Searching for life and light

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“This great evil — where’s it come from? How did it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us? Robbing us of life and light. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known.”

So asks the protagonist, Private Witt, of Terrence Malick’s war film, “The Thin Red Line,” as he encounters horror after unspeakable horror carrying out the duties of a stretcher-bearer in World War II. We can ask the same questions of the mass killings by the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes. We can ask, in light of history, as to the events and circumstances that led up to these horrors or we could ask, in light of philosophy, about the progression of ideas.

As a student of literature, however, I prefer to consider these questions in the context of poems and novels. I’m fascinated by the correlation of creative writing to the era in which it is produced. Having studied some history, I might have guessed outright that 20th century literature would reflect, in some form, the bleakness of the age. That wasn’t quite the case for me, though. When I was exposed to modern literature, I was surprised by the pervasive confusion of the 20th century and found myself asking questions similar to those of Malick’s stretcher-bearer. What on earth could have happened to make T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land” (1922), the most influential poem of the century? In what culture could the words of Randall Jarrell’s 1942 poem, “90 North,” capture the spirit of the age:

“Here at the actual pole of my existence / Where all that I have done is meaningless, / I see at last that all the knowledge / Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, / The darkness from the darkness.”

Rather, the majority of my short reading career has been within the great conversation of Western civilization in which the key questions revolve around concepts of truth, reality, beauty, the human condition, and the appropriate relationships of people with each other and with God — an altogether “meaningful” conversation. Guided by notions of reason and revelation, Homer, Dante, More, Shakespeare, and others have lead me on an invigorating journey.

Not until the fall semester of my senior year, however, was I directly exposed to the literature of modernity. In its role of shaping and reflecting the ethos of common culture, literature paints a less-than-optimistic picture of the last century. Authors like Kate Chopin, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and (the early) T.S. Eliot give evidence of a drastic break with tradition, a break which ushered in severe alienation of the individual, deep-rooted doubt and disorientation, and widespread rejection of the transcendent. I’ve wondered, how can meaning and significance turn so quickly into confusion and despair? The process of understanding the ideas and events that led up to modernity is important. I eagerly — sometimes desperately — look to authors who engage the times and offer some hopeful vision, authors like Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Dillard, and Marilynne Robinson (and others, to be sure). Most of all, I’m drawn to the writers who engage and depict modern confusion, situating themselves in their own benighted culture, without acquiescing to meaninglessness and rejecting all of the old ideas that once provided meaning for us. In short, these authors share the burdens of the times, but use the fragmented pieces of their culture to create something resonant and beautiful.

In this column, I will be focusing my attention on just such authors and trying to share why I find their words to be a source of “life and light” for the difficulties of modernity. At the end of the day they give us a way to carry on — perhaps with joy — and say, in the spirit of composer Richard Hundley’s song “Astronomers,” “We have loved the stars too deeply to be afraid of the night.”