October 13, 2023
Here in Ohio, it is suddenly autumn, season of transience. The temperature has suddenly dropped 20 degrees, and nights are chilly. As usual, it is going to be raining more days than not. I have never understood why autumn is so many people’s favorite season. Perhaps they love it that, unlike us, the trees get more beautiful as they die.
Acceptance of transience is supposed to be a virtue. Change is necessary, and in fact we long for it, because changelessness would be boring, sterile, and ultimately intolerable. But while we may yearn for what Wallace Stevens calls “the exhilarations of changes,” that is not the same as transience, which is loss. “For man is in love, and loves what vanishes,” says Yeats. “What more is there to say?” Actually, Yeats himself had a good deal more to say, much of it having to do with the fact that everything disappears and leaves not a wrack behind. In one poem, he quotes the Great Lord of Chou—whoever that is—who grandly said, “Let all things pass away.” It is the stance of the detached sage. The great poem “Lapis Lazuli” ends with four “Chinamen” on top of a mountain. “On all the tragic scene they stare,” and yet “Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.” But this pose is more effectively struck if one is atop a mountain, above the fray. Hence we speak of “Olympian detachment.” In Book 24 of the Iliad, Achilles tries to console Priam. Both men have lost those they love best: Achilles his beloved Patroclus, Priam his son Hector. In a famous speech, Achilles tells Priam that it is the human fate to love, lose, and grieve, while “the gods live free of sorrows.” Yet it is not true. Even in the Iliad itself, Zeus grieves because Fate has decreed that his beloved son Sarpedon must die at the hands of Hector, and there is nothing Zeus can do about it. Elsewhere, Apollo grieves for his lover Hyacinthus. It is the reason that gods try to avoid getting too attached to mortals, for mortals are transient—they are in fact compared to the leaves, driven by the autumn wind.
Later, in Rome, the Stoics tried to achieve ataraxia, a kind of, well, Stoic detachment, the Vulcan ideal in Star Trek, a metaphorical cauterizing of the nerves that feel pain. We sympathize, because people can die of grief. Possibly the most agonizing line in all of literature is King Lear’s cry that his beloved Cordelia is gone and can “Never, never, never, never, never” be alive again. And his grief kills him. We all know the “stages of grief” stuff, how we need to pass through the stages of anger, bargaining, and so on, to acceptance. But I wonder whether we understand the real meaning of acceptance. It is possible that it means something other than resignation, surrender, giving up. Maybe it’s my male conditioning, but I don’t believe in giving up just because the odds are hopeless. When Dylan Thomas exhorts his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night, /Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” despite the fact that “dark is right,” I feel I understand. No one reads Edna St. Vincent Millay anymore, but I have loved her “Dirge without Music” since I stumbled across it in high school. It begins:
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
“They are gone,” she says. “They are gone to feed the roses.” “But I do not approve. / More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses of the world.” The consolation of religion can be real, but even those who feel that death is not just an end do not escape the ferocities of grief. The passage in Northrop Frye’s private notebooks where he records the death of Helen Kemp Frye, his wife of 50 years, is intensely moving. So is C.S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed, in which Lewis does exactly what his title says, observes his grief over the death of his wife Joy Davidson even as he is in the midst of it. Here, the most famous Christian apologist of our time bluntly says, “But don’t you come talking to me about the consolations of religion of I shall suspect that you don’t understand. | Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the farther shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false” (23). Not quite fair, perhaps. Milton was willing to portray the heavenly fate of Lycidas in more or less those terms in the greatest of all elegies, imagining the dead shepherd arriving
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet societies, That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
And Dante’s whole journey in the Divine Comedy is motivated, not by love of God, but by the desire to be reunited with his Beatrice, who died at 25 and has been dead 10 years. But Lewis is touchingly honest: “And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air” (23). It is not lost on me that Joy Davidson was originally Jewish, and I am engaged to a Jewish woman.
Transience encompasses more than the loss to death of those we love. The loss of a relationship incurs its own kind of grief, as in the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves”:
Since you went away, the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter’s song
But I miss you most of all, my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
This song was a huge hit in the 1950’s. One wonders whether pop music could accommodate such a downer today. Milton’s Lycidas is not just an elegy but a pastoral elegy. The setting of pastoral literature is a paradisal, like the Classical Golden Age, in which there were only three seasons, and autumn did not die into winter but passed directly to spring again. But the Golden Age faded away, for it is not just in the Bible that paradises are lost. Implicit in the pastoral convention is nostalgia for a lost paradise, for “the good old days.” I have written of this nostalgia elsewhere, including in The Productions of Time.
Socially, the idea that decline and fall is the basic rhythm of human life is far more common than the notion of progressive improvement, which is a modern idea. In this sense, Virgil’s Aeneid is “modern,” based on the hope that we do not have to repeat the old tragic cycles of history, symbolized for Virgil by the Trojan War, but could create a new form of social order based on unity, progress, reason, and technology. But of course the Roman Empire on which Virgil staked his hopes is the one most of all associated with the phrase “decline and fall.” By the time of the first great English poem, Beowulf, all that was left of the Roman Empire was the eald enta geweorc, the “ancient work of the giants,” which sounds like something out of Tolkien but is really the Roman ruins left behind when the Empire withdrew from the British Isles. Beowulf is elegiac in tone. In his youth, its hero restores the great hall Heorot, the seat of King Hrothgar’s Camelot-like kingdom, to its former glory, but only temporarily. Beowulf himself rules his own kingdom capably for half a century, but grows old and dies at something like my age fighting a dragon. He kills the dragon, but to no avail: the ending of the poem makes clear that Beowulf’s kingdom will not survive long without his strength and wisdom.
The theme of transience is sometimes signaled by the Latin tag Ubi sunt, “where are,” which is short for Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerant?, where are those who were before us? A famous expression of it is Villon’s medieval ballade Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, with its repeated refrain, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” As a resident of Cleveland, I have to say that if you are nostalgic for snow, you must be really nostalgic. The great Biblical expression of transience is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which gave Hemingway the title for his novel The Sun Also Rises—and goes down again. I doubt that Leroy Carr had been reading Ecclesiastes when he wrote the famous blues song “When the Evening Sun Goes Down”: such imagery is age-old:
The sun rises in the east An' it sets up in the west The sun rises in the east, mama An' it sets in the west Well, it's hard to tell, hard to tell Which one will treat you the best When the sun goes down
But in Christian terms, transience came into the world with the Fall. In Paradise Lost, the word “lost” tolls like a bell throughout the epic. Loss is inherent in the very nature of fallen time. What I am calling transience the Renaissance called “mutabilitie.” Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, appended to The Faerie Queene as a kind of fragmentary 7th book, take the form of a debate in which the goddess Mutabilitie challenges the rule of Jupiter, claiming to rule even over the gods. But Nature decides against her. Even in the “sublunary” world, the moon being the traditional limit of the Fall, change is only an aspect of a larger order. Things change, but
They are not changed from their first estate, But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate. (LVIII)
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Identity is maintained despite constant change. Every cell in a human body is replaced over time, yet it remains the same body. This verdict, unfortunately, is reversed in the appeals court of modern physics, in which Mutabilitie appears as entropy, or disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics decrees that entropy increases, and that the entire order of nature will eventually give way to it, resulting in the “heat death of the universe.” When I was young, I used to wonder why people got so melancholy over this—after all, the triumph of entropy will not occur for billions of years. It’s not as if it’s going to cut short your vacation. But I now understand that the melancholy is over the fact that it is scientifically certain that eventually the good guys are going to lose. Order will lose to chaos, life to death.
Granted, most people do not sit around preoccupied with cosmic pessimism. For ordinary people, transience takes the form of nostalgia for one’s own lost past, and especially for one’s childhood and youth. The full title of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality through Recollections of Early Childhood.” It is perhaps the greatest Romantic expression of the idea that childhood is our personal Eden, and that we have lost that paradise, not through any sin or error but simply by growing older. In the vocabulary of Wordsworth’s contemporary William Blake, we age from Innocence into Experience. Wordsworth laments that “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” He is constantly aware “That there hath past away a glory from the earth.” It is not just that times and places are gone, but “Whither has fled the visionary gleam?” Everything in our memory of the past is numinous, imbued with an imaginative energy that transfigures it from factual to mythical. But “Shades of the prison- house begin to close / Upon the growing boy.” Although the Ode’s title may hint at a traditional Christian consolation, the two consolations actually offered in the text are not supernatural but here and now. One is memory, which, “in a season of calm weather,” enables us to travel back to see the children—who are ourselves—playing upon the shore of “that immortal sea / Which brought us hither.” The better consolation, however, is the gift that loss gives us of a “primal sympathy” for human suffering, born of knowing that other people suffer the same loss and grief. Wordsworth here comes full circle back to the Iliad. It is his grief for the loss of Patroclus that changes Achilles from mad dog out for revenge to a man with the humanity to say to the enemy king, “Old man, how much you’ve suffered.” That is Achilles’ finest moment, greater than any triumph on the battlefield.
The greatest inheritor of the Wordsworthian theme of the lost paradise of childhood is Dylan Thomas—who in his sequence of birthday poems associates it with autumn because his birthday was October 27. In “Poem in October,” when Thomas takes a walk on his 30th birthday, he says of the long-ago child that he was that “his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.” And later, “the true / Joy of the long dead child sang burning / In the sun.” But the transcendence of time is…transient, as indicated by the repeated phrase that “the weather turned around.” Nostalgia for the past is not restricted to childhood innocence. We are also nostalgic for our wild youthful exploits when we were half crazy with youthful vitality, sexual and otherwise. Nor is the literary treatment of it always lovely and lyrical. The Expanding Eyes podcast has just finished looking at Shakespeare’s history play Henry IV, Part 2, the second appearance of the great comic character of Falstaff. This play has scenes that are, despite their comedy, harshly realistic, almost naturalistic, scenes of lower-class life, more so than any other play of Shakespeare. In one of them (3.2), Justice Shallow, a not-overly-honest representative of the law, asks Falstaff, “O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field?...Ha! ‘Twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork alive?” To which Falstaff replies, “Old, old, Master Shallow….That’s fifty-five year ago….We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.” Chimes at Midnight became the title of Orson Welles’s film excerpting all the Falstaff episodes from the two Henry plays, with himself playing Falstaff, of course. Those chimes we heard in our youth when we were up all night partying were fifty-five years ago. The phrase is mournfully nostalgic. But in fact, what Shallow is so nostalgic for never really took place. Falstaff complains, “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street, and every third word a lie.” That is the damnedest part of it, that what we genuinely yearn for and grieve the loss of—never took place. It is honest sorrow for a dishonest lie, and what is to be made of that?
Justice Shallow is low-life comic relief, but sometimes the joke is not merely on us: the joke is us. Recently, looking for something else in an old college yearbook, I stumbled across a photo of the student staff of the literary magazine in 1993. I was included as Faculty Advisor. I was hit by a wave of intense nostalgia: after 30 years, I remembered the names of almost all of the dozen students, remembered poems they had written, knew that two of them went on to become academics themselves. For some brief moments, the first few years of my career at Baldwin Wallace, when I was still in my early 40’s (in the photo, the beard I wore then had no grey in it), seemed idyllic, and it was painful to think how that past has vanished. But I caught myself. While it was truly the auspicious opening of a very fulfilling teaching career, the truth is that I was fairly miserable in those days. I was working to exhaustion for a salary so low that the Academic Dean apologized for it when he hired me. Somehow I managed to commute every weekend from Cleveland to a turbulent relationship in Buffalo. I was deeply in debt with no idea how I would ever pay it back. My parents’ marriage was its usual problematic self. All of this was purged away by the imagination operating upon my memories, and all that was left was the image of myself with a group of lively and gifted students. Would I return to that era of my life? Hell no. Though I remain sentimental about that group of students.
There is much of the past, perhaps most of it, that is better off lost. That is true of history as well as of personal life. We walk through, say, the ancient Egyptian section of an art museum and think, what a wonderful culture, that created such monumental architecture, such a rich mythology—a mythology whose main theme was changelessness, the defeat of transience. But was life worth living? Surely not for the slaves who died in the labor of building those pyramids and sphinxes. Perhaps not even for the Pharaoh: the lives of the powerful are often just a well-fed kind of slavery. When I think I am unlucky, I remind myself that there are people, millions upon millions of them, whose entire lives are not worth living, let alone re-living. Imagine a slave working in a mine where the average survival rate is 5 years: not an uncommon kind of situation. Perhaps there is one moment of rest, when the overseer is not looking, in which the slave’s attention is suddenly caught by a cricket sitting on a log in the sun. Perhaps the slave wonders what it is like to be a cricket basking on a log in the sun. That is the moment that Blake called “the one minute of the day that Satan cannot find.” The imagination seizes that one moment and perhaps discards the whole rest of the life as dross. That is what the Last Judgment really means, not some show trial in the sky at the end of time. The imagination is always conducting its Last Judgment, always trying, however imperfectly, to harrow hell and free whatever is good in it, letting the furnace vaporize the rest. That sentence is as close to defining my personal religion as I am likely to get. Unfortunately, it does not work as an elevator speech. All it would get me would be baffled stares. That’s okay. I try to be a preacher, but I am perhaps a better alchemist, working with his private furnace, which is really the one inside his mind.
In The Productions of Time I used the term “decreation” to describe the harrowing, the separation of the chaff from the wheat. Harrowing is of course part of the harvest and vintage imagery of the Bible. Harvest is an autumn festival, such as the Jewish Sukkot, feast of booths or tabernacles. The imagination’s process of decreation and recreation takes place in mythology when imagery that originally designated a primary concern on the material level is spiritualized into the same primary concern on a higher level. Here, whatever significance the harvest imagery may have originally had concerning the food supply is expanded into the same primary concern on a spiritual level. Thus, the sukkot or booth becomes a place of “ingathering” and preservation, rather like a land-bound ark. There is one set up every fall right outside the building I teach in. During the Sabbath of the festival, the reading is from the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its theme of “vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” in other words transience. But as time decreates all things and winnows away what is only vanity, the spiritual imagination harvests what sustains us, what we truly survive on and not just on bread alone.
Yet if what is harvested are only memories, even if they are memories transfigured by the imagination’s symbol-creating power, what good is it, really? How is this any less pathetic than the pious reassurance that one’s loved ones will live on in your memory? One good bout of dementia, and so much for that kind of survival. Given the reverential treatment of memory in so much of the Romantic tradition and the literature that has descended from it, it may be startling when William Blake attacks whatever is merely “fabled by the Daughters of Memory,” by which he means the Muses, for the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Individual memory is unreliable and easily lost, and so is cultural memory. Two great modern meditations on history, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brethren, seem to be telling us that the memories we call history are simply illusions: they are interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, endlessly, shifting and metamorphic like the images in a dream. In fact, in Finnegans Wake, history is a dream.
Nevertheless, it is not the dream of any ordinary self. The ordinary self or ego remains imprisoned in transience, or fallen time. All the ego knows is “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Its reality is illusion, what the East calls Maya, what Ecclesiastes calls “vanity,” the word for which in Hebrew means something like “mist” or “fog.” But mythology is haunted by the intuition of a second self, one of which the imagination is the local agent, so to speak. The imagination does not go gentle into that good night: it fights back by conducting a rescue operation, retrieving images out of both individual and cultural memory and alchemizing them in the fiery furnace of its decreative, recreative process. This fighting back is indeed a battle. When it reaches apocalyptic intensity, harvest imagery takes on the violence of the “grapes of wrath” passages of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” drawn from the Book of Isaiah, the image of a great form treading the grapes in a winepress, the grapes being the images of the fallen world. It would be a fatal error to take such imagery literally: that leads only to the kind of terroristic violence that presently has a psychotic grip on fundamentalists of all religions, Christian, Muslim, Hindu. The symbolism is rather of what Blake termed “Mental Fight” in his great hymn often called “Jerusalem.” In Paradise Lost, the Archangel Michael tells Adam that the larger spiritual identity that Christians identify as Christ will do battle with the great lord of transience, Satan. But: “Dream not of thir fight, / As of a duel, or the local wounds / Of head or heel” (12.386-88). Book 6 of that epic had seemed to show exactly such a fight—yet the war in heaven turns out to have been a sham, a farce, an illusion. Milton shows the true fight in Paradise Regained, the internal wrestling of the Temptation of Christ by Satan, with its consequent casting out of illusion.
Decreation should not be romanticized, because grief is part of the active struggle against the nihilistic power of fallen time. We think of grief as passive, as a victimage, and to the ego it is. No one escapes the human condition. Enlightenment is not exemption, a tough truth. There is no free pass. The imagery of death and resurrection that appears in so many mythologies may be projected on “dying god” figures, but its deeper meaning is de te fabula: the story is about you. The people and the times we love die, and we die with them, as I tried to show near the end of The Productions of Time. The agony of grief is part of the process, and no one evades it. That is the root of empathy, as both Achilles and Wordsworth knew. Those who refuse that empathy, that agony, become inhuman, monsters. What we are reborn into is a paradoxical mystery. It is what Hamlet called the “chameleon’s dish,” because in folklore the chameleon was supposed to live only on air. Hence Hamlet goes on to say, “I eat the air, promise-crammed” (3.2). So do we all, or at least the imagination does, the chameleon within. Frye points out that the words for “spirit” in all three Biblical languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, are all words for air: ruach, pneuma, spiritus. When Prospero in The Tempest says that all things vanish into air, into thin air, he may be saying more than he realizes. Committing ourselves to that possibility—never a certainty, despite what people say—is the meaning of faith.
Memory faces the past. But, like Janus, we are double, and face the future at the same time. Something in us wants to cling to the past, even return to it, as to a womb. Old people who try to do so become elderly children, complete with whining and tantrums. When I managed an apartment building full of seniors, I knew people who had stopped living years ago, who dwelled only in the past as completely as Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Aging gracefully is not the point. The task is to age actively, not give into to passive resignation, and, heaven knows, that may not be graceful at all. In order to keep growing, keep developing, we have to ruthlessly let go of the previous phase of our lives. Not reject it, not devalue it—quite the contrary. But detach from it and seek new experience. “Old men should be explorers,” as Eliot says in Four Quartets.
A Fine and Private Place (1960) is the first novel by one of the great fantasists, Peter Beagle, written when he was only 19 and a fellow student at the University of Pittsburg along with my mentor Ted Harakas. I might point out that he is still publishing at the age of 84. The tale is a witty romantic comedy, set entirely in a cemetery, about two couples. Two of them are alive, and yet not really living: the man has been hiding in the cemetery for 19 years because he could no longer face life, while the woman sustains herself on memories of her glorious husband, though she knows they are mostly lies. Eventually the two stop trying to escape from life, leave the cemetery, and begin living together. The other couple are ghosts who refuse to let go of life and go on into the new and unknown state of being beyond death. For that is what ghosts are, spirits of the departed who refuse to depart. The narrative hints that the truly, non-ghostly dead no longer care, despite the fond wishes of those who attend séances.
Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel Childhood’s End (1953) is a vision of what these days is sometimes called “transhumanism.” A generation of telepathic children is born who are the next stage of human evolution. These children eventually leave not only their parents but the human condition itself, joining a universal identity called the Overmind, an identity that is so utterly transcendent that it seems cold and alien. But that is from the ego’s point of view. In the night sky, the stars glitter like beckoning fingers, and something within us yearns for them in wonder.
Ted, my mentor, who died this year at 86, wanted his epitaph to be Yeats’s “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.” I can understand why. All his life, Ted kept losing those he cared for, and all of them died prematurely: his best friend and fellow academic Bob Howells to cancer at the age of 49; his friend the poet Paula Rankin to a combination of respiratory disease and alcohol; his wife, who was much younger and should have outlived him by many years, to ovarian cancer. Yet he went on, still living actively at the time of his death. He was anything but cold, just vital and determined. The last paradox is that it is only by detaching through the terrible ordeal of grief that we can come to find that, as Ezra Pound says in his Cantos, “What thou lov’st well remains.” The rest is silence.
Reference
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. Faber and Faber, 1961.