February 14, 2025

Within a week, I will be moving from a home I thought I would end my days in, a semi-rural retreat that I have dwelled in for 18 years. When we moved here, I was in my 50’s, and thought I would never again have to go through the ordeal of packing and moving. But life changes, and we are always letting go. There is nothing else that we can do.

Packing is like the Last Judgment: photos and memorabilia, not looked at for years, rise from their graves, waiting to be judged: to keep or not to keep. Not everything is buried. Things that are all around me, including family furniture and my mother’s ruby and milk glass collection, which faded into invisibility years ago by becoming habitual aspects of the environment, now break into my attention. The effect is like the last act of Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale, in which a man’s wife, estranged and thought lost for 16 years, seems to come back to life by stepping off the pedestal where she has been posing as a statue. And I realize how much my life, and indeed all life, is a process of sending things down the line—an oracular phrase that leaped into my head and inspired this newsletter.

In his will, my generous father passed a moderate amount of money down the line, which we used to buy this house. I know that would have pleased him. But so much else has been passed along as well, from parents and grandparents. The oak table I have used as a desk for much of my life was made by my Italian immigrant grandfather, trained as a cabinet maker in Italy though forced to make a living as carpenter in a coal mine during the Depression. My brother has the self-made wooden toolbox that he used on the job. I just found, in boxes that came to me after my father died and which I never got around to going through carefully, a little notebook that was clearly my grandpa’s work notebook, with measurements and prices of wood. It is dated 1917. I have two other tables he made, plus a lamp and bookends made by my father. The bookends are a bit of a mystery, as my father himself was not much of a reader—he was too restless and impatient to sit still that long. Did he somehow know that his future son would be a bookworm? They are carved with the letter “M,” originally for Midvale, Ohio, but when my dad gave them to me he said they could stand for “Mike.”

Wood from my father’s side, glass from my mother’s. All her life, my mother built up, piece by piece, a collection of ruby and milk glass, the symbolic colors of red and white, though it never occurred to me to ask her why she chose those particular colors. It made gift buying easy—every holiday, you could always buy mom another piece of glass. The ruby glass alone takes up two floor-to-ceiling sets of built-in shelving in my new apartment, on either side of a gas fireplace, which I won’t use—my desk will go in front of it. All this is what has been sent down from the past, from my parents and ancestors. Mind you, that is in addition to scrapbook after scrapbook full of photos, to which I have added my own through a long life. I also have memorabilia from teaching, notes from students, programs from events and ceremonies with the names circled of students I knew. Some of them are still friends.

None of it has much monetary value, yet it is a treasure trove, and I understand why dragons are contented sitting on their hoard. Yet I am 74 years old and childless. Neither my brother nor I has children to pass any of this on to, assuming they would want it. I see no other answer but the word “dumpster.” Even in more normal families, with offspring, does there come a time when the connection is so extended and removed that no one cares any longer about ancestors who are really just a set of century-old names? Among the aristocracy, in which a son may be William IV, it is different. Portraits in oils of the ancestors may hang on the wall. If you are at Hogwarts, some of them may even move and condescend to talk to you. But we are nobodies. Small loss, then: our family will simply disappear like the millions upon millions of people who have come and gone anonymously, and there is no justification for getting so self-important about the matter. My grandparents and parents, both sides of the family, will at least remain on this earth in one small cemetery outside of New Philadelphia, Ohio, as if it were one final family reunion. I love to walk in cemeteries, looking at the stones and the dates and the occasional inscriptions, wondering at the lives signified by the names, which may be all that is left of them.

But the desire to pass something down the line has contexts of greater importance than that of my family. By the usual synchronicity, in the latest issue of Living Blues magazine, Editor Brett J. Bonner writes in his Editorial:

This year marks the 55^th anniversary of Living Blues….This is our second issue in a row spotlighting generational connections in the blues. While ties like these appear in other genres, it’s not nearly as common as it is in the blues, and that’s part of what makes the blues so special. Blues is, at its core, an oral tradition, and family legacy is one of the most important ways that the blues is passed on.

This leads him to say,

I have mentioned before my joy over the past ten years or so at the wave of young blues players diving deep into the roots of the music and forming a new generation of artists to carry the music into the future. At age 17, Harrell “Young Rell” Davenport is one of the youngest to break onto the scene. The Vicksburg, Mississippi, native came to the blues from mixed CDs his father used to play in the car.

In the article about him, Davenport says,

“I play the blues because it’s in me. It’s my culture. It runs through my veins….I was bullied in school because I played and I like the blues….I’ve been beaten—all because of my love for the blues….I took a record to school—Jimmy Reed’s “High and Lonesome”—my grandfather gave it to me. I took it for show-and-tell to the class and played it on the record player. When we came back from lunch my record was on the floor broken. The kid who did it told me after school that he did it.”

Instead of heirlooms and photographs, Davenport’s family gave him an artform, one that has now been passed on for at least a century, from generation to generation. But legacies may be passed on through less predictable lines than those of family and race. The original Delta blues players made a few records in the 1920’s before the Depression mostly shut down the recording industry, and then mostly returned to their original work as sharecroppers. Forty years later, in the early 1960’s, a generation of white kids discovered those old recordings, then went down south and, to their astonishment, found many of the old bluesmen still alive—Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, so many others. They brought them up north to give concerts in colleges and the Newport Folk Festival, and not only gave these aging artists a late career, literally sat at their feet in coffee houses, but also paid for lessons in how to play the blues, and eventually kept the blues alive by performing the songs they learned. The same was true in New York City, where young white guitarists made pilgrimages to the home of Rev. Gary Davis, an astonishing innovator who, though blind, reinvented the art of fingerstyle guitar playing. The list in the Wikipedia article on Davis of the famous blues players influenced by Gary Davis is six lines long. I myself have studied with two of them, Ernie Hawkins and Jorma Kaukonen. I just saw Jorma at the Kent Stage, performing as well as ever at the age of 83.

Nor was the legacy entirely American. The Rolling Stones named their band from a Muddy Waters song, and have expressed great admiration for Jimmy Reed. What is important is that the music be kept alive and passed on. The same is true of the mostly-white tradition of folk music. “Tradition” is the right word. Bob Dylan more or less invented the idea of writing your own folk songs. But the folk revival began before him, with people who had fallen in love with the music of the “folk,” the common people, mostly anonymous, and were not willing to let it die. Those of us who still remember the intertwined folk and blues revivals of the 60’s are now old—concerts are a sea of white hair. We are concerned that the music be passed on, and exposure is crucial. It is one of the many ironies of capitalism that in an era that offers digital means to make available the entire history of music, most young people know little of either folk or blues. Those of us who love it and also recognize its historical importance do not want all this music to die, and those of us who play guitar do not want the techniques of playing it to die. Keeping alive an artistic tradition by passing it on to a younger generation is analogous to the pattern of the small, family-owned business, in which the younger generation is groomed to take over eventually. Both the traditional music genres and the small businesses are threatened with extinction by corporate capitalism, which cares only for what is large-scale and therefore generates large profits for shareholders.

Passing things down the line is a second-best form of immortality, a way of cheating time, which annihilates not only people but also events, experiences, whole eras. In a late poem, Wallace Stevens ways, “It is as if we were never alive.” Everything vanishes, leaving not a wrack behind, as Shakespeare has his surrogate Prospero say in The Tempest. Keats wrote his own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Sometimes this endless, continuing loss strikes us with a kind of horror, and in an emotional backlash the heart cries out, “No! Stop! Let nothing change. Let time stand still.” In Goethe’s Faust, this forbidden wish is the ultimate temptation: should Faust yield to it and say about some moment, “Stay! Thou art so fair,” at that moment he forfeits his soul to Mephistopheles. We are taught that we must not cling to the present, nor be nostalgic for the vanished past. In The Book of Thel, Blake presents such an impulse as a regressive desire to remain unborn. Thel is shown the world of Experience, in which everything ends in death, and, shrieking, attempts to flee back into her paradisal Vales of Har. However, that is a tragic choice. We are not supposed to choose stasis—yet if we are honest we admit that we yearn for it. We cannot bear how everything we love is transient and dies. Keats presents us with a Grecian urn upon which characters are forever frozen in mid-act. He calls it a “cold pastoral,” recognizing that the freeze-frame motionlessness of its characters amounts to a kind of life-in-death. Yet he is honest enough to admit to the attraction of its changelessness. He counsels the lover, “do not grieve, / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”

After all, we are told that eternity is an Eternal Now, which is how time is experienced by God. We long to escape into that timelessness from this life, in which we are dying in every moment. Christianity says that God and heaven are timeless, but does not deny the reality of the fallen temporal world. There is a Classical philosopher who went further than that, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who said that all change is illusion. In reality, there is only changeless Being. The Parmenides, the most enigmatic of Plato’s dialogues, records a conversation between Parmenides and Socrates. In it, the normal roles are reversed, and it is Parmenides who asks the questions, and even more startlingly, Socrates is finally unable to answer some of them. Does this mean that Plato has come to accept Parmenides’ “monism,” or is it merely an early exercise in what we would now call deconstruction, demonstrating that any position, pushed far enough, breaks down into paradoxes? Parmenides’ student was Zeno, and Zeno’s paradoxes illustrate the principle of his master that change cannot occur. Achilles the swift runner can never overtake the tortoise because to do so he would have to cross half the distance to the finish line, but then he would need to cross half of that half, and again half of that half, ad infinitum. No one can cross an infinite number of distances, so Achilles can never reach the finish line. The differential calculus of Leibniz and Newton provided a way of solving this dilemma through “asymptotic” approximation—after all, Keats notwithstanding, in the real world distances are somehow crossed. But the sense of paradox remains.

What if Mephistopheles appeared and offered us a different temptation from that of Faust? What if he offered to make the best moment of our lives last forever? We only have to choose the moment. Yet what moment should we choose? No matter how wonderful, a moment that lasted forever would exclude all other moments. We may be nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, when we were 10—but would we want to remain 10 years old forever, never go on to the new experiences of later years? Ray Bradbury’s story “Hail and Farewell” explores the ramifications of what we might call Peter Pan syndrome. Its main character remains 11 while everyone else ages, so that he is forced to find childless couples who adopt him for a temporary period, after which he has to move on. Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffty Is Five,” which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for Best Short Story, was inspired by a mishearing. Ellison overheard someone seem to say, “Jeffty is five. He’s always five.” He knew that the person must really have said, “Jeffty is fine,” but his imagination was inspired by the mistake. Jeffty not only remains 5 years old, but he has the ability to tune in the old radio serials from Harlan Ellison’s youth, and buy issues of long-vanished pulp magazines. But Jeffty does not survive, and his disappearance leaves the narrator feeling trapped in the modern world.

A compromise solution to the problem of time is cyclical renewal, which is a way of having your time and beating it too. Many religious rituals throughout history have been based on the idea of eternal cyclical renewal: the great work on this subject is Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return. Time occurs, and therefore change, but time periodically renews itself, starts all over again at some point, often marked by ritual, especially a New Year ritual. Eliade’s favorite example is the Babylonian New Year ceremony, in which the Creation myth was recited—yet not merely recited but re-enacted. The Creation happens all over again. In such cultures, which include both traditional agricultural societies dependent upon the death and rebirth of the seasons as well as urban city-states and empires, which calculate the cyclical returns and renewals by sophisticated mathematical calculations of the movements of the heavenly bodies, time exists, yet time is renewable. What does not exist is history, the sense that events move in a straight line and are once-and-for-all. Eliade credits the Biblical cultures—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—for the advent of linear, historical thinking in the West.

We have our own cyclical rituals for denying time: they are called habits. Children demand the same bedtime story over and over, told in the same way. Instead of providing novelty and freshness, varying the story disturbs them. They also want the same songs, same videos, over and over. That sort of thing has been turning up too in the archeological excavation of basement storage boxes, including our copy of “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” from 1958. I cannot tell you how many times my brother and I made our poor parents listen to that silly song, with its falsetto chipmunk voices. But we were not the only ones. That song became one of the best-selling singles of all time, and I find it hilarious that the Chipmunks have a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Speaking of which, both the great Christian festivals, Christmas and Easter, are rituals of the renewal of time. But all of our secular habits are likewise ways of minimizing time. I am a creature of orderly ritual habits, even down to eating the same foods much of the time. Change is disturbing: change is the breaking in of chaos. Whereas a life of habit is on cruise control: relax and enjoy the journey. Students are likewise creatures of habit, and do not like change. In social terms, we speak of sleepy small towns that preserve the old ways, for better or worse, contrasting them with the effervescence of the urban. This is one way among many that capitalism may be harmful to your health, for capitalism depends on constant novelty—new markets, new products, improved products, planned obsolescence, all at a rapid pace. I just learned from a conversation on folk artist Tom Rush’s Rockport Sundays Patreon site that Spotify considers an album released more than 3 months ago to be “old.” In other words, we live in a throwaway culture in which success depends upon the opposite of preserving what is valuable by passing it onward. If your smartphone is five years old, it’s a relic. You must not only upgrade your equipment: you must be ready to re-invent yourself over and over again in a fast-moving job world. We are perhaps the first culture that does not preserve anything, and this may be part of the reason we are so neurotic.

Human life depends upon the continuity provided by passing things down the line, and the first thing to be passed down is language itself. We are aware that native languages around the world are disappearing by the thousands, a phenomenon often compared to global extinctions. Linguists tell us that it takes only a single generation for a language to become extinct. All that needs to happen is for the younger generation to choose to speak English or some other world language rather than the native tongue spoken by maybe several thousand, most of them aging, and the native tongue will disppear within a generation. People may ask whether it really matters: after all, outside of special technical and scientific terms, anything can be expressed in any language. However, people who ask this are thinking in terms of the transmission of objective factual and practical information, where the language is simply a vehicle of transmission. But that is a specialized development of language. Noam Chomsky is doubtless correct that, on a level of deep structure, all languages are variants of one Universal Grammar. But all human beings are variants of one human body plan, and that does not mean that all people are actually pretty much the same.

Of course, there are people who want everyone to look and act more or less the same, starting with being white. But the inexhaustible variety of human appearances is glorious. So too with languages. Each language is a branch in a linguistic multiverse, related by affinity to others and yet unique. And growing up inside any language shapes the way we think and feel, not deterministically, and yet profoundly. If you love a language, you love its texture, the play of alliteration and assonance in its texture, the subtle play of connotations and associations that reach back etymologically to deep historical roots, the possibilities of syntactical variations, not to mention the connection of that language with a culture’s history and values. All this is lost if a language is not passed down the line to a new generation of speakers. Yes, you can “get the idea across” in another language. Nonetheless, as we said, that is a useful but reductive relation to language. In an expanded perspective, language is what Heidegger called it, the dwelling house of being. We dwell in it, are at home in it, and its possibilities and limitations of expression condition our thinking more than we often like to admit. A translation is a way of passing a text onward, but a comparison of translations makes one aware of the irreducible idiosyncrasies of any language. For a previous newsletter, I consulted as many as five translations of the Tao te Ching. They were so different from one another that they might as well have been translations of five different texts, and I have no idea which was closest in spirit to the original.

We have been speaking in terms of the ordinary means of transmission down through time, the passing on of heirlooms and estates, of pictures and writings. But, strange to say, we may be haunted by our ancestors themselves. The physical part of the dead may lie in a graveyard or a cremation urn, but the dead inhabit us psychically. We have not actually lost them. They lie dormant within us in the unconscious, but sometimes may be summoned, or appear of their own volition, especially in a moment of crisis. This means a lot more than “You’ll always survive in my memory,” which is weak and sentimental. A significant member of the Dead may become what Jung calls a “complex,” an autonomous portion of the unconscious psyche, and may appear as an archetypal figure in dreams or waking visions. Imaginative literature projects such figures as supernatural, and a meeting with an ancestral archetype is a standard stop along an epic hero’s quest. Odysseus meets his dead mother Antiklea during his descent to the underworld, even though the actual wisdom figure is the seer Tiresias. Aeneas meets his father Anchises, who instructs him about cosmology and the system of reincarnation. Dante meets his own great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in heaven, who plays the archetypal role that Jung calls the Wise Old Man. It is Cacciaguida who tells Dante his own future, specifically that he will be exiled from Florence in the coming year because of his political involvements. When Dante worries that telling the truth about some powerful figures he has met might make him further enemies, Cacciaguida strongly urges him to tell the truth and to hold nothing back, for that would subvert the whole purpose of his poem.

The central theme of the Harry Potter epic is coming to terms with death. The villain’s name, Voldemort, probably means “flight from death,” as Voldemort is determined to become immortal, even at the price of life-in-death. Harry Potter possesses the Resurrection Stone, one of the three Deathly Hallows, significantly passed on to him by generations of his family. Before the Battle of Hogwarts, he uses it to summon up both his parents and other surrogate parental figures of his life in order to feel that he is not alone. This enables him to do the opposite of Voldemort: to accept death and sacrifice himself, and to relinquish the Resurrection Stone rather than seeking power over the dead.

The dead are not always parental, but are often wisdom figures and mentors. In Blake’s short epic Milton, Milton descends from Eternity and enters Blake through his left foot, inspiring him. The turn of the 20^th century saw a vogue for communicating with the dearly departed through various means, including séances. Yeats’s wife summoned the spirits who gave Yeats the material for his book A Vision through automatic writing. One of the great poetic epics of our time, James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, is composed out of conversations between Merrill and his partner David Jackson and a whole host of those beyond using a Ouija board.

Some of Jung’s early researches into the psychology of the occult involved the investigation of séances. But Jung himself would later have his own visitations, first in the form of a Wise Old Man figure called Philemon. In 1916, the dead arrived en masse in the form of an imaginative vision, as described in “The Seven Sermons to the Dead”:

Around five o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically...but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: "For God's sake, what in the world is this?" Then they cried out in chorus, "We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 190-1)

Not surprisingly, such passages have led any number of people, including a couple of his biographers, to conclude that Jung was a madman. One of those people was Freud, who, if Jung is to be believed, once told Jung that the Freudian sexual theory must be upheld as dogma against “the black tide of mud.” When Jung asked what that was, Freud supposedly replied, “Of occultism.” This could be interpreted as Freud’s anxiety that psychoanalysis not be dismissed as irrationalist quackery. Or it could be construed as a nervous defense against the possibility of paranormal phenomena. Everything must be reduced to materialist terms rather than admit the possibility of something uncanny. Jung also tells a story of how, when he and Freud were arguing over the occult, a loud crack sounded from a bookcase. When Freud asked what that was, Jung said it was an illustration of what he was talking about. Whereupon there was a second loud crack, and Freud fainted. We have only Jung’s word about these stories, but Jung is arguing, not for the existence of anything supernatural, but of psychic phenomena that can occasionally leap the subject-object gap and produce physical manifestations.

Whatever one decides about that, Freud in fact had his own version of indwelling ancestors. Freudian psychology is based on the Family Romance, the notorious Oedipus complex, in which the child desires unity with the mother and sees the father as rival and antagonist. In the process of resolving this complex, though, the parents are internalized. The rival father, he who lays down the law and says no to unacceptable desires, becomes the superego or conscience. But in fact the superego is formed from the father’s own superego, which was in turn formed from his father’s superego, and so on. As French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan put it, the father is absent—yet he is present everywhere in the Symbolic Order of society as the Name of the Father, the ghost who says, “Thou shalt not.” In Totem and Taboo, Freud solved the infinite regression of superego formation with a prehistorical myth of the killing of a primal father by a horde of his sons. But the curse upon patricide is guilt, which is the great power of the superego to enforce its renunciatory dictates. Thus the father is passed down the line as a guilt complex, universal because we all have forbidden desires. What of the mother? She must be renounced due to the incest taboo, but in fact the mother imago is projected on other women, at least in a heterosexual paradigm. Jung would say she is still within the male psyche as the complex personified as the anima; a heterosexual woman has an internalized male figure, the animus.

It's all complicated, but the point is that the Family Romance means that we carry both parents and more distant ancestors within us—our psyche has been structured by them. When we joke about how we’re becoming our parents, we are making light of an uneasy intuition of that reality. It is striking what a negative and pessimistic picture of human identity Freud bequeaths to us. The heterosexual boy must transvalue his hatred of the father by idealizing and identifying with him; he must renounce his desire for the mother by projecting his desire on other women. The desire to have children is the boy’s desire to become the father, which is why fathers so often want male children, and also why men want to dominate women. It is all based on power, and the power drive, with all its resentment, is based on enforced renunciation of desire. There is a hard wisdom here. Such a paradigm explains the masculinist insanity of Trump, Musk, and their misogynistic followers. But the story of Oedipus is a tragedy, and Freud’s is a tragic psychology. Like Greek tragedy, it is not exactly cheerful in its conclusions about the human race, which may be summed up in a line repeated in several plays: “Not to have been born is best.” It is understandable that a large number of people are feeling like this today.

What, however, if this paradigm is half wrong? The theory of the Oedipus complex is tragic or ironic because it assumes the unalterable reality of the subject-object division. We desire a close relationship or identity with an “other,” but that “other” remains alienated because, well, that’s life. We are Tantalus, condemned in the Greek underworld to reach for food and water, only to have them move out of his reach. The alienation is existential, not merely circumstantial: it is the very structure of life, what we call the “reality principle,” and we must resign ourselves to life’s limitations

That is the Freudian counsel of wisdom. But that kind of stoic resignation and control of our selfish desires does not appeal to many people, who refuse to accept that desire is inevitably unfulfillable. They are determined to jump the gap and possess the object, and to fight off all rivals to their desire. Hence we get various forms of Social Darwinism, in which life is the survival of the fittest, and the fittest are those who are most aggressive and have the least scruples. This refusal of limits leads to what Jung calls “inflation,” the megalomaniacal mentality of those who would be “like gods.” And we are back to Trump and Musk again.

What if what is wrong is the framework itself? What if the “reality principle” is actually a form of neurotic delusion—seemingly real as all delusions seem real to those who are caught in them? It has been pointed out that original Darwinism, what is sometimes called neo-Darwinism, is one-sided in its emphasis on competition and conflict. Life is in fact an interplay between competition and cooperation. It took a woman biologist Lynn Margulis, braving male skepticism, to prove that the cell, the basis of all life, came into being as a result of a symbiotic relationship between the cell and its mitochondria. Life is a cooperative, interdependent process on all its levels—that is what “ecology” means. There can be, should be, a Social Darwinism of cooperation as well as competition. Rugged individualism is a neurotic fixation of immature males—we are utterly dependent upon a social network, more so than any animal, since human beings, because of their large heads, are born prematurely and therefore spend many years needing care and nurture. Each of us is a symbiotic universe of cells that have specialized functions, of bacteria that live in our gut and digest our food for us. Northrop Frye distinguished between primary and secondary concerns. Primary concerns, such as food and drink, shelter, safety, love, autonomy, and so on, are primary because they are common to the whole human race. Secondary concerns are the values of particular societies, expressed as ideology. Societies may be judged according to how far their secondary ideological concerns attempt to fulfill primary concerns—or how far they attempt to repress and deny them. A healthy society says that we are all members of one another—no one is an island. The religion of the alien Atevi in James Cameron’s Avatar films is based on a group mind from which everyone comes and to which everyone returns. What if this is what Christ meant by “love,” what Paul meant by the “mystical body of Christ,” of which we are all members? At least before the Church distorted Christianity into one more power structure.

Such a view is an existential threat to those who rule the country right now. JD Vance, a Catholic convert, just said that empthy and concern are concentric—they begin with one’s own family and tribe and may expand outward in larger concentric circles. He had to be corrected by the Pope himself, who did so very simply: by pointing to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The whole point of Christianity is its ideal of universal love rather than love confined to the tribe or the in-group. Vance knows better—he is a power-hungry liar. The Christian nationalists are now condemning what they call “toxic empathy”—which is what the rest of us call empathy. It is a sin to be compassionate outside of the right-wing circle. These people are demonically possessed, as the Nazis were demonically possessed.

Passing down the line is not necessarily a good thing: curses are passed down, unto the fourth generation, but really to all generations. “Original sin” means that the predisposition to evil is passed down from the Origin, the sin of Adam and Eve. Human beings have a predisposition to selfishness. A good upbringing may alleviate it, a bad upbringing exacerbate it. It is a commonplace that abusers have almost always been abused. That is a key, however. Evil is not necessary. The goal is to break the chain of the curse, to stop evil from being passed on through conditioning and ideology. It is not inevitable, and thinking it can be conquered is not sentimental idealism. The selfish world is not the real world, and coming to see it as a self-perpetuating illusion is the first step—the step I signify with my phrase “expanding eyes.” Healing is possible. And if the selfish world is dispelled, if illusion were cast out, what would remain? That is what is meant by eternity, and eternity might be a repository of all that we love. We do not have to be exceptional visionaries to have an experience of such an eternity. In “Poem in October,” Dylan Thomas takes a walk on his 30^th birthday. Eventually, “the weather turned around.” But not before “the true / Joy of the long dead child sang burning / In the sun.” We do not want to be a child forever. But it is good to know that it is still possible sometimes.