War In the Closed World

Sunday Night Journal — January 3, 2010

Yes, the Sunday Night Journal is back. For those who started reading this blog within the past year, or have forgotten why I dropped the journal at the end of 2008, here is the explanation. It wouldn’t be perfectly accurate to say that the plan was a total failure, but it would be close; “miserable failure” is a pretty good description.

But I haven’t entirely abandoned my hopes for some of the projects which have gotten so little attention over the past year. Since it seems clear that I need some sort of external pressure, even of the contrived semi-illusory type I described last year, I intend to incorporate some of those projects into the Sunday journal, so you’ll be seeing fragments and drafts of some of those.

Chief among them—and I’m telling you this so that I’ll feel obliged to deliver something—will be the renewal of an effort I began and abandoned some thirty years ago, a sort of spiritual autobiography or memoir. Part of the reason I gave up that project was that I really didn’t want to write a detailed autobiography; there were many reasons for that, most fundamentally a sense that it is indecent to write in any detail about one’s relationships with other people, who may not wish to be part of your public story and who have no way of giving their view of things if it differs from yours, and I thought it would be impossible to write an autobiography without doing that. But a recent re-reading of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has given me some idea of how I could tell the most significant parts of my story without violating the privacy of others.  (Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain may be another, but I still haven’t gotten around to reading it.) And so I’m about to give it another try.

The chief concern of that earlier book was to have been the spiritual sources and significance of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and the social ramifications of the spiritual phenomena. With another thirty years’ experience behind me, I’ll be making the scope somewhat broader than that, though the revolution will still be prominent—it has to be, because it was of decisive importance in my life.

My attitude toward it has changed somewhat, too. In my early 30s, a newly re-converted Christian and with my lost years still very fresh in my memory, I was concerned with the attempt to understand what had gone wrong, in myself and in the culture. I had a good deal of sympathy for my younger self, seeing him primarily as a confused but genuine and relatively innocent seeker.

Now I see much more clearly the role that sin, original and personal, played in that young man’s life. I see his wretched and weak character, his blindness, his cowardice, his sheer stupidity. I regard him in fact with something pretty close to contempt. I’m embarrassed that he fell for the asinine ideas—if they can be called ideas—of the hippie movement.

It has become a struggle for me to recall that there was any good at all in that movement. There was, but, supposing that one could measure the proportions of truth and falsehood in it, of sanity and madness, I think the ratio might be something like 20-80, perhaps only 15-85. And it’s a pretty weak defense to say that the bad thing one embraced was not all bad: the Nazis were said to have made the trains run on time, and many Communists were sincerely concerned with economic justice.

I think I’ve said this here before, so my apologies if I’m repeating myself (but then this will probably be in the book, if there is one): it seems to me now that in the fall of 1967 I took a decisive step into spiritual darkness from which I didn’t emerge until some ten years later. For several years now I’ve been experiencing a kind of purgatory in which I’ve seen with horrifying clarity some of what I was and what I did in those years. And I’m troubled by evidence that I may not have changed as much as I would like to think I have.

Agonizing is not too strong a word for this experience. But yet there is a great deal of hope in it. I’ve been like the old professor in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, begging “Is there no mercy?” There is mercy. And I trust that in the end, the greater the mercy, the greater the joy.

My working title for the book is one I had chosen tentatively for that earlier effort: War in the Closed World. “War” refers to the cultural conflict of the ‘60s; “closed world” to an image I proposed for modern secular-technological civilization: a landscape without boundaries in any horizontal direction, but enclosed by a low ceiling which likewise stretches as far as the eye can see. Interestingly, Stratford Caldecott uses more or less the same image in Beauty for Truth’s Sake, which I reviewed here a few weeks ago (see here). It’s possible that a better title will emerge in the process of writing the book.

25-75 at most.