Philosophy

Apotheosis

There's a scene in C.S. Lewis' book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: a ship is approaching a foggy place in the ocean that is marked as 'the place where dreams come true.' For a minute, the sailors are intrigued: then they begin rowing frantically away from that place, as they remember some of their dreams.

Writers who write a lot often track a kind of hero through many books. This person gets all the good lines, is vindicated over the more foolish characters, is clearly the author's pet. But sometimes, when a writer has done enough of this sort of thing, there comes a book in which the hero turns on the writer, reveals a well-lit vacuum at his or her core. I recommend a couple of pieces, to study this: Kingsley Amis' late work Girl, 20, in which the ironic character who appeared on the scene in Lucky Jim shows us where his heart isn't, and Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man, in which, I think, the Jungian psycho-historian, guardian angel sort of fellow who stands in the background of the Deptford and Cornish trilogies comes to realize that guardian angel work is not quite appropriate for human beings. It is interesting that both of these late works are critiques by fine observers of the distanced, academic, observational stance.

St. Thomas said late in his fairly short life that he had come to see everything he had written as straw. Maybe that happens occasionally, with honest people who write enough.

There's an intriguing bit in Plato's Phaedo . On the day of his death, Socrates tells of a dream in which the gods encourage him to write poetry. He has been sentenced to die for a lifetime of direct challenge to the fundamental self-images and certainties of his fellow Athenians. His speech in court is full of confidence that this activity was absolutely the right thing to do, mandated by the gods. And then, at the very end, there's this strange little footnote, which could be read as "perhaps I took the wrong approach, after all."

There's nothing more valuable to study than the big mistakes. One has to get oneself into the minds that made them, as those minds were working at the time the mistakes were made. (All those people who introduced new predators into fragile eco-systems to solve some particular problem come to mind.) One has to realize how natural the fundamentally stupid move seemed, how outlandish and impractical the little critical carping voice at the edge of consciousness must have sounded. If one can come to realize what sort of mind is needed to stop short of doing terrible but utterly natural things -- now that's an intellectual accomplishment. If one can come to that realization before the last day of one's life -- all the better.