Bumbling along

So, my friend writes the other day about reading these Cheever short stories

Just a thought

Late the other night, I was reading a John Cheever story, "The Wrysons," in which a suburban woman is afflicted with a recurring dream of nuclear holocaust. The dream winds up with a sort of yacht-club immolation scene in which boaters are drowned as they over-crowd the waters of refuge. In the dream, she weeps "to see this inhumanity as the world was ending."

Well, it isn't the world that is ending. The post-holocaust planet will go on spinning somehow, and opportunistic life-forms that have been waiting for the opportunity will flourish. (For example, a virus that replicates through the digitized memory of chatted vacuities such as "I'm standing outside your building, where are you?") Life will begin the long trek back to Descartes. This much we know. But I found myself wondering this evening about cultural extinctions in our own long past. One hundred fifty thousand years is no time at all on the geological scale, but it's plenty of time, I imagine, to scrub the traces of human artifact from the face of the earth. We think of the time between the moment of homo sapiens's unmistakable arrival (whenever that was) and the composition of the first granary account as a long, boring and unrecorded progression toward us. But what if we've done this already a few times? What if there were was a New Yorker seventy thousand years ago - and all record of it has been obliterated by natural processes, just as natural processes would clear Earth of our record in, say, fifty thousand years? What if, far from living in savannahs and bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

As you know, my mind doesn't drift toward science fiction. But I found myself plausibly wondering...

(But it's another Cheever story altogether that I urge you to read, a lovely tale called "The Duchess.")

And, I tried to respond with a comment

RJ,

From the World of Unintended Results

I know you intended to point me to Cheever here and just might not be interested in where the images in your note here have taken me but indulge me for a moment, please.

bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

My head is still reeling from finishing Sam Harris's End of Faith last night. Harris deserves a good rereading with substantial note taking, but that will wait, I think, until we've finished Freeman's Closing of the Western Mind. End of Faith creates for me its own special flavor of intellectual and spiritual vertigo which is only amplified this morning reading your note here and being led back to Augustine, Manichaeism, Origen and the issue of reincarnation. Spooning out some of the bigger chunks from this soup pot of philosophical rememberances we find the tasty morsel of

THE SENTENCES OF SEXTUS AND OF THE PYTHAGOREANS CHADWICK J Theol Studies.1960; XI: 349

wherein we find

Whatever you honour above all things, that which you so honour will have dominion over you. But if you give yourself to the domination of God, you will thus have dominion over all things.

and

The greatest honour which can be paid to God, is to know and imitate Him.

causing us to remember how in the eighth grade we posed questions to the dear Sisters of the Incarnate Word and the Society of Jesus Fathers about Constantine's influence on the early church and Neo-Platonist influences in Augustine's writings. And, causing us particularly to remember how irritated they all were by these questions. Fortunately for the fathers and the sisters but unfortunately for us we didn't know much about the Buddha then. We really thought we had put all this to bed after the debacle of the first college year in Austin. Perhaps, we are reincarnated but we can only hope that it comes without the memory of the troublesome issues while still somehow preserving and transmitting forward the benefits of whatever positive accomplishments occurred in previous steps. We are perhaps a bit micro-reincarnated every year of the current life and there is much We Don't Remember for good reason. Meanwhile, later that same lifetime we have put "The Duchess", which appears just after "The Wrysons" in The Stories of John Cheever, on the reading list. Page 347 in my copy, how about yours? Likely it's time now to do a bit of sitting, eh?

Bumblingly yours,

George

But, his antispam measures have taken over and everything is now subject to approval.  Approval, the bane of my bumbling life.