A meditation on the cusp of a new year
By Herbert Rothschild
More than most of my columns, I’m writing this one for myself, not for you. You’re welcome to look over my shoulder. And doing so may be worth your while. As Michel de Montaigne asserted, everyone bears the whole stamp of the human condition. Then, again, it may not.
The Doppler effect, named after Christian Doppler, who first described it in 1842, refers to the changes of wave frequency as the source of the wave moves relative to the observer. Our most commonly noticed experience of the Doppler effect is with the sound waves of sirens. As the ambulance or police car moves toward us, the pitch of its siren keeps increasing because the sound waves are compressed. As it moves away from us, the pitch diminishes as the waves are attenuated.
Long before the Doppler effect as a physical phenomenon was understood, Andrew Marvell expressed it as an existential phenomenon: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.”
Those lines are from “To His Coy Mistress,” published posthumously in 1681 but probably written in the 1650s. It’s the greatest of all carpe diem (seize the day) poems. While most obviously a persuasion to a woman to stop playing conventional games of courtship and frankly return the speaker’s love, it more generally advocates living intensely in response to our inescapable mortality. “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.”
And so once again I take up my theme of activity and passivity, of trying to shape our selves and our world or letting be. What prompts this recursion is the end of the calendar year — the 85th in which I have lived — and the imminent start of a second Trump presidency. What’s an old man to do?
I bring to mind Arthur Kinoy, one of the great champions of civil rights and civil liberties of the last century. Not as well known to the general public as William Kunstler, with whom he practiced law from 1964 to 1967, Arthur was the greater legal force. I got to know him in the late 1980s when I was directing a nuclear disarmament and peace organization headquartered in Montclair, New Jersey. Arthur was teaching at Rutgers Law School and living in Montclair. I was in my late 40s, he in his late 60s.
Arthur was a physically small man and, to me at that time, he appeared old. But he was full of fire. One of his common rhetorical practices was to ask a short question and then answer it. Often his question was, “What are we going to do?” His answer: “We’re going to fight!” I’m sure that’s what he would say today if I asked him what we should do next year. You had to love Arthur. He lived with great intensity and a firm grip on justice.
You didn’t have to emulate him, though. The eternity before us may not be a desert. It may be fecund. Indeed, if it is eternity, it lies neither before us or behind us but is the abiding reality from which we mistakenly segregate our lifetimes. A close friend of mine just shared with me a copy of a letter that Fra Giovanni Giocondo sent to Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi on Christmas Eve, 1513. In it he assured her, “The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!”
A part of me resonates with that counsel to let be, to affirm and receive reality as a gift of which I myself am a part. That mode of being, too, can be intense, as Fra Giovanni’s language unmistakably conveys.
And yet I couldn’t send such a letter to someone in Gaza or Darfur or in all the other places in the world where people writhe under the cruelty of those who fail to see them as sisters and brothers. And they have a right to expect that I’ll try to alter their dreadful reality to the extent of my power and, if I have no such power, then at least that I’ll feel with them.
It is with these human capacities for both activity and passivity in mind that, on the cusp of a new year, I look behind me and before.
I ask, were my activities a fulfillment of the imperative of caring for others, or were they an effort to impose my will on them? Were my passivities a grateful reception of the gifts life so abundantly offered me, or were they a lethargic response to the challenge of being human? The record is mixed but instructive. I will go gentle into that dark night, and I will find a way to let my light shine.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
