I go to meet a friend in his office. We’re to discuss an essay I’ve written–the essay on memory and memorial in Luther and Augustine, modern tragedy and the temporality of forgiveness. Thumbing the corner of his copy he asks what I’m up to in words, “I mean, what are you trying to do with an essay like this?” I talk of warring twins in the womb, the ambition to be legible as a scholar, and the other desire–more like a compulsion–to confess myself. He laughs, “Right, you cite your own conversations throughout.” We talk around my topics, then his topics. He’s writing on Thoreau. “Speaking of confession,” he begins, “I don’t buy it, don’t buy him.” I’m astonished, “You don’t buy Thoreau?” I tease, “Is this about his Sunday dinners with mother? He wasn’t a cheat you know.” He laughs again, “No, no, it isn’t that.” What then? ”It’s this immanent transcendent thing. You know, epic battles in the sand.” ”You mean the ants? That’s great stuff!” ”Is it? I mean I get why people like it, and I certainly like some of what’s come of it–the American nature essay tradition, all that. But there’s something overblown about his religious ambitions, his philosophical ambitions.” I dare him to convince me. He tries: “These small moments of notice, of attention, of–yeah, I grant you–real beauty are called in to carry too much weight. I don’t like his divinized quotidian, the personality and profundity is all out of proportion.” ”So give me an example,” I insist, “Heaven below as well as above? The project of securing vital heat?” ”Well, yeah, okay, take the fire. He gets bogged down in the details as if the details are what matter. And maybe they do matter if what he’s telling us is the story of how he went to the woods, etc. But you know if he were to just stick to the fire–the fire itself, in all of its generality and elemental meaningfulness–he might get closer to the kinds of truths he seems to be after.” ”You’re against the epiphanic?” ”No, not against the epiphanic, but I want epiphany to count for something. I don’t want it to get lost in the wash of flickering colors and sounds.” I feel I’m beginning to understand, ”You’re against a Mary Oliver approach to philosophy?” ”Yes that’s it!” he crows. And then I’m laughing and quoting myself in derision, ” . . . a heron stalking craw in the still-mineral-rich shallows . . . ” He rolls his eyes and slaps his knee, “Exactly!” I’m surprised by the purity of my own playfulness, neither cynical, nor self-protective; the line which I had liked at the time, now drums thin-walled; I’m glad to be free of it, moving on. ”So what’s worthy of wonder?” I charge him, “The stars above and the moral law within?” ”For starters,” he replies, “And then there’s the view form high places, mountain tops, outer space.” Now I’m rolling my eyes, “No, no, I won’t go in for that Hadotian cosmic consciousness stuff. It’s too removed, too abstract. You would fault romanticism it’s pedestrian eye for the particular, but there’s real humility there, an acknowledgement of what’s given us, what perspective is ours.” ”Who’s to say what’s ours, what’s given us?” he challenges me, “It’s no less natural, is arguably more natural, for us to try to speak for mankind, to cast ourselves up and out,” he gestures, “and seek a sense of who we are in the scheme of things.” ”But that’s just it,” I counter, “What ‘scheme of things’ are we talking about? Isn’t this a recipe for disaster? All of human history running up to the here and now. A grand sense of purpose . . . ” He cuts me off, “Sure, it might work that way, might feed our delusions of grandeur, but what if it just doesn’t? What if it just so happens that when people exercise themselves in these ways they are wiser for it, more stable, more just. Surely you’re not so principled or logically driven to deny . . . ” I cut in to assure him, “No, of course I’m not. Our bodies are strange. Our grammars are strange. I’m happy to accept the ‘it just so happens’ proof.” He’s pleased by this, “Good! And it’s not Hadot you should be reading, so much as his sources” I point my finger at my friend and shake my head. He’s a classicist and knows me to be under-read.
“So warring twins,” he says returning to my essay, “The disunities of scholarship and confession, philosophy and poetry. Where will you find your synthesis?” I reply, “In the war, I suppose,” but then take it back because it’s too clever to be true. ”One will have to found Rome,” he warns. But I had thought they were Jacob and Esau. One clutching the other one’s heel.
C.
