as self. We could locate accurate roots in praise and celebration. We could let poetry into daily life. We could put the growing and preparation of food at its proper center of life. The evidence, thus far, is profoundly mixed, if not downright degraded, but we could live in what I call in the coda to this endeavor, “Earth Time.”
That feeling for possibility is at the core of the Emersonian impulse that I have tried to honor. The topical ambition of his essays and his biographical pieces (Representative Men) may seem naïve, the hortatory tone wearing. At times, amid so much afflatus, one wonders what exactly Emerson is boosting. It seems wise, however, to keep our eyes on the prize. To write about “The Conduct of Life” seems dusty and musty, yet what else matters? People in modern times dressed up that conduct in many coats—ideological, theoretical, scientific, semi-spiritual, and pseudo-scientific—but in their excitement over contemporary discoveries they often lost feeling for the timelessness of the human situation. They also committed hideous excesses.
Sometimes Emerson stood on a hill and acted as if it were a mountain but the longing for the view was understandable. He wanted better for the human race—not newer or larger or faster but somehow better. To go beyond making wishes demands an elevated candor; in Emerson’s words: “We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.” Though my conclusions often are chastened by the ravages and conceits of modern history, “the true fire” remains.
I’m looking forward to this series. I’m grateful that I can afford to live a pretty authentic life. It seems like it will all come down to giving access to land to more and more people.
In the face of the inevitable acceleration of accelerating change, timelessness of this ilk is humanity's only hope of survival, should we prove worthy of surviving. Thank you for this important contribution.