Choosing to Be that Which We Become

In 2020, I had two essays published, and spent that year of tumultuous political upheaval working on a much longer third work which was relevant to unfolding events.

I did not expect these essays to be considered, as they were walkthrough commentaries on other literary works, so it was a surprise when they were accepted.

The first essay, Journey through the Age of Reason, was a commentary on Thomas Paine's diatribe against revealed religion.

It was published in the debut issue of The Dillydoun Review, which has since folded. It was witty but dour, as was I, at the time. Nevertheless, despite my more cheerful disposition, the excerpt below still speaks to my mind and my plans for the future. Paine is in quotes, my commentary is in bold.

“To be happy in old age, it is necessary that we accustom ourselves to objects that can accompany the mind all the way through life, and that we take the rest as good in their day. The mere man of pleasure is miserable in old age, and the mere drudge in business but little better; whereas, natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical science, are a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of these things is the true theology; it teaches man to know and admire the Creator, for the principles in science are in the creation, and are unchangeable and of divine origin.

Those who knew Benjamin Franklin will recollect that his mind was ever young, his temper ever serene; science, that never grows gray, was always his mistress. He was never without an object, for when we cease to have an object, we become like an invalid in a hospital waiting for death.”

Putting aside the suspicion that Franklin had many more mistresses than science, this passage is a true nugget of inspiring and calming philosophical wisdom hidden in an otherwise acerbic critique. We might conjecture that this was Paine's own perceived reward, his manna from Heaven in the dark days of his life after the French Revolution.

The other essay accepted for publication was Thoughts on Steppenwolf. Its publisher, The Decadent Review, has also been lost to time and the internet.

No, the essay was not about the band, though sometimes I do wonder if I was Born to be Wild.

I read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf at 25 and then took it upon myself to reread it as I was approaching 40, an exercise in perspective and perhaps a therapy session with my favorite dead author, written in the deepest despair, in the wake of my third divorce.

Hesse's Siddhartha touched me on such a deep level that I found myself reading and rereading it periodically throughout my life, and gifting it to others as if it were a religious tract and I, its preacher.

Yet I have to credit Steppenwolf with one of the best lines in literature, uttered by the phantasm of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the protagonist of the book, Harry Haller, in a dream:

"Eternity is a mere moment, only long enough for a joke."

But at the time, I did not get the joke, and had not yet moved on to take Paine's excellent advice above, or admit to Mozart's conclusion below.

But now I do.

There is a Divine which transcends the human, and to this I will dedicate myself, in my calling as a philosopher, for the rest of my life.

I will not call it God, for, as Paine understood, organized religion has soiled the association.

However, dear reader, if you choose to call it that, I cannot quibble. I just hope you haven't been duped into thinking you require some intermediary to access it.

We all have a right to a direct relationship with the Divine. Even an old irreligious blasphemer like myself!

So here I am, exploring the conclusions Hesse came to at the end of Steppenwolf. Again, my responses are in bold, though, unlike in the original essay, I'll leave Mozart the final word!

First, the idea that our personalities are as malleable as pieces arranged on a game board. This idea appealed to me immensely at 25, and had already occurred to me before I read Hesse's book. I take it as an indication of Hesse's arrested development that he does not come to fully explore this idea until his forties, and though he indicates through the character of Pablo in Steppenwolf a belief in the possible veracity of this concept, my reading of his letters, essays and subsequent novels leads me to believe that he did not ultimately accept it, and the seed of this realization is even there at the end of Steppenwolf when Pablo politely chastises Harry for making a mess of the magic theater.

Closer to the truth is the core personality as unique and arbitrarily predetermined, like a snowflake or fingerprint. It may be that through scientific methods—psychological, pharmaceutical, surgical, genetic engineering—we could one day find a way to manufacture persons and personalities as we do other goods , but this again draws me back to a comparison with Huxley's Brave New World and a serious concern about whether or not such a process would stagnate evolution and, inevitably, survival. It's an open question, for sure, and both Hesse and Huxley, in their respective spiritual and technological visions, seem to believe that this would constitute a sort of progress, but it was also obvious that these notions discomfited them as much as they do me.

Second, the final conversation Harry has with Mozart. Mozart brings a radio and sets it up. He plays Handel through it and Harry asks him why he should want to afflict the both of them by playing this beautiful music through this inadequate instrument. Mozart's reply:

“Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando ? An inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and coarse, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips the music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and be-slimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone—slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it.”

Well-wrought, Hermann! Well-wrought, Mozart!

As for the final essay that I never submitted for publication, it was a turgid analysis of Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, which, though very relevant to the events that unfolded during its composition, is best left for posthumous publication by my heirs, as with my lost Trashterpieces, and even in that, only as a record of my folly.

However, I did salvage something from it, which I recently published in The Cynickal Art, and which I believe is a point many still need to take to heart and think upon deeply.

So, fellow writers, keep in mind that you may not always agree with your former self, but also that this person you were was a stepping stone to becoming what you are, and that if you can stick it out to improve your self every day, the world is a better place with you in it.