It happens this time of year. Although November is probably the ugliest and most hopeless of all the months - March at least has the promise of spring - it brings with it the first cold skies, new to us in Wisconsin after half a year of humidity. I notice this as I go to the mailbox and look above the stubble of corn, and in walks through the fields, but most of all, on Nick's Hill.
It is not officially or even locally known as Nick's Hill, but just among we three at the house because of a fellow student of our son's who lives on it and happens to be named Nick. It really is a ridge a few miles long that runs parallel to our road and is necessarily crossed by the state highway in its anxious need to run east-west instead of north-south, and it rises from corn and soy flat lands on both sides, making it moderately unique in the immediate area. I have to cross it going to and from town, and it is on the return when it sometimes becomes so special. As it gradually slopes up, one feels as if lifted by waves, and one wants to drive as fast as possible - witnessed by the fact that police are regularly posted there to catch speeders. I usually restrain myself, because the best is yet to come on the other side, especially at dusk. When one reaches the top, there suddenly is the setting sun, or the just-set sun illuminating the colors, the oranges and purples and reds, of the horizon, and there, to the south (left) is a great plain of marsh, hundreds of acres of cattails and reeds that bleed into vast, shallow Lake Koshkonong a distant mile or so away. On ordinary days, the view is pleasing. On other days it is, as the poets say, sublime.
Such it was yesterday as I drove back from the store, luxuriously cushioned by the shocks of the new car, rolling up the hill like a surfer in the zone, there at the peak to get the full effects of that clear autumn sky and colored horizon and darkening swamp and icily sparkling black water. It was then, as it sometimes happened, that it slipped, or rather my perception was changed, from the beautiful to the sublime. It was then, for ten or fifteen seconds, that the facts and hardness of this world became distant shadows, overcome by the sense of a greater reality that made the 'normal' so ghostly and unreal. I wanted to make words of it, to call it "shattering beauty," but they would not suffice. Nothing less than a transformation had occurred, where for a few brief moments something else, another entire way of living, opened.
It then closed, as it always does, and will remain so for another week or month or whenever whatever does this decides to tease or please me again. But the memory - not so much the feeling, but the truth of it - always remains, staying behind like the odor of bacon and coffee from a morning breakfast. And the truth of it is: nothing short of death and pain matters; social standing, success, money and all the pleasures and gratifications they can bring fade into something immature and immaterial. There is in this truth BEING, fulfilled as it is, needing nothing but the commonplace needs of survival to continue. With this comes an understanding of how it was done for so many millennium, how our most ancient ancestors lived so fully with such simple lives; and also how those people dedicated to the spirit of this other world survive to this day in monastic or purposefully simple communities. With this sense, with this presence of the other world - a world that is this, but seen in so much greater completeness - the needs of history are blown away. With this sense, heaven is within reach, one mortal touch away. With this sense, all but the most elemental problems of life and death are solved.
But why aren't we given this sense all the time? Why has it been chosen - or why have we chosen - this incomplete world that requires everything that makes us emotionally miserable? It is with this sense that I understand those who are antiquarian - who despise the notion of "progress" as we understand it, for it is not progress towards this other world that we have, but something away from it, dependent as it is on the unfulfilled world view that spawns it. For me, yes, I would like the world of Star Trek - and as such I will not say 'no' to our great innovations and scientific promise. But still - in that other world, those things are at best small, and at worst, contributors to our misery. In that other world there is complete, instant fulfillment and with it, compassion, for there is nothing to conquer or to fight. If we could only stay there...
But we can't. St Paul spoke often of it, of living in the spirit, and with it he was willing to suffer and die so that others might live it, too. But most of us, like myself, are not saints. We fall back into the world of needs and wants so quickly, with only those brief reminders that we are something more. Why only this short time?, I ask again. Why are we given this brief touch but rarely the full grasp?
No, I don't resent Star Trek - that is, our progress in understanding and controlling the forces of nature, as long as this is not made the golden calf. But this I fear: that in our desire to make this other, better world permanent, we substitute the form for substance; that is, that we enforce a communal life style before we are joined by the spirit of this greater world. It is the spirit of this other world that makes the communal life natural and freely chosen, but without it, this sort of life quickly becomes a totalitarian nightmare. The communal life is not meant for those of this ordinary world, and does violence to the spirit of the ordinary world. This greater spirit - that of this other world - cannot be made. It can be recognized and sought, but it cannot be made by the hands that make this world.
If I could impart two things I have learned from my brief experiences, it would be exactly those two just stated. We know how to seek this greater world - it is to seek the spirit that is behind the good. We also know that all other goods flow from this, but the good can never be achieved from the top down. The ends do not justify the means, for the mere implementation of this destroys the spirit that must exist to create the ends. Our brave new world might have star ships, but never, I hope, an imposed utopia. FK
It is not officially or even locally known as Nick's Hill, but just among we three at the house because of a fellow student of our son's who lives on it and happens to be named Nick. It really is a ridge a few miles long that runs parallel to our road and is necessarily crossed by the state highway in its anxious need to run east-west instead of north-south, and it rises from corn and soy flat lands on both sides, making it moderately unique in the immediate area. I have to cross it going to and from town, and it is on the return when it sometimes becomes so special. As it gradually slopes up, one feels as if lifted by waves, and one wants to drive as fast as possible - witnessed by the fact that police are regularly posted there to catch speeders. I usually restrain myself, because the best is yet to come on the other side, especially at dusk. When one reaches the top, there suddenly is the setting sun, or the just-set sun illuminating the colors, the oranges and purples and reds, of the horizon, and there, to the south (left) is a great plain of marsh, hundreds of acres of cattails and reeds that bleed into vast, shallow Lake Koshkonong a distant mile or so away. On ordinary days, the view is pleasing. On other days it is, as the poets say, sublime.
Such it was yesterday as I drove back from the store, luxuriously cushioned by the shocks of the new car, rolling up the hill like a surfer in the zone, there at the peak to get the full effects of that clear autumn sky and colored horizon and darkening swamp and icily sparkling black water. It was then, as it sometimes happened, that it slipped, or rather my perception was changed, from the beautiful to the sublime. It was then, for ten or fifteen seconds, that the facts and hardness of this world became distant shadows, overcome by the sense of a greater reality that made the 'normal' so ghostly and unreal. I wanted to make words of it, to call it "shattering beauty," but they would not suffice. Nothing less than a transformation had occurred, where for a few brief moments something else, another entire way of living, opened.
It then closed, as it always does, and will remain so for another week or month or whenever whatever does this decides to tease or please me again. But the memory - not so much the feeling, but the truth of it - always remains, staying behind like the odor of bacon and coffee from a morning breakfast. And the truth of it is: nothing short of death and pain matters; social standing, success, money and all the pleasures and gratifications they can bring fade into something immature and immaterial. There is in this truth BEING, fulfilled as it is, needing nothing but the commonplace needs of survival to continue. With this comes an understanding of how it was done for so many millennium, how our most ancient ancestors lived so fully with such simple lives; and also how those people dedicated to the spirit of this other world survive to this day in monastic or purposefully simple communities. With this sense, with this presence of the other world - a world that is this, but seen in so much greater completeness - the needs of history are blown away. With this sense, heaven is within reach, one mortal touch away. With this sense, all but the most elemental problems of life and death are solved.
But why aren't we given this sense all the time? Why has it been chosen - or why have we chosen - this incomplete world that requires everything that makes us emotionally miserable? It is with this sense that I understand those who are antiquarian - who despise the notion of "progress" as we understand it, for it is not progress towards this other world that we have, but something away from it, dependent as it is on the unfulfilled world view that spawns it. For me, yes, I would like the world of Star Trek - and as such I will not say 'no' to our great innovations and scientific promise. But still - in that other world, those things are at best small, and at worst, contributors to our misery. In that other world there is complete, instant fulfillment and with it, compassion, for there is nothing to conquer or to fight. If we could only stay there...
But we can't. St Paul spoke often of it, of living in the spirit, and with it he was willing to suffer and die so that others might live it, too. But most of us, like myself, are not saints. We fall back into the world of needs and wants so quickly, with only those brief reminders that we are something more. Why only this short time?, I ask again. Why are we given this brief touch but rarely the full grasp?
No, I don't resent Star Trek - that is, our progress in understanding and controlling the forces of nature, as long as this is not made the golden calf. But this I fear: that in our desire to make this other, better world permanent, we substitute the form for substance; that is, that we enforce a communal life style before we are joined by the spirit of this greater world. It is the spirit of this other world that makes the communal life natural and freely chosen, but without it, this sort of life quickly becomes a totalitarian nightmare. The communal life is not meant for those of this ordinary world, and does violence to the spirit of the ordinary world. This greater spirit - that of this other world - cannot be made. It can be recognized and sought, but it cannot be made by the hands that make this world.
If I could impart two things I have learned from my brief experiences, it would be exactly those two just stated. We know how to seek this greater world - it is to seek the spirit that is behind the good. We also know that all other goods flow from this, but the good can never be achieved from the top down. The ends do not justify the means, for the mere implementation of this destroys the spirit that must exist to create the ends. Our brave new world might have star ships, but never, I hope, an imposed utopia. FK
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