Rootedness Over Time and Affection for the Real

Heritage

Sep 5

Outside the screened-in porch and downwind from us fourteen lambs graze in the dark. Their bleating diminishes with the coming darkness. Near them, in a lean-to made of repurposed rail fencing, four hogs sleep on the cool dirt floor. On the other side of the barn five hens roost in their coop, safe from the marauding raccoons and foxes.

I mention this because among the five of us gathered in the porch the question of what is “real” arises. It arises amid talk of what is not real or what seems insubstantial, ephemeral, real only inasmuch as it is inimical to the Good. What is X, what is AI, what is Facebook and email and Zoom and Google Meets and the internet and television compared to a lamb on pasture, to good food before real people sitting around an actual table. If there is nothing virtuous in all this, there is certainly nothing “virtual.” Each of us has five senses, and we engage them all. This is a human space, and there are people in it.

But presently, in a brief moment of abstraction, I wonder how often what is happening happens at all anymore. Consider:

One of those gathered here lives just a few miles away in a house a few hundred feet from the one he grew up in and not much farther from the retirement house his parents now live in. He is an avid bicyclist who manages a bike shop.
Another is a priest from the area who serves a parish in the same city he grew up in.
A third lives only forty minutes down the road. He once worked hereabouts in the state legislature and then as a journalist. He has interesting things to say about the censorship and bias that, even then, thirty years ago, sent him in search of less mendacious employment.
My wife and I, here on this small farm, live a short walk through the woods from where she grew up and only a few miles from where I grew up. My mom and my wife’s parents are both nearby.
And somewhat to my surprise my younger son, not quite twenty years-old, sits with us, engaged in the talk of four men in their sixties who long ago gathered together each day in the same high school not far from here. The boy, a college sophomore, also attended and graduated from this high school, as did my wife.

How often, I wonder, does this happen—not during the odd planned reunion, when people gather from the four corners, but because it can happen and because those gathered here desire it to happen?

My dog, moving from knee to knee under the table, looking for a friendly hand and a scratch behind his ears, brings me back from my solitary inquiry.

This gathering is at once a simple and a complex thing. What can be more simple, more human, than people gathered over a distinctly summer fare of sweetcorn and bruschetta, of cheese and grilled lamb lightly sprinkled with rosemary from the garden yonder? In the long history of humans making-do during their brief journeys from cradle to grave there isn’t anything especially odd about meat on a table that was once on the hoof out back. And until the age of deracination and hypermobility there would have been nothing remarkable about a few men who were schoolmates more than forty years ago luxuriating in talk over beers on an evening in August. In the long story of humanity there isn’t anything particular about this at all.

But now—in what surely are anomalous times, notwithstanding our inclination to regard them as normal—this, clearly, is rare. Surely the answer to my question is “rarely.”

So there’s a complexity here as well. It inheres in part in the effort itself. First there must be the effort, against all prevailing tendencies, prejudices, influences, and forces, to remain in the place of your upbringing. And then, at least on this particular evening, multiply that by four. This is not a simple thing. Then there must be the effort actually to come together and to have an implicit agreement that doing so is salutary—this in spite of what a mess a family’s calendar can be. And I do think the agreement itself is a matter of effort, at least in part. You have to say, “I will sit with old friends instead of stay home and let the industries of entertainment keep the ambient boredom at bay.” You have to make an effort to do something for your own good and for the good of others. I will go so far as to say ascesis gets the better of acedia. You prefer discipline to indifference, especially indifference to your own improvement, perhaps salvation. That is not simple. It is not easy.

Moreover, who would doubt that the necessary comity after all these years is an odds-beater? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune can change a man, and tonight we speak of such changes. We have seen them in siblings and friends. The joke about how a liberal in New York City is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet is not only funny; it reminds us that the slightest twist of fate no less than the most devastating wallop can change a life. Reversing the flow of the Chicago river was a feat of engineering, probably an ill-advised one; but what is that compared to changing your mind? What is engineering compared to losing your faith, or finding it, or finding it anew?

We are a motley assemblage. One of us has no children, though that is a matter of vocation. One has no grandchildren and no sure answer about why this is so, while another has seven and thinks the number will reach nine. I have one plus one more incubating. Our four lives are and have been very different. It is lucky that we mostly agree about politics, though none of us, thank God, is obsessed with them, not even during an election year. It is also lucky that we are all a little distressed with the way of things.

There’s mention of a polar shift taking place and what that could mean for a world abjectly dependent on electronics, which are abjectly dependent on a fragile grid, which elected officials willfully ignore.

There’s mention of riots in the British isles, the state of higher education. We all agree there’s scarcely a college or university worth sending your kids to, and by and large the shrinking number of adults who are still having children are sacrificing them to Molochs more insidious and moronic than any of us can believe. They hardly differ from the mob that cried, “His blood be on us, and on our children.”

The sweet singer of Israel, said, “Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, for brethren to dwell together in unity.” Certainly it is true that intellectual agreement conduces to our talk as much as the bourbon does. Like seeks like; deep calls unto deep. And, after all, those we disagree with are probably doing the same thing we are, though perhaps with less eschatological hope and more angry bumper stickers on their cars. No doubt their comestibles come from Whole Foods instead of the pasture and garden yonder. They are “on the right side of history”; we are amused at the idiotic notion that history has sides.

But I think that in our case something else is at work. I think there is a cohesion that comes from elsewhere, and I think it gets me close to articulating why what is happening happens rarely.

Consider with what genuine affection—not longing, not nostalgia, but genuine affection—we can rehearse our own and one another’s stories, recall one another’s parents, siblings, our own foibles and hijinks, failures and successes, encounters with the cops, camping fiascoes, and so on. Consider how important those stories are not for knowing about but for actual knowing. Consider how important it is to rehearse them with both seriousness and good humor.

It must be that there is something wholly salutary about an extended and remembered intimacy, an intimacy here, an intimacy in this place and with this place. It must be that such rootedness as we share is in large measure what makes such evenings as this possible. I played three varsity sports with one of these guys and three with his brother. We were also in elementary school together. You can bet we got under each other’s skin a few times. The priest, back when he and I were teenagers and knew everything, argued like bishops in ecumenical council.

(I see some of this in my son and think it’s okay for him to be a little argumentative, even vehement. It is one of the lessons of the evening that, although we might become more concentrated versions of ourselves—for we see or saw this in our parents—we also gain wisdom as we age, and in gaining it we mellow. All the waves of youth crashing in the surf now have a soft inland murmur.)

That is, I would not gild over the past: there is no good in falsification. Lying to yourself is a bad idea. But spats and arguments of old are behind us. Civility prevails. It prevails alongside humor, affection, respect. This is goodwill toward men.

I do not mean to say that people who leave home do not live good lives or that they are incapable of rootedness. I only mean to say something in favor of rootedness and a longstanding affection for a place. I mean to insist that place matters, that place impinges on our gathering this evening, that a placed continuity differs from its opposite as quiet sunlight differs from the buzz of fluorescent lighting.

“Dollar” Bill Bradley (later Senator Bradley), in his book Life on the Run, which covered only a handful of days during one of his seasons with the New York Knicks, wrote this: “When I travel constantly the experience I have seems to consist largely of observations and moments of enjoyment—the 80 degree weather in San Diego, the desert nights in Phoenix, the days in the mountain ranges of the Northwest—but never are they lived through and absorbed. I miss that sense of sharing that comes from people living together in one place, over time. I miss permanence.”

This is no casual remark. The diction is precise: “Absorbed.” “Lived through.” “Living together in one place, over time.” “Permanence.”

It is possible, or rather likely, that I will be accused of living in the past or of trying to turn back the clock. I have been told on many occasions that you can’t turn back the clock, which is nonsense. Find a clock with hands on it and turn them back. You’ll see. And, at any rate, no one is living in the past, because that is impossible. The real point is to inhabit the present fully where you are—and not to think of it as inferior to where you might be—which you do by bringing the fullness of the past to bear and by attempting to be worthy of the place. To do that you must have respect and affection for the place, knowledge of the place, and, I would add, with a resolute commitment to what is real.

Tonight no one pulls a phone out. That pernicious assemblage of irrelevance and annoyance can’t compete with what’s happening, and thank God for that.