“You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, as if that were what he wanted to do.
Here is the protagonist of the ironically named novel Look Homeward, Angel, considering his young life with his drunken and histrionic father, his shrewd, land-grubbing mother, his frustrated sister, his three variously unhappy brothers, and the people of “Altamont” (Wolfe’s fictional Asheville, North Carolina), part shabby old Southern town, part tacky new resort for the rich and weary:
[H]e became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others—his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery.1
It is a characteristic passage. Quite different from the feeling for home expressed by Dante, the political exile. In Purgatory, he and Virgil meet an apparently solitary spirit on the lower slopes of the mountain, and an ordinary question is the occasion for an outburst of love—love for the place of one’s birth, the homeland:
Virgil approached the spirit nonetheless
and asked of him to point us the best way
to climb the mount, and he made no response
But to inquire about our native land
and who we were in life; and the sweet guide
began with “Mantua,” when that desert shade
Rose up from where he’d stood so firm in place—
“We share one country, you of Mantua!
I am Sordello!”—and the two embraced.2
Virgil does not get to the verb in his sentence, much less to his own name. When Sordello learns of that, he falls to his knees, addressing his fellow poet as the “glory of the Latin tongue” and the “everlasting honor of [his] land.” (7.16–18)
No one ever cast Thomas Wolfe out of the Carolinas and confiscated the boarding house that his mother operated in Asheville. No one did to him the violence that the Florentines did to Dante. So what explains his protagonist’s revulsion against the place, the womb that bore him? “O lost!” he writes in his novel, again and again. “We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.” This is no mere elegy of sorrow before the chances and changes of time; that note has been sounded ever since man was banished from the garden. It is something more—something sadder, more sinister.
We sense what it is from the novel’s climax, when the young protagonist Eugene has a dream-conversation with the spirit of his older brother Ben, who has died of pneumonia, without any of the consolations of faith or even of a stoic philosophy. The young man asks, urgently, “Where, Ben? Where is the world?”
“Nowhere,” Ben says. “You are your world.”
The emphasis is in the original. Wolfe has collapsed the universe into a solipsism. Eugene’s words end the conversation: “No leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as any ever sounded; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the labyrinthine ways until—until? O Ben, my ghost, an answer?”
Ben turns away with burning eyes, and does not reply.
The young unbeliever has seen “in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled quest of himself.”3 That quest has also been “the blind groping of a soul toward freedom and isolation.”4 A powerful phrase, that; a powerful error, and one that gnaws near to the heart valves of the American. The heart that does not beat warmly in the neighborhood of its original loves longs for a freedom from, a freedom that Dante would not have recognized as freedom at all. To him, as to nearly all Christian and classical thinkers, freedom is to the soul as health is to the body—it is a power. It is the unimpeded capacity to realize the perfection of the kind of being that you are. Legs are for walking; freedom is for virtue; and virtue, intellectual or practical, is a perfective power. But since man is a social animal by nature and not by mere accident or necessity, his freedom is incomprehensible apart from love and life in a community.
That is what man’s spiritual powers are for, and they find their most exalted expression in a communion of divine worship. No human life without feasts, and no feasts without what the progressive man has labored to eliminate, replacing the sacred celebration with labor and vacation, toil and vacancy. Josef Pieper writes in Leisure, the Basis of Culture:
[H]owever dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. It is true that ever since the French Revolution attempts have been repeatedly made to manufacture feast days and holidays that have no connection with divine worship, or are sometimes even opposed to it: “Brutus days,” or even that hybrid, “Labor Day.” In point of fact the stress and strain of giving them some kind of festal appearance is one of the very best proofs of the significance of divine worship for a feast; and nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.5
But there is no God in Wolfe’s sad and sagging world, and the only feast he mentions, without a trace of mystery or prayer and therefore without any real mirth, is Christmas, the residue of a culture he has no part in. Wolfe has never known the wassail bowl from which the heartier and saner Belloc has drunk. Man without God loses his grasp of the world around him; mud is no longer the shining “plough-down sillion” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” but only mud, sludge, the obliterating slag of dust and rain, and mud-man himself is “a flash of fire—a brain, a heart, a spirit,” as the cynical and drunken doctor at Ben’s deathbed says, and “three-cents-worth of lime and iron—which we cannot get back.”6
“I’ve had nothing out of life,” says Ben, enumerating his failures, and crying, “What’s it all about? Can you figure it out, ’Gene? Is it really so, or is someone playing a joke on us? Maybe we’re dreaming all this. Do you think so?”
Eugene answers in the affirmative and wishes that somebody would wake them up. “To hell with it all!” says Ben. “I wish it were over.”7
The moment of brotherly love is genuine and filled with pathos. Yet aside from these ineluctable moments of human feeling, here today and shucked on the morrow, no brotherhood can survive an un-culture, and the false freedom of the individual will. Eugene has “a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth,” the family he thinks of “with fear, almost with hatred.” “Am I never to be free?” he thinks. “What have I done to deserve this slavery?” You might as well rise up in anger against being bound to arms and legs and not remember that your legs can take you places, and your arms can embrace someone you love.
Neither of Eugene’s parents has ever raised a hand in anger against him. Eugene has never been abused. Indeed, he has been a bit spoiled, admired by his mother, envied by his eldest brother, and looked on with favor by women and girls for his tall stature and handsome face. He has not known poverty. But his attitude toward family, home, and what remains of a decadent postbellum culture is contempt. He cannot forget his home, but he very much wants to do so.
There is a strange resemblance between Eugene and the Margaret Mitchells of the American South, who bemoaned a lost civilization of courtly gentlemen and sweet slave-owning ladies while turning a blind eye to the human horror in their midst. The fickle and selfish Scarlett O’Hara, we are told in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, loves one thing in the world with a fidelity she grants to no one and nothing else: the red earth of Tara, her Irish father’s plantation. That love is in itself a good thing, as Eugene’s refusal to love Altamont is in itself not a good thing, but in both cases the authors have missed the heart of the matter, which is not cultural so much as culture itself, the thing in its essence. And neither the false and dreamy lyricism of Ashley Wilkes, the sensitive Confederate officer and slaveholder with a conscience nor the nightmarish revulsion of Eugene can bring us closer to that thing—unless it is by the hard instruction of trial and failure.
What Eugene is missing may be suggested by the tentative steps homeward taken by Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Ryder goes to Oxford and learns little enough from the dons there, but he does fall into a couple of romances. The first is with a young, charming, and dissipated Roman Catholic nobleman, Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain. The second romance, long afterwards, is with the strange and appalling faith that some of Sebastian’s family follow devotedly (even as a matter of course, not the worst way to pray) and that others of them flout and try hard to reject. Ryder is searching, as Eugene was and as Miss Scarlett was not. He becomes a commercially successful painter, with a certain charm and no originality. Appalled by the soulless philistinism of English cities, he turns with a poignant longing to the site of a once-living culture—to such homes as Brideshead had been for him:
I published three splendid folios—Ryder’s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, and Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture, which each sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece. I seldom failed to please, for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the same thing.8
Ryder does in painting what Margaret Mitchell did in prose. Yet this antiquarianism, a skin of nostalgia and not its muscle and blood, does not satisfy him. He misses the heart-pounding life of Brideshead—its loves and antagonisms, its apparently atavistic faith and the equally atavistic betrayal of the faith—and the inspiration it had once provided him. Like Gauguin and others—Gauguin the vile, who went to Tahiti to experiment in painting and married two or three teenage girls—Ryder turns away from moribund Europe. He leaves his society wife behind and spends a couple of years in Mexico, trying to nurse from the breasts of a land he takes to be half savage. Of course, it is a cliché to put it in those terms, and Waugh is quite aware of it. Ryder returns to England with great fanfare, and the exhibition of his new paintings seems to be an unqualified success.
Seems. But it is another decadent Catholic, the flamboyantly homosexual Anthony Blanche, who takes Charles to a “pansy bar” to tell him otherwise. Eager to see “Charles’s unhealthy pictures,” he met with disappointment at the gallery. He found no inspiration, nothing full-bloodedly evil. “I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.”9
(“Fiddle-dee-dee,” says Scarlett, with a flounce of her shoulders and a toss of her hair. God save us from the charm of charm.)
Charles agrees. He knows he is a failure, a most successful failure.
What does he want? Perhaps what Lord Marchmain wants. The adulterous husband, accompanied by his mistress, comes home to Brideshead from Venice to die. Let us be careful to notice what is as big and clear as day. He might have stayed in Venice with his mistress and died there, fanned by the faintly sewerish air of the canals, while the gulls cried and the gondoliers swore cheerfully at one another in their incomprehensible dialect. He does not. Says the mistress: “He has come home to die.”
Charles, an atheist, fascinated by the Catholic family despite himself, fights against what he knows they will try to do. “They’ll come now,” he says, “when his mind’s wandering and he hasn’t the strength to resist, and claim him as a death-bed penitent. I’ve had a certain respect for their Church up to now. If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true—that it’s all superstition and trickery.” But when the moment comes, and the priest has anointed the dying man’s head with the oil of salvation, Lord Marchmain raises his hand to his forehead in the only reply he can make, the sign of the cross. And Charles himself is kneeling there, longing with the rest of the family. “Then I knew,” he says, “that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”10
Brideshead—the manor, a home no more—will be abandoned by the family and employed as a barracks by the British army during the Second World War. Charles, surprised to find himself stationed there, strolls through the house he knew so well, ending his visit at its heart: the chapel. “The art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words.” For what is most ancient is always ever new. He considers the apparent futility of the builders over the generations, extending the house, wing by wing, stone upon stone, until, “in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper,” a platoon commander in Charles’s company and a comical philistine. “The place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas.” That was Jeremiah’s lament over Jerusalem sacked, its people led into captivity. Yet that is not all. I cite Waugh’s passage in full, because it reveals the life of something that the modern world has not been able to extinguish:
Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre and Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.11
Charles Ryder, the successful dilettante, the antiquarian, the Bohemian poseur, is finally woven into what is a true culture. Brideshead is his home, not because he grew up there (he did not), but because it has placed him, as if he were a stone, in an ancient edifice of meaning. He is in communion with the Crusaders who fought at Acre, now in ruins, and Jerusalem, also in ruins. He is in communion with the friend of his youth, the alcoholic Sebastian, now an exile, a pilgrim, and a man with a home, half in and half out of a community of monks in North Africa, where one morning, as his sister Cordelia foretells, “after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”12 It beats secular exhaustion and a shot of morphine.
This being home is not a sentiment. It is a felt reality, and from this day on it gives form to Charles’s life. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” a soldier tells him in the last line of the book.
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” cries the psalmist from captivity in Babylon, “let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy” (Psalm 137:5–6). The modern man produces little to remember and much to forget—the stuff of his vast landfills, so unlike the honest droppings of horses and oxen as they pulled the plows over the farmlands of old. I do not mean to champion horse-drawn plows, underrated as they may be, but rather to note that our whole orientation is toward disposal, junk, burial, razing, obliteration. So it behooves me again to bring culture into clearer focus, lest we be led down a false alley—or boulevard, lined with posh restaurants, clothiers, and museums.
A “Lady in a Box” seat in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town uses the word in that common sense: “Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover’s Corners?”
“Well, ma’am,” he says, “there ain’t much—not in the sense you mean.” The townspeople of Grover’s Corners, an imaginary village in New Hampshire, have the ordinary beauties of sun and mountain and birdsong to enjoy, and one of the ladies prevailed upon her husband after many years to take her to see the ocean, fifty miles away, “but those other things—you’re right, ma’am,—there ain’t much.—Robinson Crusoe and the Bible; and Handel’s ‘Largo,’ we all know that; and Whistler’s ‘Mother’—those are just about as far as we go.”
“So I thought,” says the pleasant snob. “Thank you, Mr. Webb.”
The irony is that Our Town is all about memory, of families extended in time, knowing all there is to know about one another, and the central events of the play are a marriage and a funeral, wherein all the people in town are somehow involved. We have seen already that culture is not a bit from Handel and Whistler or a tourist trip to Paris, which Mrs. Gibbs in little Grover’s Corners dearly wants. We have seen that it is what Belloc knew when he went back to the Sussex downs and swung the scythe again, with cunning in his hand and a keen eye for cutting the grass while there was still some green in it, and breathing the salt breezes whispering from the sea, and singing the Sussex songs with men he knew when he was a boy.
The home may be a place of wild anarchy, blessedly beyond or beneath the statutory law and the hordes of beneficent mischief-makers who know everything, from how to change a diaper to what to do when your teenage son comes home late and unsteady on his feet. But calm or half wild, it has always been home, a haven. Imagine a culture that is not home because it is a place of aggression, suspicion, unrest, and threat. Imagine, from our own experience, that man’s power over nature has become unmoored from human purposes and now proceeds by its inexorable logic, demanding, as Romano Guardini puts it in The End of the Modern World, “its own actualization,” so that it becomes, in the strict sense, “demonic.” Guardini writes in the aftermath of that upheaval of madness and wickedness, the Second World War, nor had the wickedness died with the suicide of Hitler and the surrender of the Japanese Empire. The world being built up before and during that war, and upon its ruins, was not a world of memory. “I know of no term with which to designate the culture of the future,” says Guardini. “To speak of a ‘non-cultural culture’ would be correct in the intended sense,” but hard to understand, unless we specify the characteristics of the world to come—our world. This Guardini does, with admirable clarity:
The coming order by which man will be related to his own works differs radically from the older one. It lacks the precise elements which constituted a culture in the older sense; the feeling of a tranquil fertility, of a flowering, beneficent realm. The new culture will be incomparably more harsh and more intense. . . . The new culture does not promise that breath necessary for a secure life and free growth; on the contrary it presents a vision of factories and barracks to the eyes of the mind.
A single fact, we must emphasize, will stamp the new culture: danger.13
We are not speaking merely of direct threats to human existence, such as the atomic bomb that had been detonated in the soul of modern man. “Man today holds power over things,” Guardini notes, “but we can assert confidently that he does not yet have power over his own power.” Thus we now hear of scientists seeking to create beings that are “transhuman” because good old ordinary man is not sufficient for their pride, and that same ordinary man is powerless to resist it, even by political means, for the political machine also has been fruitful and has multiplied or has sprouted mechanical arms and legs and is in the control of no one singly and no one collectively: it moves on. Ordinary human institutions such as schools have been likewise mechanized; they are trans-schools—centaurs or chimeras, half human and half machine, or all machine, subsuming the human. And again, there is nothing that an ordinary human being can do about it, even if he works in the belly of the centaur. Try to sit in on a class and see how many barriers within barriers you have to breach before you are allowed to open the door. You are a wanderer in a bureaucracy out of Kafka, on trial before you know the charge.
No one is at home. Orwell’s imaginary Oceania, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a vast sprawling anthill, both subhuman and transhuman, where no one is at home because everyone stands always under the glare of Big Brother and because the memory that builds up the home has been erased. The protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, which Orwell conceived after his experiences working for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Ministry of Truth, or “Minitruth” as it is called with shameless irony in Newspeak, is in the business of deceit and oblivion. Smith’s job is to alter old newspaper articles to bring them into accord with whatever the official policy of Oceania is at the moment and to destroy all evidence that anything was ever otherwise. Such evidence is incinerated in the aptly named “memory hole.” We need not travel to that imaginary horror. All we need to do is to visit our schools. What is remembered there? Name one story about George Washington that our young people will be taught to remember and honor.
Or we may think of the sole space where Smith believes he is free to think and to record his thoughts in a form that may triumph over time and oblivion. It is not a place at all, only an odd angle in the walls of his flat, where he believes he is just beyond the surveillance of the two-way television and camera, at once delivering propaganda and spying upon the state patients to see that they follow it. So also in schools, where everyone has a screen and submits to its glaring eye. What, here, is with free devotion brought forth into the future?
If I can call upon my experience as a college professor, not much. A few plays by Shakespeare and pretty much no literature written before our current political itching. In Canada, the same, bilingually: ignoring French literature as well as English. Not much history, and what there is, blackened or wrested to current political parades. Last year an Episcopal church in Virginia removed a plaque commemorating Washington, who sometimes worshiped there. What the church did with crowbars, the school does with textbooks—the ones they use, and the ones they have sent to the dumpster. Our craze of icon-smashing is like the spike of a fever the patient has been suffering for a long time. Good but flawed men like Robert E. Lee are tarred and feathered long after death and without any inclination to see them as fallible human beings who tried to do what they thought was right and who risked all they had for it. Thoroughly bad men like Che Guevara are fêted and made into modern-day saints, a canonization that requires effacing all memory of their murders. Out come the chisels, stage left, and the deceitful banners, stage right. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. No one is home.
I am looking at two paintings that illustrate what I take to be the heart of culture. About one of them I have written before:14 it is The Angelus by Jean-François Millet. Two peasants—I use the word in the literal sense: they are of the pays, the countryside, and they work the land—stand in the foreground. A man and a woman, their day’s labor ending, have paused to pray. The man has stuck his three-pronged pitchfork in the ground. They have been hoeing potatoes, as we can see from the ground and from the lumpy bags on a cart nearby. The man has the slender build and tanned complexion of someone who is outdoors all the time. The woman is full-bodied, with broad hips and an ample bosom, though she is by no means what you would call soft. Her form bespeaks fertility, and fertility is an earnest of the future. They wear the peasant’s sabots, wooden shoes. He has his hat in hand. They are bowing slightly, in an attitude of prayer. In the background, we see a broad plain stretching to the horizon, the fields brown with stubble and rolls of hay, and behind those fields a distant village, marked by the spire of a church. Evidently from that church comes the tolling of a bell to call the people to prayer.
What really is going on? They are praying the Angelus. One of them, probably the husband, will say, in French but possibly in Latin—and keep in mind that they are peasants, these people who would be saying a prayer in a language not spoken in common conversation in over a thousand years—“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,” and the other will respond, “And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.” Then they pray the Ave Maria. The husband continues, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” and the wife responds, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” Another Ave Maria. And finally, with a genuflection, the husband, “And the Word was made flesh,” and the wife, “And dwelt among us.” And the third Ave Maria.
Notice how their action is set in time and yet how it far transcends the moment. Whether they are conscious of it is beside the point. The things that are so habitual to us that we do not subject them to analysis are those most formative of our souls. They are recollecting. They place themselves at the moment, more than 1,800 years distant, when the angel appeared to a young maiden named Mary, who allowed her womb to become the haven of the incarnate Lord. Most paintings of the Annunciation show the calm holiness and grave beauty of Mary, portrayed as meditating upon the Scriptures, though Tintoretto portrays the violent irruption of the Word made flesh into a world once royal but now in ruins. However the Christian looks at it, the Annunciation is what Dante calls “the fulcrum of the everlasting plan,” the hinge of time, the moment at which all changes. All of the previous history of salvation was a prologue and a foreshadowing of that moment, and all of the subsequent history of man will be the playing out of what that moment means: the Word was made flesh.
You do not have to be a Christian to see the import of this act of prayer. If I wander across the battlefield at Gettysburg, I may pause at a memorial to this or that army from the North or the South and say, “These men offered their lives here,” or I may climb the rise upon which Pickett’s men sacrificed themselves in their desperate charge. And such memorials, and such thoughts, are cultural, properly speaking. We ought to have more of them, not fewer, and everywhere, not only in places thick with the traffic of tourists. But I do not seek while I am walking there to see all of time as consummated in that moment, nor am I engaged in making that moment real and present to the world. I do not measure the time of day by Meade and Stuart and Lee.
Nor do I bring all of human action and all of the world’s breadth into the place where I stand and the time when I collect my thoughts. The peasants in Millet’s painting pause because it is time to do so, as they hear from the tolling of the bell, and they are aware that other people will be praying likewise: other peasants in fields far off, people in the village streets, master and students in a classroom, the priest in the chapel, and then, farther away, Catholics in Spain, in Italy, and wherever the evening sun shows that it is time for their daily labor to cease. They are at one with them. So also at the churchyard; mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, whose bodies lie buried in the hallowed ground; they too prayed, as their children tagged along after them in the fields and learned the holy words.
The mysterious skies in Millet’s painting, streaked with clouds and suffused with sunlight, ranging subtly across the palette of color, direct our eyes toward heaven, even while we glance toward the homely things—the cart, the potatoes, the shoes, the earth. The anti-Millet would give us a concrete floor, ceiling tiles, and a man and woman strangely sexless and sterile, at lunch or on the telephone or scribbling notes on a pad, without connection to heaven or earth, to time long ago or time present across the world, to things humble or holy. The peasants in Millet are at home. The functionaries in the anti-Millet have no home. If man has no roots in time and beyond time, he has no home. Life is only a long stay at a motel or flophouse, and when he leaves, he turns in his magnetic key card at the desk, and his room number knows him no more.
The second painting I am looking at is by the baroque Dutch painter, Jan Steen: The Child Jesus in the Temple. When Jesus was twelve, we read in Luke’s gospel, he went up to Jerusalem along with his parents and his kin for the Passover and lingered to speak with the elders in the Temple, proposing and answering questions. The boy astonished them. When, on the road back to Galilee, Mary and Joseph realized that the boy was not with any of the cousins, they returned to the city in haste. Steen depicts the moment when, after three days, they have found him in the Temple, portraying Mary as a woman in full adulthood, leaning toward the boy in an act of appeal and protectiveness. “Son,” she says to him, “why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” But he stands, his right hand on his heart and his left arm held out at his side, palm outward and fingers stretched forth, as he says, as if to explain something they should have known already, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:48–49)
The rest of the scene is crowded with men, most of them elderly: the high priest, seated beneath a baroque marble canopy flanked by winding pillars, a book opened before him; a turbaned elder seated in the center, one hand propping up his head, the other marking a place in an open book; an ancient scholar with a rugged beak for a nose, seated to the left, glaring down at a small book while a companion peers over his shoulder; others engaged in concentrated discussion, while one man in the background looks out from the scene directly to the viewer—Steen himself, in a self-portrait. We are beckoned to place ourselves in that Temple, amidst the love of the Holy Family and in the life of Jesus, whose first public act situates him within the long history of his people, even as he will bring that history, as Christians believe, to a new instauration. Mary and Joseph want to bring him home, but he is already at home and about his Father’s business, and in a cultural sense, all of the other people in the scene are at home too.
I once angered a number of students at the university where I taught by suggesting that “multiculturalism” is a sham. There is nothing “multi” about its uniform politics, I said, and it is too rootless and shallow to be a culture. When I met with some of them, I showed them Millet’s Angelus. They grew uneasy. They did not want to concede that we were looking at what was essentially cultural. That was because they knew in their hearts that what I said about contemporary man is true: he has no home. One of them complained that I was imposing my view of culture upon them, but he had no reply when I said that my description fits every known culture until what, for want of a more accurate term, we call our own. Another said that “culture” means different things to different individuals, but such epistemological relativism implies that nothing is true, and so why should anyone be criticized for what he says? And what culture can be founded upon solipsism? Still another, a native speaker of English but of Hispanic ethnicity, grew petulant and said that if she had no culture, it was because others, Europeans, had robbed her and her people of it. None had any response to the point at hand, which was that the purported robbers or the descendants of the robbers, the descendants of Europeans on our campus, had no culture either, no home.
When I suggested that we meet again to talk these things over, recommending Romano Guardini’s book as a starter, the robbery victim protested that I wanted them to read a book on “my” side, as if we were engaging in partisan politics, and not thinking about human realities that transcend the heat and mire of the controversy of the day. They were not interested. I let them go and did not go out of my way to meet them again.
Perhaps these students were not, strictly speaking, engaged in partisan politics, but this kind of activism is to genuine care for the polis as mass entertainment is to culture, or as the shudders induced by pornography are to married love. It is, we might say, sub-political or pseudo-political. It warms no heart, forges no friendship, admits no sin and forgives none in others, and hates the present almost as much as it hates the past.
I was not angry with the students. That would have been like being angry with a half-mad cripple waving a sign on a street corner while begging for alms. People who have no home are going to be insecure. They do not say, “I am a pilgrim on the road, like millions who have gone before me,” because they have no destination. They do not say, “I am here under the canopy of grace, where my father and mother stood, and their ancestors also, back into time immemorial,” because they have lost the faith, or it has been demoted to a hobby, a pass-the-time.
Thus do they perceive every criticism as a mortal threat, truth’s sword-point aimed at what they take to be their very existence. The more tenuous their grasp of what they are in place and time, the more they shrink like sensitive plants from the merest touch, a hair’s tickle. The more foreign to them the walls and the roof of a time-transcending and place-transcending Temple, the more jealous they are of their scrap of ideological plastic tarp propped up on sticks, which is all they know of shelter.
The phrase “identity politics” is a strange contradiction in terms. There is no identity, and there is no polity. For if I assign to myself my identity, I have none. I have donned a costume. What I don I may doff. If I take for my identity my skin color or the happenstance of my begetting, I am attempting to build a world upon a foundation that will not sustain it—a cathedral upon a sheet of paper stretched over emptiness. If I take for my identity a partisan movement that is political in the common sense of the word—having to do with elections, money, advertisements, and protests—I may as well have consigned myself to a mental ward.
“Who is it who can tell me who I am?” cries Lear, without a kingdom, spurned by his eldest daughter and about to be turned out on a foul night by his second daughter, like a mongrel kicked from the door.
“Lear’s shadow,” says the Fool.
No faith, no culture, no home. Matthew Arnold, that sad prophet of culture who had lost the liberal Christian faith of his father, saw it despite himself, and wrote about it in his conclusion to his poem “Dover Beach”:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Those students in my office had youth’s natural desire to fight. But they had nothing clear for which to fight, no clear object of devotion. So their fight was endued with bitterness and madness. The hobbits of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings could remain cheerful in dark times not because they had a natural predilection for fighting or for adventures. Hobbits were notorious for being stay-at-homes, except for the raffish Tooks. (The real name of Pippin, one of the four friends along for the sojourning and the fighting, is Peregrine Took, and “Peregrine,” as the polyglot Tolkien expected his English-schooled readers to know, means “pilgrim.”) They went forth to save their beloved Shire, which meant also to save Middle-Earth itself from the totalizing ambition of Sauron. My students had no Shire.
It was, however, not likely that they would have agreed to have a Shire if I had managed to point them toward one. Their minds had been eaten up with political slogans, as with cancer. One among their number, a young man from Colombia, told me that he was not eager to read Calderón (1600–1681), the greatest playwright of his mother tongue, who flourished during the greatest period of Spanish drama. “European,” he said, with disappointment. He might have made the same complaint about the architecture of the churches in his country and the language spoken there, although after four centuries the strands of European and native cultures have become so entwined as to form one fabric, a good and strong fabric, as the native stone and stucco of the New World was raised up into homes of worship, where speakers of Spanish uttered prayers in Latin to the Lord who hears all languages, even those that have no words.
I might have offended them worse had I suggested that there was a home for them, if they would rise up from the unsatisfying task of feeding husks to political swine. Let me present that home.
In the decades following the Civil War, Helen Hunt Jackson, a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a liberal at a time when “liberal” did not imply a complete political program to banish all liberty from human life except for the sexual, went west to examine the plight of other peoples whom the United States government had treated badly. These were the Indians. She began with the California missions, writing a series of long articles for several consecutive issues of The Century Magazine, in which she described the death of the great and indefatigable missionary Father Junípero Serra. On the eve of his death, he walked from his bed to the church he had built to receive the viaticum—the inspiration for Tolkien’s “waybread,” because that is what the word means: food for the journey. As Father Junípero knelt before the altar, there “rose from choked and tremulous voices the strains of the grand hymn ‘Tantum Ergo.’ ” Mrs. Jackson, who came from a Unitarian family in New England, gives the reader the verses in Latin, without feeling the need to translate them. Protestant English-speakers could enter into the profound spirit of a Catholic ritual spanning many centuries in a language that had passed from life and change to eternity, among people who were both Spanish and Indian, in a land that had once belonged to Mexico and not the United States.
Suddenly, she writes, “a startled thrill ran through the church as Father Junipero’s own voice, ‘high and strong as ever,’ says the record, joined in the hymn,” to the sobs of his friends and fellow workers, and the members of his flock, both whites and Indians. When the bell tolled his death the next morning, the people thronged the church, weeping and lamenting, and “it was with great difficulty that the soldiers could keep them from tearing Father Junipero’s habit piecemeal from his body, so ardent was their desire to possess some relic of him.” Not without justification did the Indians want such memorials: “He loved them, and yearned over them as brands to be snatched from the burning. He had baptized over one thousand of them with his own hands; his whole life he spent for them, and was ready at any moment to lay it down for them if that would have benefited them more.”15
Lest we think that Mrs. Jackson is indulging in prettiness, she is careful to present for us items from the friars’ well-kept records regarding what was accomplished and produced at the missions in California, extending from San Diego to San Francisco. We must consider the wide variety of goods and trades the friars brought to the Indians, whose life in those dry lands had been ever marked by poverty, famine, and the threat of violence from stronger tribes. The Indians for the first time cultivated the vine and the olive. They planted orchards of apples, pomegranates, and oranges. They learned the arts of the foundry and the mill. They dug wells. They raised cattle and sheep. They grew corn and traded the surplus for goods from abroad. They built schools. They learned to play musical instruments:
The picture of life in one of these missions during their period of prosperity is unique and attractive. The whole place was a hive of industry: trades plying indoors and outdoors; tillers, herders, vintagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in schools; women spinning; bands of young men playing on musical instruments; music, the scores of which, in many instances, they had themselves written out; at evening, all sorts of games of running, leaping, dancing, and ball-throwing, and the picturesque ceremonies of a religion which has always been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in color, form, and harmony.16
What happened to these homes? Governments happened to them, first the Mexican, ever levying goods and moneys from these successful enterprises, and then, after the Mexican War, the regional government of California, followed by the United States. The missions were sacked. Lands to which the Indians had a claim extending back two or three generations were sold to American speculators amid confusion as to the specifics of titles, sometimes justified confusion and sometimes bad faith. Jackson went there herself. There were still quite a few elderly Indians who remembered the days of the fathers. There were also still visible many of the ruins of what had been their homes, the homes that the fathers had made for them: a well filled with sand, a broken mill wheel, the side of a chapel, grapes gone wild, an orchard choked with brush.
Here was home, in a way hard for us to imagine. What the fathers did for the Indians united them with fellow worshipers across the world and across the centuries. The Indians did things they could not have conceived before, conducting international trade from California round the horn of South America and on to Europe and back. But what was all that, against the secular dreams of an ever-expanding progressive American state? Jackson sums it up so: “The combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part of the American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect on the part of the Government at Washington, has resulted in an aggregate of monstrous injustice which no one can fully realize without studying the facts on the ground.” And this: “I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate danger of being driven out from their last foot-holds of refuge, ‘homeless wanderers in a desert.’ ”17
Abstract theories about what national progress meant, combined with not so abstract greed, destroyed a remarkable interaction between the people of two races. But what would those who ply insatiable grievances wish, since the past cannot be changed? To live on grasshoppers and small game and to pound corn in a mortar? That life is gone. I might as well desire to herd sheep on the Norwegian mountainsides with iron tools, no electricity, no gasoline, and no schooling, while pretending to worship an Odin I know is only a myth. That is not a homecoming. It is Miniver Cheevy again. The people of southern California never gave up the faith the fathers had taught them. The people of Peru have not done so either.
The question we face is not what people in the past, who were on the whole no better or worse by nature than we are now, should have done. The question is what we are to do now, and why. Where do we go?
People—there is such a thing as home. Time to rise up, and take a step in its direction.