How I missed the war

I get a lot more done when Peggy is away because her presence is a distraction. During this absence, I’ve been roofing our new deck during the day and making crackers and soups at night. When I’m working in the kitchen, I watch films one after the other. Tonight, I watched two war documentaries. The first was The Corporal’s Diary, which was about an American soldier who died in Iraq, and the second was Heroes of Iwo Jima. In a few minutes, I’ll go to bed and continue my nightly reading of a newly-released book entitled Survivor: Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Fight for Freedom, which is surely the last first-person account of a Nazi death camp that the world will ever see.

When I was younger, I sometimes experienced regret that I had never gone to war because I saw it as a rite of passage like no other, and because it enables men to bond closely with other men. Yet, I went to great lengths to avoid the only war I had a chance at. I’m not sure whether I did this because I thought that only suckers voluntarily went to Vietnam, or because I had no stomach for any war. I suspect the former because, unlike World War II, which made at least a little sense to me, and during which those who didn’t fight were viewed with suspicion, I never felt the least inner desire or societal pressure to go to Vietnam, although I felt a lot of pressure from the draft board, which was forever eliminating my latest exemption in what seemed like a cat and mouse game with me being the mouse. When it seemed as if the cat finally had me cornered, my doctor wrote to the draft board saying that I had passed several kidney stones, so I was reclassified from 1A (kiss your ass goodbye) to 4F (we wouldn’t draft a worthless fucker like you no matter what) for a year, and by the time that year ended, the war was winding down. I was surprised to learn that I had suffered from kidney stones, but I wasn’t about to argue.

Tonight, as I cried my way through Heroes of Iwo Jima, I glanced over at Brewsky and was startled to discover that he was watching me with an expression of consternation unlike any I had ever seen in him, and I knew it was because he didn’t understand my tears. I very much wanted to tell him what was going on for me, but how does one describe feelings about war to a cat? Not very well, I shouldn’t think. When the war films were over, I watched another documentary, The Cruise, which was about a NYC tour bus guide. This guy had depth, honesty, creativity, sensitivity, eloquence, and a unique world-view, which is to say that he was everything I would like to be when I’m around people but am not. Of course, it’s a lot harder to be all those things given that I mostly avoid people. Like this morning, I got to feeling lonely, what with Peggy being gone, so, it being Sunday, I thought about either visiting the new Unitarian Church or calling someone about getting together, but I decided against either because they seemed like too much work. That decision being out of the way, my friend Cliff called to ask if he could come over, but I didn't answer the phone. About an hour later, I called him back, and we took a walk. It was good, but there’s such a wide gap between myself and others that I sometimes think about seeing people in the same way I think about taking medicine. I know it’s good for me, but it’s not altogether pleasant, although it can sometimes be very pleasant indeed, which is another parallel between people and drugs.

They will be like the morning mist, like dew in the morning sun, like chaff blown by the wind, like smoke from a chimney. Hosea 13:3

I saw life as predictable and everlasting because time moved so slowly that I couldn’t imagine myself growing up. Days were alike except for weekends and holidays, which seemed so far apart that I once tried to hurry Christmas by pulling leaves from September trees. I knew that real change would someday come, but the time seemed so far away that thinking about it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I lacked the words to say so, but I regarded change as theoretical rather than actual in the same sense that the earth someday being obliterated now seems theoretical rather than actual, although it will certainly happen.

My concept of life as more or less a status quo affair lingered into my fifties because, while many changes had by then happened around me, I stayed constant within myself. Then, my health changed in ways that left me with pain and limitations, and once a person can’t trust himself to stay right, and other people can’t make him right, life becomes more serious. Now, when I look back upon all the people and events that I once knew and experienced—and are gone forever even though it once seemed that they would continue forever—I become panicky and nauseous because I know that the people and events that are currently a part of my life will also cease to exist, and that the time before it happens no longer seems like looking through the wrong end of a telescope but through the right end of a microscope.

I have an 87-year-old friend who says to me every time I see him: “Growing old isn’t for sissies.” He says this with a solemn voice and baleful eye as if it’s his own original and profound discovery even though he’s been saying it for years, as have millions of other people. He says it this way because it is his own discovery and it is original and profound, although the bromidic words with which he expresses himself can’t begin to impart his private realization that life can and will go horribly wrong no matter what we do, and that, all too soon, everything will be lost. All the work, all the years in school, all the relationships, and a million little things, will soon disappear in the same way that light disappears when the bulb blows.

In late adolescence, I began to think of life as the product of how one looked at it, which meant that if I looked at it as a game, I could avoid suffering. Yet, even then I knew what it was to step on a nail, to fall ill with strep throat, and to bend double from food poisoning, and I would guess that no one ever said that life was a game while he had a nail sticking out of his foot, or was having diarrhea in a toilet while throwing-up in a trashcan. There are even books that promote the view that life is a game, but I very much doubt that any of them were written in Palestine or Darfur or by people who were in intractable pain. The irony of life is that the same brevity and powerlessness that make it meaningless also make it profound. Indeed, when I was able (on my better days) to view life as a game, I had yet to understand that life is more akin to a gasp that bursts from the eternal blackness of the void only to be sucked back into it. Once that thought reached my core, life became a tragedy. As my IOOF ritual put it:

“I have seen the rose in its beauty spread its leaves to the morning sun. I returned and it was dying upon the stalk; its grace and form were gone; its loveliness was vanished away; its leaves were scattered to the ground, and no one gathered them together again. I have seen man in the pride of his strength. He walked; he ran; he leaped; he rejoiced in that he was more excellent than the rose. I returned, and life was departed from him, and the breath from out of his nostrils.”

All but one of the nine men who used to stand around a coffin with me as we performed that ritual are dead. “Death is in the world,” they said; “All who are born must die,” they said, and so they died, leaving only my 87-year-old friend and me.

Given such a reality, I can understand why people turn to religion and spirituality, and even today, I wish that they could be true. Yet, from adolescence, I viewed their content as so fanciful that I could but cling to them desperately in order to enjoy even the fleeting illusion of a permanent hold. I asked the darkness around my bed why, if there really exists an Eternal Beneficence that reaches out to us as eagerly as we reach out to it, doesn’t that Beneficence reveal itself equally and undeniably to everyone rather than leave us to interpret the words of dead men in contradictory ways, all of which promote hatred in the name of a thousand different Gods of Love. Finally, I couldn’t go on believing in God anymore than I could go on believing in Santa Claus, there being so few things that make life bearable that the rest must of necessity fall away. What could possibly make life bearable for an atheist, some might ask. Kindness, integrity, intimacy, art, music, literature, good health, simple pleasures, adequate resources, writing, reflecting, studying, time in the woods, and, most of all, truth. Given that there are so few, none can be relinquished without the loss outweighing the gain, and religion and spirituality required that I relinquish truth as I believe it to be within my deepest self.

The truth of which I speak is that the existence of certain persistent questions regarding the possibility that our lives possess an ultimate purpose, doesn’t suggest the existence of answers, but rather a need that there be answers, and so it is that answers are invented—both by religion and philosophy—not to satisfy a truth need, but rather a psychological need. Some people are satisfied with these answers; others appear to have been born with a lack of interest in the questions; and still others are left with the questions despite the absence of any hope that there be answers. They are left to feel that religion, spirituality, and philosophy have all failed to satisfy their needs and, indeed, that their needs are unsatisfiable short of death. Wittgenstein expressed philosophy’s failure as follows. Religion and spirituality are unable to address their own limitations so humorously.

“The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.”

In case his words are obscure, I will tell you what I think they mean. The only truthful tack that philosophy can take is to say nothing about that of which it knows nothing. If it does this, its remarks will be limited to natural science, a field unrelated to philosophy. If someone should come into a philosophical circle and make a remark about the existence of a reality that transcends natural science, philosophy can but dismiss his or her remark by breaking it down into its constituent parts and pointing out that they suffer from a lack of clarity and specificity, and are therefore nonsensical. The person who made the remark will not find this approach satisfying, and won’t even understand what it has to do with philosophy, yet those who offer it can take comfort in knowing that they have presented the best that philosophy has to offer.

To put it another way:

“Even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course, there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein