THE LANDSCAPE of America seems often like one of those endangered kingdoms in old sagas. Nightly, Grendel steals upon the knights sleeping in the hall and slays the fairest and the weakest alike. The siege, chronic, of change is one that we live with—and so we are never quite sure what has come upon us. Are we in the midst of destruction or renewal? Have we been blessed with something better: or have we, instead, merely a replacement?
The mind cannot hold the memory of the old corner before the supermarket came about, cannot remember the seemingly eternal mortar and brick that stood upon the bare land that is now a parking lot, the space that is waiting, as if under the dominion of a lawsuit in chancery, waiting with its automobiles in rows for some final disposition of the property, some lucky mortgage of partnership. What was once a cotton field has become the pasture for a new appetite, or perhaps the flattened strip of an airplane landing.
Sometimes, dreaming, in the country when it is very quiet, in imagination the Indians return to the northern regions and you meet them, melancholy and still as the woods. But the unconscious is shrinking, and those who thought it triumphant did not see the sudden, unalterable obliteration of the past. We had thought—wrongly—that the past slowly, imperceptibly receded, leaving always its traces clearly visible in the new.
We hear and read that we, at this moment, “want” something, we—“the American people.” We are also assured that there is a great deal we don’t want: indeed, much we “won’t stand for any longer.”
All through the spring and early summer of this year, small towns and large cities saw the Candidates making their intense visits. They went in and out of television studios, arrived in a rush at motel or hotel for dinners held not so much in their honor as on their behalf. They appeared at the time of day, late morning or early evening, when the citizens are likely to be drinking and eating and hospitality may fall like Grace on the just and the unjust Candidate alike. They went in and out of private houses and apartment buildings, smiling on the like-minded and favorable, soliciting the unfavorable, looking for dollars and cents and names for letterheads and petitions. These persons, flying without cease in and out of states and towns, wish to be President. The Candidate is always saying to us: I wish to be your servant, but first I must, in some degree, be your master.
“Benevolent wishes,” as Kant observed, “may be unlimited, for they do not imply doing anything.” The mythology of our lives is murky just now; and one sometimes feels that to look inside is to gaze at a screen that is not perfectly adjusted, a mirror that gives up its images in a vertical or horizontal distortion. And what an effort it takes, what patience, to “get the picture.”
The new, itself, is never safe from the Usurper, encroaching, with his brighter, more arresting, more puzzling promise. “What is the use of a newborn baby?” Benjamin Franklin asked. The wild question, pragmatism rampant, not quite serious, of course, was part of the old beginnings in the 1770s. Franklin’s notebooks with the ruled categories for the thirteen virtues—Temperance, Silence, Order, et al.— nowadays would provide the maxims of a failure. Frugality is suitable to the Chinese, not to the American. Yet, a certain element of revisionism in the current air seems to lead back to a suspicion of spending and to the thought of dignified resignation and reduction. But we remember that surrender to circumstance is for others: amelioration and good luck and grand expectations are for ourselves.
What is he for? What is he for? This year, election year, if we could know what he is for, we could know whom to be for. No man thinks of himself as having a bad character; and so, in voting, we are voting for ourselves, for those hints from the Candidate that he somehow represents our own yes and no. Hazlitt wrote about William Pitt, “With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and preserved, in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral excellence.”
Americans have all become philosophers in politics. They have had to take in thoroughly the difference between appearance and reality, shadow and substance.
Sincerity and the gold of its eloquence: this virtue, limited in politics, is a sort of official philosophy at this time. Our sincerities are strongly attached to our prejudices. That we have observed. The virtue is real and profound, however, and it means something, even if one cannot always be sure just where it is to be applied.
The New World, the New World and its recurrences: When does the New World become the Old? Perhaps we are now the Old World, but in a new way. The long streaking highways, the grasses and flowering shrubs in the falling sun. The struggle for what we are newly to become, through our political leaders and through ourselves, brings to my mind the last race at the end of a day at the track. It is then that the stress of racing, the pain and pleasure of the enormous effort are finally consecrated. In the last minutes we feel the apotheosis of the sacrificial power of the horse and its Faustian contract with the jockey. The end comes suddenly. And soon a tristesse falls down upon the scene. The horses are led away to their rest—those creatures whose feelings about the race they have run are unknown to us. And so it is, in the political race for our love.
1976