Nostalgia

Going Home in a Homeless World

Anthony Esolen

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781621578482
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Alone among the creatures of the world, man suffers a pang both bitter and sweet. It is an ache for the homecoming. The Greeks called it nostalgia. Post-modern man, homeless almost by definition, cannot understand nostalgia. If he is a progressive, dreaming of a utopia to come, he dismisses it contemptuously, eager to bury a past he despises. If he is a reactionary, he sentimentalizes it, dreaming of a lost golden age. In this profound reflection, Anthony Esolen explores the true meaning of nostalgia and its place in the human heart. Drawing on the great works of Western literature from the Odyssey to Flannery O'Connor, he traces the development of this fundamental longing from the pagan's desire for his earthly home, which most famously inspired Odysseys' heroic return to Ithaca, to its transformation under Christianity. The doctrine of the fall of man forestalls sentimental traditionalism by insisting that there has been no Eden since Eden. And the revelation of heaven as our true and final home, directing man's longing to the next world, paradoxically strengthens and ennobles the pilgrim's devotion to his home in this world. In our own day, Christian nostalgia stands in frank opposition to the secular usurpation of this longing. Looking for a city that does not exist, the progressive treats original sin, which afflicts everyone, as mere political error, which afflicts only his opponents. To him, history is a long tale of misery with nothing to teach us. Despising his fathers, he lives in a world without piety. Only the future, which no one can know, is real to him. It is an idol that justifies all manner of evil and folly. Nostalgia rightly understood is not an invitation to repeat the sins of the past or to repudiate what experience and reflection have taught us, but to hear the call of sanity and sweetness again. Perhaps we will shake our heads as if awaking from a bad and feverish dream and, coming to ourselves, resolve, like the Prodigal, to "arise and go to my father's house."

CHAPTER ONE

Man in Time

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12

I once asked a college friend what he believed was the most important criterion for judging between good and evil. He gave me the Darwinian answer: survival. That got things backwards and was beside the point. What is good will allow man to thrive because it is good, and man has been made for good and not for evil; but not everything that gives a man an advantage in the struggle for existence is good. Robbing his neighbor is not good, though it would give him the money to impress the vivacious Miss Lovegold, and that in turn might result in marriage—and then think how grasping he must learn to be.

If we make the Kantian move on the chessboard and say that if everybody robbed everybody else, there would no longer be any property to rob, I reply that such were the cultural habits of the pagan Germanic tribes, so long as it was other tribes they robbed. “That was a good king,” says the Christian poet of Beowulf, speaking with a subtly ironical air of Scyld Sceafing, the deceased warlord of the Danes, whose claim to being good was that he smashed the mead-benches of his neighbors and made them pay tribute. If we combine Kant with Darwin and say that such habits do not conduce well to the survival of your people, I reply that they did not kill off the Germans who swarmed over the Roman empire, and besides, mankind is no longer in any danger of disappearing from the earth. We are going to be around as sure as the sky is blue.

If we are reductive materialists and say that our notions of good and evil have been bred in us by the pressures of survival back in the ages when that was by no means assured, I answer, besides that there is no evidence for that claim, that that turns things backwards again and evades the issue. What do we do now? It is not sufficient to say that Johnny must be honest with his employees merely because his parents taught him so, nor does it alter the question if you extend his parents backward into the days of stone knives and bearskins. We say instead that Johnny must be honest with his employees because honesty is good, and that because honesty is good, man does not merely survive by it, he thrives by it, as men have seen for as long as men have dwelt upon the earth, in every part of the world, in cultures at every stage of technological development. That is likely why his parents have taught him to be honest, and their parents before them, and we do well to heed the testimony of the ages.

But my friend was on to something after all. He didn’t know it, because he had not read any philosophy or theology, and neither had I, at that time—keep in mind that we were American students at one of the most famous colleges in the world. We were not likely to have learned much from the past. He had intuited something about man’s relation to time. But because of the pseudoscientific reductions he had uncritically accepted, he could express no difference in that regard between man and a flea. Those biters and burrowers also are driven to survive. We sense, though, that time for man is different from time for a flea, though the bodies of both should age and decay and turn to dust. What this difference means for man’s home, and his homecoming, we shall see.

Consider the above sonnet by Shakespeare. In his day, a collection of sonnets was not a grab bag of love poems tossed in at random. It was a highly organized and intricate work of art, and each sonnet was a piece of the whole. Shakespeare has thus begun his sequence of sonnets with seventeen poems that all have to do with one way, the most obvious way, to defeat the fell purposes of Time. You have children.

So the narrator of the sonnets, whom we should not naively identify with the poet himself, begins by telling the young man whom he addresses that he had better get married soon and have children, because Time, that “delves the parallels in beauty’s brow” (Sonnet 60, line 10), will be doing its inevitable work. As spring passes into summer and summer into fall, and as the sheaves are brought in on a bier, like the body of an old man with a white beard brought to the burial ground, so must we too pass away. The urgency is not for the human race but for the individual person. It seems but a few years ago when I was strong and not a single hair on my head was anything but glossy black. I have arthritis developing in my knees. If I eat as much as I used to, I will put on weight—and I have put on weight. The malady that will send me out of this world may now be working unseen and unknown in my body. And I see my fresh-faced children, and they, though not children anymore, cheer my heart.

Again, Shakespeare puts it most brilliantly, striking home to the point where childhood greets old age and makes a man feel young again. So says King Polixenes about his nine-year-old son:

If at home, sir,

He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;

Now my sworn friend, and now mine enemy;

My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all;

He makes a July’s day short as December,

And with his varying childness cures in me

Thoughts that would thick my blood. (The Winter’s Tale, I.ii. 199–205)

We are not talking merely about boosting the old man’s metabolism. He has thoughts that would thicken his blood; these thoughts, in our quiet moods, in our old age, must be of the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, the things we have done that we cannot undo, the things we should have done that we left undone, and death. No other creature upon earth experiences anything remotely resembling these thoughts. We are immersed in time, as all things are, but we alone can grasp it as it passes, can stand above it or beside it. We alone are conscious of age and death. We alone can sin and know that we have sinned. We alone can mourn our lost innocence.

It is not then survival that we ask from our children, but hope. I am not yet speaking in specifically Christian terms. At the beginning of the same play I have cited above, two gentlemen are speaking about another young lad, the son of King Leontes. The counselor from Bohemia tells the counselor from Sicily that his people “have an unspeakable comfort of your young Prince Mamillius; it is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note.” The Sicilian agrees: “It is a gallant child, one that indeed physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh. They that walk on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man” (I.i). The boy “physics,” or gives healing medicine to, those who look upon him, and the lame man who is near the grave wants to live if for no other reason than to see how a boy of such intelligence and grace should grow to be a man worthy of his childhood.

Although the child is at the center of both the sonnet and these reflections in The Winter’s Tale, there is a difference. The speaker of the sonnets has a narrow view of the child. The proposed son is to be a mirror in which the young man will see his beauty born again, an heir to that beauty, a bounty that comes from using your wealth wisely while you have it rather than to “make worms thine heir.” The child is an instrument of egotism.

But Shakespeare—I am speaking of the author, not the voice in the sonnets—is the playwright of his age who most boldly shows his love of children and his sense of the peculiar evil in offenses against them, which he never leaves unpunished. The child, like every other living person, is a bearer of legal rights, though no more than that, and if we are to believe the philosopher Peter Singer, much less than that, particularly if he is newborn or if a defect of birth makes him more vulnerable to someone’s desire to have him out of the way. The child is a vessel of hope—the foot soldier in the vanguard against time, which is also a battle against the ruins we have made in time. He is the bearer of a hope not in mere survival but in spiritual regeneration, not in life as bios, which vitality the sheep and cattle have, but in the life of life, the zoe that is divine. Yes, we know that the child will grow into a man, a sinner who will likely spoil some things in his turn, but when we see him uncorrupted, we can understand, even if not yet in any specifically theological sense, why Jesus said, “Let the little children be, and do not hinder them from coming to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).

Perhaps that explains why people in our time who have no faith tend also to have no children. You might think the reverse, that if you do not dwell in the precincts of heaven, looking to the horizon whence glory shall come, you will be thrown back with all the greater force upon the natural expedient and attempt to “live” forever through your healthy brood of progeny. But that is to think mechanistically, as if the human soul were an overheated boiler, so that the steam that would be released through a clogged valve must press the more urgently upon the valve that is still free. But we are not so. Hope will color the whole man—hope, not its impostor, optimism—or the whole man will be pallid and frail. Marcel again, considering the adventurousness of the large family, notes “the horror of this very risk which prevails in an ever-increasing fraction of a country on the way to progressive devitalisation.” Such people think you can use life as an element “to obtain a few patent satisfactions, without which the world would be nothing but a prison.”¹ Life, for such, has all the glare, the noise, and the triviality of an amusement park.

But soon that speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets leaves off recommending a child as a stay against the onslaught of Time and turns to another expedient. He introduces it briefly in sonnets fifteen through seventeen, then makes it the center of number eighteen, one of the best known in the sequence:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate;

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The sun declines to westward, the summer fades, the flowers wither, but into you, you callow and inactive lump of humanity, I will breathe the breath of life, or inject the ink of life, and you shall live. What kind of life that is is an open question and not one that critics have wanted to ask. That is because they assume that Shakespeare, confident in the staying power of his poetry, really believed that he was conferring upon the young man a kind of eternal existence. A strange existence it is, when the greatest creator of characters the world of letters has ever known describes not one of the man’s features other than his fair skin, when we do not know the man’s name, and when his behavior implied by the poems is at best dubious and at worst treacherous. So why do we take the speaker at his word? I think we are disarmed by something else we take for granted: that our creations can live on after us. We achieve an ersatz eternity by means of “children,” that is, by works of art and culture. “Exegi monumentum aere per...