It all came back to me, all the separate fragments of the vision I had seen, together with the sinister remembrance of that upper world of night, glittering with its riches, and its soft, sophisticated pleasures, and its cold indifference to the misery and injustice on which its very life was founded. It all came back, but now it was an integrated picture.
So it was, in this far place and under these profoundly moving and disturbing alien circumstances, that I realised fully, for the first time, how sick America was, and saw, too, that the ailment was akin to Germany’s—a dread world-sickness of the soul. One of my German friends, Franz Heilig, later told me this same thing. In Germany it was hopeless: it had already gone too far to be checked now by any measures short of death, destruction, and total ruin. But in America, it seemed to me, it was not mortal, not incurable—not yet. It was desperate, and would become more desperate still if in America, as in Germany, men became afraid to look into the face of fear itself, to probe behind it, to see what caused it, and then to speak the truth about it. America was young, America was still the New World of mankind’s hope, America was not like this old and worn-out Europe which seethed and festered with a thousand deep and uncorrected ancient maladies. America was still resilient, still responsive to a cure—if only—if only—men could somehow cease to be afraid of truth. For the plain and searching light of truth, which had here, in Germany, been darkened to extinction, was the remedy, the only one, that could cleanse and heal the suffering soul of man.
After such a night of seeing whole at last, day would come again, the cool glow of morning, the bronze gold of the kiefern-trees, the still green pools of lucid water, the enchanted parks and gardens—but none of it was the same as it had been before. For now I knew that there was something else in life as new as morning and as old as hell, a universal ill of man seen here in Germany at its darkest, and here articulated for the first time in a word, regimented now in a scheme of phrases and a system of abominable works. And day by day the thing soaked in, and kept soaking in, until everywhere, in every life I met and touched, I saw the ruin of its unutterable pollutions.
So now another layer had been peeled off the gauzes of the seeing eye. And what the eye had seen and understood, I knew that it could nevermore forget or again be blind to.
47. Ecciesiasticus
Now I have told you [George wrote to Fox] some of the things that have happened to me and the effect they had upon me. But what has all of this to do with you?—you may ask. I am coming to that now.
In the beginning I spoke about my “philosophy of life” when I was a student in college twenty years ago. I didn’t tell you what it was because I don’t think I really had one then. I’m not sure I have one now. But I think it is interesting and important that I should have thought I had one at the age of seventeen, and that people still talk about “a philosophy of life” as though it were a concrete object that you could pick up and handle and take the weight and dimensions of. Just recently I was asked to contribute to a book called Modern-Day Philosophies. I tried to write something for it but gave it up, because I was unwilling and unready to say that I had a “modern-day philosophy”. And the reason that I was unwilling and unready was not that I felt confusion and doubt about what I think and now believe, but that I felt confusion and doubt about saying it in formalistic and final terms.
That was what was wrong with most of us at Pine Rock College twenty years ago. We had a “concept” about Truth and Beauty and Love and Reality—and that hardened our ideas about what all these words stood for. After that, we had no doubt about them—or, at any rate, could not admit that we did. This was wrong, because the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man-Alive, and his “philosophy” must grow, must flow, with him. When it does not, we have—do we not?—the Unfixed Man, the Eternal Trifler, the Ape of Fashion—the man too fixed to-day, unfixed to-morrow—and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
I cannot attempt, therefore, to define for you your own “philosophy”—for to define so is to delimit the “closed” and academic man, and you, thank God, are not of that ilk. And to define so would be to call upon me once again your own and curious scorn, your sudden half-amused contemptuousness. For how could anyone pin down neatly the essence of your New Englandness—so sensitively proud, so shy, so shrinking and alone, but at bottom, as I think, so unafraid?