[A note: I have separated my book, "Hurricane River," from "Books by Frederick Keogh" to its own title. Starting today and each Friday from here on out, I will add an additional chapter or two until it is complete. I will leave all chapters presently up until next week for those who want to start it, and then leave only the two latest chapters up at a time, as a serial, starting next week. This is to add to the website something new besides the blog. I am seriously working on getting the Essays into a book, and so will only have one or two new ones a month posted until this book is finished, hopefully with the hardest part done by spring.]
(Back to Blog): My wife found a site, I think it is called "Despair," where a company makes posters and tea cups and such with de-motivational themes to mock the hollow optimism of corporate buzz-phrases. In their product line is a poster that shows a sunken schooner in a squall, only its bow and mast showing above an island of rocks. The words underneath read: "Perhaps your life's purpose is to serve as a warning to others." Now, I know that this is not true; in the Gospels is the parable of the workers who came to harvest a field. Those who came early and worked all day complained afterwards that those who came at the last hour were paid the same as they. Says the owner: all will receive the same, whether they come to me early or late. In other words, "doing" is not the only measure of accomplishment. Realizing God's work, rather, is our main job, and that can come at any moment, in any life. The past is then just as a nothing. Eastern mysticism says much the same, if not more so.
Still, it often feels that way, at least to me, that my life has been a string of mistakes, usually done through my own ignorance, which is usually caused through my arrogance. Even so, we never know what our lives, failures though they may be, will yet accomplish.
In the book I am reading and have almost finished, "The Darkest Jungle," by Todd Balf, he talks of the life of Lionel Gisborne, British engineer, after the disaster of the American crossing, in part due to his poor maps. Because of other criticisms of the American team in Europe, he was able to restore his reputation and get work laying cable across different oceans for the then-new electric wire (Morse code) communications. He was successful in laying thousands of miles of it in the Indian Ocean, in the Red Sea, and in other areas, but as it turned out, the wires only lasted a few weeks. Poor material led to their undoing, and Gisborne was to die a broken man at age 38.
Certainly a life lived as a "warning to others." However, we come to learn that it was because of his enthusiastic work that other engineers were able to correct the problems and successfully lay additional thousands of miles of lines. They had, in a way, built on the fallen shoulders of Gisborne. He did serve as a warning to others, but a necessary one that led to success.
In other words, we don't know. We don't know how our current success might lead to future disasters (Nobel created a prize out of guilt for inventing dynamite, used for engineering as well as for war; and just think of Einstein, Oppenheimer and the Atomic bomb) or vice versa. I have a cousin whose step-father was an alcoholic - and because of that, he became the straightest of arrows and has done a lot of good, certainly as much or more good than his step-father's bad. Beyond that, it seems, rather than black and white, our lives are lived in a gray zone - consider Columbus's discovery of America for the Old World, or advances in Chemistry (medicines causing good and the bad of overpopulation; new genetic breeds of crops alleviating overpopulation, but creating an unstable reliance on single species, and etc).
Maybe it is that all advances and accomplishments in this world are at best an overall null in the greater context; maybe, in fact, the whole business of worldly enterprise is a warning to us: don't go this way, for eventually, it will produce negative effects, from wealth and spoiled children to chemical and germ warfare. In the Gospels, the workers are rewarded for showing up, not for the work; it is for bringing themselves to the field, an analogy for finding the truth in the world, however a religion might put that (god, the absolute, nirvana). The works of man, our Towers of Babel, might be the warning, not so much in the initial product but how we will use it. To see the truth in the world is not to use dynamite or chemical knowledge in warfare. More, even as we invent, we spin ourselves around; the Panama Canal when finally realized did not end world strife and poverty.
I would never say that invention itself is evil - I want to fly to the stars as much as anyone else. We were made to explore, but also to calibrate morally our use of what we find. But still, a life is not a failure because it fails in its work; we have every moment of our lives instead to find that which is most valuable, and in the end, we will all be paid the same. FK
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