... Though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be beloved of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire,
What I see excellent in good, or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.
Milton, Paradise Regained
Liberalism, in thought and life, is a virtue. The dim green mists of Merovingian or Carolingian spaces give way to the porcelain perfection of an English countryside, and finally to a clapboard puritanical hometown where everybody knows your name. To be recognized immediately for what you are (as Christ recognized Satan in Paradise Regained)rather than for Who you are, is to be dragged onto a cumbersome subway platform at 2:00 AM by some weirdo who needs a place to stay and a little swig of whatever you've got in your laptop bag. She demands a prose kinema, indeed. Sapphic charms and Attic graces notwithstanding, when there is snow on the ground and liquor in the pouch, it takes little effort to induce a confession of love. All who draw breath beneath this sickly sun desire love, and all who desire love fear death. Nothing novel about that! Once in the bluest of moons, however, we encounter a force that rends us, and forces a view of primordial notions unconnected to the personality. The peace of the materialist - for whom all emotion is but an outpouring of chemicals - gives way to the war of the idealist: for whom Life is a series of steps, on the way to a firm platform from which to address eternity. Only, there is no eternity, just as there is no "I". I used to think so. I used to pretend that I had something to say, a message for the world. I used to think that art would subdue idiocy; that idiocy would give up its chaotic secrets, and lend to art some unpredictable something that would permit originality, once again. Not hardly. Faulkner said it well, in his little Nobel Prize speech:
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
Over what, exactly? Over what will we prevail? I look about me and see no enemy but the deception of my own nature. Sartre was wrong: there IS such a thing as human nature. It is in our nature to selfishly draw others into our cocoon of comfort, where we feel all will be well, if only enough people would place their rubber stamp upon our decree of autonomy, and fall in line with our will. Everyone does this. Parents want children who will mirror them; men want women who will praise them to the stars ... and women want the same from men. The heroic life is a necessary myth. An enemy is necessary. To be liberal means to grant freedom of action to all, and to glory in the diversity of this egregious globe.
una salus victis nullam sperare salutem
~ Virgil
