(The) Inner Life
The vagueness of the phrase belies its importance. Whether lodged in the quiet turmoil of “identity crisis” or the stark spotlight of “existential” or the sociological metaphor of “the lonely crowd” or the challenge of “growing up absurd” or the bald assertion of “modern man” who lives in “an age of anxiety,” the purport is the same: something inner has changed and something inner is amiss. Modern times, besieged and defined by self-consciousness, kept taking its own dark, thrilling pulse. What was to be done was anybody’s guess.
In all cases, the uneasy feeling was clear—for all the industrial, electrifying achievement some demanding prices were being paid. How were people to find their way in an increasingly faithless world? They could find new faiths but the political ones—Nazism, Communism, both Soviet and Chinese—were brutal. They could find comfort in distraction, work, entertainment, travel, accumulating money and possessions, but those arenas did not add up to faith. They could renew their faith and many people found that renewal in some form of evangelical Christianity. Many did not, however. Many were resolutely secular or, not even resolutely. There did not seem for many such people to be any real choice. Modern times seemed to have left the old faiths with their rituals and demands behind. In a world of marketed haste, “out of date” was a damning term.
Most adults would not choose to go through life carrying a pocketful of uncertainty. For better or worse, adulthood is a confirmation of predilections. Yet modern times offered very little certainty. Not much was time-honored. Those photographs from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century where a group of artisans stared forthrightly at the camera, assured about who they were and what they did, came to seem like a remonstrance from another world, the one where one day resolutely followed another, the one that was not driven so totally by machines and what machines made possible. However much those blacksmiths and wheelwrights and ironmongers, to say nothing of sheepherders or cowboys, may have suffered in their devotion to their pursuits, they were denizens of a time-sanctified domain. They knew what they did and why they did it. Their dignity was palpable.
The nostalgia that has always informed modernity is understandable when we look at those photographs. Wasn’t everything simpler? We are peering into a world without therapists, anti-depressants, mood swings, and an extensive vocabulary of pathological missteps. Back then, personality took pride of place and each trait played out as it played out: Tony was hot tempered, Teresa was haughty, Joe was sunny, Mary was parsimonious. So it went with human beings as they struck anvils and darned socks. Their inner lives were part of their tangible, daily actions. They had not yet swallowed an age. They were not modern.
The age was at once vaster and faster than any one life—an agonizing crux that was hard to avoid. What a person gained in a sense of eventfulness amid the constant boosting of what was new—the modern frissons—often came at the price of self-respect. A person was someone targeted by marketing. Even as they readily participated in modern times, human beings were abased by the brisk, heartless terms of modernity—here today and useless tomorrow. No dignity lay in that equation, only much free-of-charge contempt.
Given the dire yet amiably advertised terms—get on the bus or be left on the ash heap of history—all those phrases that I cited in the first paragraph seem like the bleating of many forlorn lambs. To be sure, a certain bravado informed the likes of existentialism but when one examined that philosophical stance it seemed exactly that—a stance rather than a way to live a life. Modern times were good at critiquing emptiness because they knew the locale so well. Paradox—the faithless faith of the lone, somehow moral individual—came easily. When, across the ocean, the American hipster took on that bravado, it felt again more a stance than a life. Things did not end well for the likes of Jack Kerouac or Neil Cassady. Things don’t necessarily end well for anyone but to not look at the endgame part of the picture seems sophistry, a celebration in a void. Hunger for the road was not an inner direction. The Buddha told Jack Kerouac that more than once—the road went nowhere.
The inner life that modern times highlighted was flawed, the sum of countless debilities, gnawed by one Zeitgeist after another, an invisible stratum designated by a panoply of inventive terms—id, ego, superego, psyche, anima, subconscious, complex, archetype. As endless books, movies, and uplifting speakers proclaimed, those insides were eminently fixable. Each individual could hoist the weight of modernity and be a better person for it. Attitude was everything and in the face of the neon façade that modern times constituted, such a response made sense. The cheer that once emanated from God—He made your imperishable Soul and that Soul was indubitably yours—could be more or less manufactured from the relentless materials of daily, how-you-doing existence. How many lower-case souls crucified themselves on the pitiless cross of betterment will never be tallied.
Robert Frost, a poet who lived through modern times, though who, at first glance, did not seem to be a modernist, put it directly: “What to make of a diminished thing?” He was writing about a bird at summer’s end, but, as the implicated narrator, he was writing about people, too. The answer is that any human being has a hard time constructing a sane sense of time based on one mere lifetime. We tend to put our faces against the shop window and wish for more. The extent of the diminishing is hard to judge and easy to overestimate. Making wrong comparisons comes easy, as does complaint and wringing one’s discontented hands. Yet the close to unbearable anguish conveyed in many a modern work (I think of a “quiet” novel like The Moviegoer by Walker Percy) is unavoidable. The feeling of being haunted amid much touted enthusiasm will not go away. So much has been promised and so little of substance delivered. Alone, alone, alone—no bells ring out that irreducible word.
PLEASE NOTE: I will not be posting on May 22 but will resume these posts on May 29.