our abundant recompense: the still sad music of humanity

I

Let me start with two war memorials–those ubiquitous monoliths in towns and villages that honor those who died fighting for the Republic. The first one is from the neighborhood where I grew up in Pittsburgh with the casualties of WWII from that community. Their names are on a brass plaque at the base of a flagpole in what we called the Rose Garden which we were taught, as children, to revere as holy ground because of the ultimate sacrifice those former neighbors made. It was the 1950s. WWII was still fresh. The Korean War barely over. Some of the families of those who gave their lives still lived nearby. 

Back then, I would sometimes walk through the garden, kneel at the plaque and slide my fingertips over the raised letters of their names. I was trying to reach back in time to make contact. Then, I would wonder how they died–on land, in air, at sea. They were heroes. Their deaths made war real; made the moral and military strength of the nation real; made sacrifice and valor real. It seemed possible, given their example and our coming from the same neighborhood, that I could be called to serve one day, even summoned to die for our country. 

I could not have articulated it then, but my consciousness was expanded by that brass plaque in the Rose Garden…it punctured the protective bubble of my childhood. The outside world of human conflict and violence broke into my day to day life–albeit in a rose garden and largely through my imagination. Still, an element of a vast world, yet unknown–“if this, then what else?”–was added to what I surmised life was about, was added to the Dutch uncles and surrogate fathers, to my school and church, and to seasonal sports we were obsessed with and to the emergent media industry for boys and its confection of TV cartoons, war movies, and westerns whose mantra was that the men in white hats always win, though rarely without violence. 

I did not dwell on my new, expanded awareness of the bigger world “out there.” But I was acutely alert to a certain aura that infused the Rose Garden–as if a beam of light from beyond illumined that plot of ground and revealed a more complex and mysterious human existence. The natural elegance of those thorn-stemmed flowers, in the beauty of their terraced, landscaped setting, evoked the tradition of giving flowers and food–the staples of life–to loved ones of the deceased. But the Rose Garden with its hallowed names and thorny self-protection against rabbits and deer embodied the larger struggle and glory of life and symbolized that all of us are part of the living, breathing, self-perpetuating earth. 

Fast forward to the present day and the war memorial in Ridgefield, CT where our older son lives. It is located on Main Street in front of a church that used to be at the center of the town green. The monument was erected in 1924 to honor those who died in the six wars from the Revolution to WWI. The casualties belonging to each war are listed alphabetically on brass plaques on three sides of the stone rectangle with a dedicatory plaque on the front. The concrete bench on all four sides is cracked and well past routine maintenance. The Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great War have the most names–dozens each of boys and men from that village. Many of the surnames are repeated in each of the wars–siblings, cousins, uncles and nephews, fathers and sons cut down by musket ball or mustard gas. But unlike the plaque on the flagpole in my childhood, these names are largely forgotten. I have rarely seen anyone at the monument reading the names or sitting on the bench. The old memorial is a vestigial tribute to patriotism devoid of its original appeal and power. I wonder, in fact, if some war memorials are constructed so that the names and wars can be forgotten. 

In contrast to the monument in the Rose Garden, the indifference of most people walking by the Ridgefield monolith with its hundreds of war casualties of people, like us, who had things to do and places to go, hopes and dreams and who were loved, mourned, and missed, now lost and forgotten–the Ridgefield memorial is a poignant reminder of how temporary life is. 

II

I started noticing war memorials after our younger son served in Afghanistan where he and his unit from the storied 2nd Cavalry Regiment carried out over one hundred missions. His work routinely placed him in harm’s way which is why the Army asked him, as it does every soldier before deployment, to indicate in a will and last testament where he wanted to be buried should he be killed in combat. I am aware of that administrative detail because Doug called early one morning from Germany before his company left for Afghanistan and asked me where his mother and I would like him to be laid to rest. It was a sobering conversation, out of the blue, at 7 a.m., but it was also a reality check for me as a father anticipating our son’s deployment to that war-torn land. Somehow, in that phone call I was able to avoid anxiety or denial about what lay ahead for him; we had, at length, a serious conversation; but we also used humor to fend off fear and joked about the benefits of cremation which would allow him to be in two places at once: buried in Arlington National Cemetery and at Lake Winnipesauke, New Hampshire, which were his wishes. 

portrait by m. dellas

There were other sobering moments–like the photograph he texted from the Role 3 Trauma Center at Camp Lindsey with his 28-member platoon, decked out in their camo holding their M4s, surrounding two buddies in hospital beds, hooked to IVs, who were wounded that night when their vehicle ran over an IED. But one of the most startling moments–almost an out of body experience–as if over-hearing and observing myself, was when my wife and I skyped our son shortly after his arrival in Kandahar. When he appeared on the screen he was sitting out of doors on a bench on what was a beautiful, sunny day. Something seemed very wrong with that picture, then I realized my surprise, if not confusion was caused by the fact that the sun was actually shining in Afghanistan. The sky was so bright and blue he could have been sitting on a bench in Dorset, Vermont. My expectation, which I did not realize until then, was that that land would be literally shrouded in darkness. Then, as if emerging from my own darkness, it occurred to me that the laws of nature which govern life and turn the stars and planets are indifferent to human suffering. 

What hit me with new force and meaning–because our son’s life was on the line–was that he was on his own; neither nature violating her own laws nor God violating our freedom will intervene with a magic wand. I remember suddenly realizing more keenly that Doug in Afghanistan–and all of us–was not protected by some invisible shield but, apart from chance, we rise or fall with the choices we make. For all but atheists, God’s absence is the great mystery of the Holocaust and the unanswered question that haunts the Book of Job. At the end of that book, God doesn’t so much as thank Job for the ordeal and trauma he has been put through on God’s behalf, but humbles, even humiliates his servant, as he displays the magnificence of the created order and asks Job what he did to contribute to the glories of creation. God, as Creator, implies that not only is Job, as creature, unworthy to ask why he suffered but if it were explained to him, his finite mind would fail to comprehend. The great “I am who I am” turns out to be the willful, arrogant, rude–certainly elevated– “I will be present when I am present, absent when I am absent and I will do what I will do.” It is a fine Melvillian collision Job has, if not with a Leviathan God then with a Leviathan mystery that has shattered more than a few Pequods of faith in organized religion, human achievement, and moral order.

It is not too much to say that we are living in a Leviathan/Pequod moment even now. Vladimir Putin is mad Captain Ahab with authority over not a ship but a nation stockpiled with nuclear weapons. Or that other MAGA-lomaniac Donald Trump aiming to take down our constitution and democracy and, like the single-minded ship captain, anything else that stands in the way of his apotheosis. There are also the conspiracy theorists; plus, the forces that have driven wealth and poverty to obscene extremes; and, our daily decisions from feeding our addiction to consumption to corporate board rooms that move us closer to climate catastrophe.

Not only are we alone in this world but along with the freedom to make our own choices we must face the full consequences of those choices. John Flavel, the seventeenth century English Puritan, put it this way: “we will be judged twice, once when we die and once when everything we have said or done has had its final effect.” As I reflected on the web of politics and policies that perpetuate war and the use of human lives and vast resources to kick the can, often blindly, down the road it seemed to me that we often get mired in a vast, layered, reactive human enterprise. The revealing work of the January 6 Commission makes this point crystal clear. Yes, sometimes choices are made that lead to life-affirming results but there are often occasions when the path we choose leads to pain and suffering, sometimes unintended, but sometimes to fulfill revenge or some punitive end or nefarious goal. 

The sobering moments I experienced during Doug’s military service were blunt reminders that we are flawed creatures in a flawed world. They were partial answers to my wonderment as a child musing on those war heroes in the Rose Garden, “If this, then what else?” Yet, rather than feeling bitter or cynical I was thankful to see more clearly the nature of our mortality, as if I had stepped out of Plato’s cave of ignorance into the light of a world where I could see and accept, as a full participant, not just the beauty of the earth but its limitations. It has been my own Melvillian collisions that have awakened me to a larger, if chastened, perspective; occasions less of warm, fuzzy feeling than of brain-freezing dipping the “toe of my consciousness” into the ice-cold water of reality resulting in an un-muddled or, hopefully, less muddled view of life.

III

I say “awakened me to a larger perspective” but truth be told, much of my life is lived in a tunnel of routine and habit until some crisis or loss calls me out of my task-oriented day. Perhaps I am not so unusual. Maybe you remember that scene at the end of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, inspired, he said, by Dante’s Purgatorio. The play was ground-breaking theater in 1938, redefining the scope of contemporary drama. Wilder’s aim was to jolt the audience into some awareness of what Walter Pater called this brief “interval of consciousness after which our place knows us no more.” The final act of Our Town opens with the stage manager musing that there is something in us we rarely “take out and notice” but that poets and saints, since antiquity, have said is there, namely, “the eternal.” 

The scene shifts to the burial of a young mother who dies giving childbirth and against the advice of all the other residents of the graveyard returns to the world of the living to witness one last time what she remembers as a typically happy occasion–the weekday morning of her twelfth birthday. Yet, in death, she sees as if for the first time, the life she left and family members whose lives are lived in the narrow circumference of daily needs and maintenance, though who are blind to the wonder of each other and the marvel of ordinary life in their New Hampshire village. After watching her parents, her brother and herself on that typical, school-day morning she realizes her mistake of wanting to go back. “It goes so fast,” she despairs, “we don’t have time to look at one another…I didn’t realize all that was going on and we never noticed… Do any human beings realize life while they live it? … Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” 

The message of Our Town is that until death we are oblivious to “all that is going on that we never notice”–the splendor hidden in the ordinary, the miracles found in happenstance. Wallace Stevens, in that famous line from his poem “Sunday Morning,” agrees when he says “death is the mother of beauty.” Flannery O’Connor says the same thing in her unnerving way in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” We encounter in this land-mine of a tale a truth so naked it seems a macabre distortion. A family traveling by car to a distant location is stranded when the car breaks down. In their distress, along comes a murderer–The Misfit–escaped from prison with his two disciples. His escape has been well publicized and the family immediately recognize who he is. Realizing they know his identity, The Misfit instructs his underlings to escort the family members to a nearby ravine and kill each one, including the children. As her family is escorted away to be executed, the grandmother looks at the convict and says, “Why you’re just one of my babies,” to which he responds by shooting her in the head. Then he says of her, “She would’ve been a good woman if it’d been someone there every minute of her life to shoot her.” 

What could O’Connor possibly have meant? She shrewdly shrinks the distance between life and death in The Misfit’s act and statement. What the convict refers to is the scintillating, eye-opening, life-changing awareness of our lives when death is near. The grandmother saw in her killer not only a killer but “one of her babies”–a person valued, as any human should be. Facing death reveals the fullness of the present moment. We see everything in relief against the backdrop of non-existence, like Wilder’s character returning to her family from her grave knowing the role death will play in the years ahead–her brother and mother will be dead, her father will live the rest of his life alone, yet they take each other for granted, as if they will always have each other, thus covering their eyes to the miracle of the present by ignoring that they each will perish one day.

Walter Pater said the goal of life ought to be to expand our consciousness and get as many “pulsations” into the given time we have through aesthetic experience–the arts. But O’Connor takes us deeper. Her Roman Catholic faith relies upon Christ’s execution on a cross as the path to life–a tenet brilliantly put on display in, and as repulsive to the world as, The Misfit himself. Like Christ, we must die to ourselves, to this life, to find life. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Emerson in their own way would agree. As would their precursor Keats with his notion that we become human as we embrace our own loss and suffering for which we employ the vocabulary of the heart, the language of empathy, and in doing so cultivate the undeveloped “soul” within us. Loss and suffering teach us the range of human emotion and enable us, Keats said, to live not as brutes but fully as the humans we were created to become. 

Deep recognition of our full humanity and of all of sentient life is a favorite theme of theologian and novelist Marilynne Robinson. Here she is at her best in a talk she gave at Chautauqua last summer: 

“We are what we are…even our errors and failures are impressive in their own way… God says, Let there be a garden in the midst of measureless reaches of sterility. And it is so the tender atmosphere, the satellite moon skirting our path, every tree and herb. The reduced thing Earth is now is the most astonishing thing in existence–including its creaturely life, including humankind. If we imagine a day when the last dandelion frees its last seed, that seed will be the most astonishing thing there is, even if there is no one to see if it finds a niche. Everything potentially miraculous in a blooming weed is miraculous in it now. It is given its being in this moment along with the sun and the stars, on no other, no lesser grounds.”

IV

All I have said from the Rose Garden to Marilynne Robinson is rooted in if not made possible by William Wordsworth whose literary experiment was a sea change from extolling the exterior world in rhyme to exploring the interior realm of human consciousness in the context of the natural world in blank verse. 

Wordsworth as a young man with progressive political ideas was drawn to France during the Revolution of 1789 where he remained long enough to fall in love and father a child. But during the Reign of Terror which cast darkness on the lofty ideals of the Revolution, Wordsworth as an Englishman was forced to return without his lover and daughter to an England still largely bound under medieval social and political laws and customs. This is the dual crisis of Wordsworth’s life–France falling to mob justice and England’s relentless grip on class and status. A crisis to which Wordsworth would respond in his so-called crisis lyrics, the great odes and conversation poems written upon his return to the Lake District where he was born and raised. Immersing himself in its lush fields and rolling hills, he emerged from depression to discover a deeper self at one with the natural world. Fortuitously, he meets and begins a friendship and literary collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together, they fashion a new poetry that maps, in Wordsworth’s magnum opus The Prelude–an autobiographical epic poem–the evolution of his consciousness from birth to adulthood.

Two phrases embedded in one of the most lyrical strophes written during his great decade from 1797 to 1807 identify what would be the psychological sweet spot of his high achievement:

That time [youth] is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, [here’s the first phrase] for such loss,
I would believe, abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
[here’s the second phrase] The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

If nothing else it is at least counterintuitive that Wordsworth takes the “still sad music of humanity,” which is what I’ve been talking about, and what he hears not in youth but now in adulthood, that has the power to chasten and subdue, to open our eyes to loss and suffering, not as a deficiency of our humanity but as “abundant recompense” for lost youth and its intimate association with the natural world. He takes this sad music as the very source of our happiness and joy. 

Wordsworth had an uncanny ability through various methods of focus and concentration to isolate himself when beholding the subject matter of his poetry, to see and experience his feelings about the natural world through his imagination. His sensitivity to his own consciousness enabled him to see himself as if standing outside of himself. One critic likened this to an anechoic chamber in which you can hear the heartbeat and pulse of your own blood, which is often what Wordsworth’s poems aim for–isolation that overcomes our alienation from the natural world. Nature tells us that we are bodies, that we perish, and that being human means simply that we are the only bodies in nature that know their fate, and suffer accordingly in sadness. Yet, when the still sad music is understood to be immanent in the natural world it becomes paradoxically the happy refrain, abundant recompense, and our alienation from the natural world is suspended. Hearing this melancholic music of our finite existence suspends our alienation because it reveals our unity and what we share with all living things. 

V

I tried an experiment last fall when we were visiting our son and his family in Ridgefield. Out for a walk, I came upon the monument that gathers up from that small town the dead from six wars. Just as practiced in many communities on the anniversary of 9/11 or as we have learned to do after mass killings in our gun-saturated nation, or in religious services when the necrology is read, or on Shabbat on the anniversary of the death of those of blessed memory, I read aloud several of the names of those who died at Verdun, the Somme, Gallipoli, and the Marne. Even though they were lost over a century ago and are anonymous to me the mere sound of their names rang out a still sad music of our species–not so much that we engage in war, but that we are each destined to perish. 

A somber bell seemed to toll as I read the names of the boys and men who went to fight, in Mr. Wilson’s words, “the war to end all wars” but never came home to that hamlet of tree lined streets and sidewalks with two churches and a school–their home that they knew so well; and to the townspeople whose eyes were opened by the empty chair at the dinner table, the absence of a talented tenor in the church choir, and the fond memory of the boy, barely a man before he enlisted, who delivered the newspaper. 

Here are a few of the 147 Ridgefield, CT lives lost in WWI: 

Clarence E. Avery,
James H. Bailey,
Frederick T. Bates,
Harry C. Bates…

The root of “mortal” is the Latin word “mort” which means death–as if to say the life of a person, a mortal, is contained–both held and bounded–by death. The two are inseparable. Not only can one not be explained without the other, more importantly not until we confront and contemplate the reality of our own death do we have the opportunity to live. In the wake of losing a dear friend and life-long mentor in October of 2022 these thoughts have occupied my mind.

Unlike Job, the “burden of this mystery” is not something Wordsworth wants explained. Indeed, his entire project is to seek less “answers that explain” the mystery of existence, the need for which he refers to as a “burden” to be lifted, so that he can hear and discern this “still sad music,” a music not in monotones of detached reason but in songs of the heart. 

If Shakespeare opened the door to the interior life of humans through the vast array of characters who take the stage in his unmatched work as a playwright, not so much “inventing the human” but, as Harold Bloom said, revealing the broad spectrum of who we are and what we are capable of as humans in terms of emotions, passions, and feelings, then Wordsworth crossed that threshold and took us further into the interior world by opening the door to personal consciousness to reveal how our interior life works. While Shakespeare spoke in the many voices of his characters who were engaged with each other around plots the playwright conceived, Wordsworth speaks in his own voice in The Prelude with the aim of showing the reader the complex, at times chaotic, but ultimately singular life of the mind of the poet not acting out a preconceived plot but experiencing the vicissitudes of life. 

As much as Wordsworth has been praised for his insights to and encounters with nature, equally original and perhaps of more importance, claims Helen Vendler, is his work tracking the growth of his “mind” (the word he uses in place of “soul”) or consciousness. It is as if he shines a light on or holds up to a mirror to his heart/mind/soul as he seeks to articulate and make sense of his at times erratic, at other times calculated responses to stimuli from the external world. His great accomplishment was to conduct this experiment in blank verse and, in doing so, invent a new language and model for lyric poetry. Wordsworth exposes human consciousness not only for inspection but for his own and his readers’ inspiration. To conclude that the “still sad music of humanity” turns out to be our “abundant recompense” is to discover a strange and paradoxical truth. Wordsworth’s aim, in part, was to open the eyes of the poet in each of us to such wonders. 

It could be said that the final segue from Renaissance to Modern Poetry came when Wordsworth turned the focus of poetry upon the life of the poet. He paved the way for writers like Wilder, O’Connor, and the others I mentioned to consult a deeper awareness of their own mortality to inform and enrich their art. But he also invited his readers to experience the acute sensitivity to life that Wilder’s stage manager tells Emily most folks, but for saints and poets, fail to see.

in print