The End of Time
The word sadness fails to capture the feeling I had after reading "The End of Time" by David Horowitz. Although written beautifully and powerfully, the emptiness of life without God permeates the pages. Horowitz represents the secular conservative movement; those who believe in the wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition but reject divinity. Although Horowitz is primarily writes on social and political issues, you will find very little politics in this work as he reflects on his mortality.
No human being truly wants non-existence. Even a suicide only seeks escape, not necessarily oblivion. Even the terrorist martyr believes in the promise of paradise on the other side of his physical disintegration. If the Stoic resigns himself to suffering or death, it is not because he desires these things, but rather, he courageously endures reality.
In the last chapter of the book, Horowitz quotes from the poem "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens. Here is the complete stanza:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
So Stevens (and Horowitz) elevate death to a place of honor. A tree that never drops its fruit loses its charm. A river that never empties into the sea flows endlessly without a destination. The demarcation of our lives with birth and death define our significance because our being stands against the background of non-being. Endless summer brings endless ennui; seasons heighten our sense of living.
A life without hope must find some justification in hopelessness.
The melancholy which permeates this book carries the one seed of hope in an otherwise bleak moonscape. Something deep within our soul hungers for immortality. We do not want to cease to be, so the approaching end of our time brings sadness. Yes, we can be noble, we can find dignity, or honor, or we can even pretend that life's worthiness issues from transience, but in our honest, deepest and most fearful heart, death is very, very ugly. Wallace Stevens portrays a changeless paradise; he implies that the death of death destroys life and replaces it with a still life, pretty but nevertheless lifeless.
But could this be the sour grapes of a soul tormented by the inevitability of death? Like a child who eagerly waits to see his Xbox 500000 under the Christmas tree and is disappointed when it is only a Nintendo DS, he stoically puffs up his indifference and says, "I wouldn't have really enjoyed it anyway." Agnosticism is the faith that everything will turn out different and usually worse than we could ever hope, and that it is better not to know than to be wrong.
This is unfair to Horowitz, and it is only in the dying pages of his book that he counters his wife's faith in God with a frail faith in the here and now. Much of the book is devoted to his experience with prostate cancer, and this reveals the optimism which seems to come naturally from Horowitz. Like Socrates, he vows to continue his dialogue without a tear while the hemlock slowly freezes his heart. After all, hasn't this life been good? Haven't blessings of unknown origin, fallen upon his charmed existence? Since his guardian angel will not reveal herself, she gets no credit, but neither will she receive curses. The angel might as well not exist, because she doesn't, does she?
Agnosticism is like prostate cancer. You may overcome it. You may live with it. You may succomb to it, but you never really know when it might return. It may be dormant or it may suddenly become malignant, but it carves a cavern in your soul, a place you long again to explore, but from which there is no exit except by the way you came in, if you can still find it.
I know I missed the real message of this book because I was numbed by the pain of separation from God. It was a reminder of my own spiritual spelunking adventures, how they began with the promise of clinical knowledge but ended with the fear of being lost forever in the cavern. But like Gollum delving for secrets in the roots of the Misty Mountains, he finds nothing but blind fish and weariness. Maybe Horowitz will turn around and find his way back to the place he entered. After all, the radical son has reinvented himself once before.
The End of Time
Radical Son
No human being truly wants non-existence. Even a suicide only seeks escape, not necessarily oblivion. Even the terrorist martyr believes in the promise of paradise on the other side of his physical disintegration. If the Stoic resigns himself to suffering or death, it is not because he desires these things, but rather, he courageously endures reality.
In the last chapter of the book, Horowitz quotes from the poem "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens. Here is the complete stanza:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
So Stevens (and Horowitz) elevate death to a place of honor. A tree that never drops its fruit loses its charm. A river that never empties into the sea flows endlessly without a destination. The demarcation of our lives with birth and death define our significance because our being stands against the background of non-being. Endless summer brings endless ennui; seasons heighten our sense of living.
A life without hope must find some justification in hopelessness.
The melancholy which permeates this book carries the one seed of hope in an otherwise bleak moonscape. Something deep within our soul hungers for immortality. We do not want to cease to be, so the approaching end of our time brings sadness. Yes, we can be noble, we can find dignity, or honor, or we can even pretend that life's worthiness issues from transience, but in our honest, deepest and most fearful heart, death is very, very ugly. Wallace Stevens portrays a changeless paradise; he implies that the death of death destroys life and replaces it with a still life, pretty but nevertheless lifeless.
But could this be the sour grapes of a soul tormented by the inevitability of death? Like a child who eagerly waits to see his Xbox 500000 under the Christmas tree and is disappointed when it is only a Nintendo DS, he stoically puffs up his indifference and says, "I wouldn't have really enjoyed it anyway." Agnosticism is the faith that everything will turn out different and usually worse than we could ever hope, and that it is better not to know than to be wrong.
This is unfair to Horowitz, and it is only in the dying pages of his book that he counters his wife's faith in God with a frail faith in the here and now. Much of the book is devoted to his experience with prostate cancer, and this reveals the optimism which seems to come naturally from Horowitz. Like Socrates, he vows to continue his dialogue without a tear while the hemlock slowly freezes his heart. After all, hasn't this life been good? Haven't blessings of unknown origin, fallen upon his charmed existence? Since his guardian angel will not reveal herself, she gets no credit, but neither will she receive curses. The angel might as well not exist, because she doesn't, does she?
Agnosticism is like prostate cancer. You may overcome it. You may live with it. You may succomb to it, but you never really know when it might return. It may be dormant or it may suddenly become malignant, but it carves a cavern in your soul, a place you long again to explore, but from which there is no exit except by the way you came in, if you can still find it.
I know I missed the real message of this book because I was numbed by the pain of separation from God. It was a reminder of my own spiritual spelunking adventures, how they began with the promise of clinical knowledge but ended with the fear of being lost forever in the cavern. But like Gollum delving for secrets in the roots of the Misty Mountains, he finds nothing but blind fish and weariness. Maybe Horowitz will turn around and find his way back to the place he entered. After all, the radical son has reinvented himself once before.
The End of Time
Radical Son
posted by moleses | 3:48 AM
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