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CONFESSIONS
June 2006
DEATH IS IMMENSE
Someone I love died this week. Though not related to me, and though we did not speak often, she was responsible for a great many of my life's blessings. Though she was not Catholic, she was devoted to Our Lady, and said the rosary in the last days before her death. My world has shrunk; the ranks of the dead have expanded.
Oh yes, you must die.
Death is immense, incomprehensible.
All Souls' Day: we want, in vain, to hear voices
From the dark, underground countries, Sheol, Hades.
We are rabbits, playing, unaware of the butcher's knife.
That's from Czeslaw Milosz's last book of poems, Second Space. Milosz was a Nobel Laureate. He was a Catholic. Earlier in the book, he writes:
Religion comes from our pity for humans.
They are too weak to live without divine protection.
Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.
Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice
Of compassion, pity, understanding?
Well, Philip Roth, that's who. From his latest novel, Everyman: "There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us." Terry Gross interviewed him on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and it was clear that this view was Roth's own. Roth visits his parents' graves, but he doesn't want to hear voices. He just wants to remember what they meant to him. He not only accepts that awful world, he proclaims it.
Gross asked Roth, "So there isn't any part of you that wished you could believe?"
"I have no taste for delusion," he replied. The flatness in his voice was frightening.
"Was it always that way? That you never had a taste for...." Terry couldn't bring herself to say it.
"Delusion. Yes."
Roth also wrote that his main character couldn't stand "the complete unadultness" of religious belief. To a certain sort of person, all that talk of "drawing near to the Father" could sound like the wishings of an arrested development. My friend who died, a middle-aged woman, turned to Mary the protective Mother. Our only hope of salvation lies in our becoming children of God, adopted heirs with Christ to the treasure of eternal life. "Unless you become like little children...."
But while that may be objectionable to a certain mindset, that doesn't mean it isn't true. Gross found herself on the side of Milosz, arguing for religion as the more human view. She said of Roth's protagonist, "There's nothing in his life to replace religion, nothing real to hold on to. Do you see that as a problem for people who reject religion?"
"I personally think religion is the problem," he answered. There was no rancor in his voice. There was just the abyss. And maybe it's because I'm religious, but it was the abyss that seemed inhuman and problematic.
The final poem in Second Space is "Orpheus and Eurydice." As in the myth, Orpheus travels to Hades to rescue Eurydice -- whose love "humanized him" -- from the land of the dead. He is given leave to take her back, but he is required to have faith. He cannot look back, or speak to her. He obeys, but, as he walks up the path...
And entwined him like a cold bindweed.
Unable to weep, he wept at the loss
Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead,
Because he was, now, like every other mortal.
His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.
He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.
And so he would persist for a very long time,
Counting his steps in a half-wakeful torpor....
It happened as he expected. He turned his head
And behind him on the path was no one.
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
Ultimately, Orpheus makes do with the comforts of the earth. But that reproachful cry must haunt him. I know what Roth means when he says that religion is the problem -- there are so many instances when it seems it must fall away under Ockham's razor, the one that removes what is unnecessary from any explanation. But standing with Roth against Milosz doesn't seem like bravery. It seems like a narrowing of vision -- this body, and nothing else. Never mind what the poet glimpses.
Interestingly, Roth cited Milosz during the interview, noting that the nonagenarian wrote poems about his lust. Oddly, Roth didn't draw any connection with that desire and the desire for life -- to procreate, to give life, to keep life going. Even Miloszbody fought oblivion.