`An Amazing Wrongness'

Whitman was large and contained multitudes. Each of us is a hive of selves, oblivious to the others, proud in their (“our”) mutually exclusive contradictions. Montaigne, in “On the Inconsistency of Our Actions,” agreed:

“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

In his wisdom, Montaigne is not overly disturbed by our constitutional flux. He knows we are fickle, variable creatures, seldom reductively simple:

“These supple variations and contradictions that are seen in us have made some imagine that we have two souls, and other that two powers accompany and drive us, each in its own way, one toward good, the other toward evil; for such sudden diversity cannot well be reconciled with a simple subject.”

Tom Disch transposes these ideas into a comic key. In “We Are Divided Everywhere in Two Parts,” he likens humankind to unhappy geopolitics:

“The subcontinent is divided in two parts,
Much like your heart or mine, one receptive
To new data, the other an armed camp, a bloody hell,
And those two parts in turn subdivided,
And so forth and so on, just as Malthus predicted…”

Disch’s mention of Malthus sent me back to the essays in The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson, especially “Darwinism.” In it, she chillingly distills the essence of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) like this: “the withholding of very meager sustenance from those who would die without it.” He wrote it, she says, “to demonstrate the harmful consequence of intervening between the poor and their death by starvation.” Our morality, too, is highly selective and self-serving. Robinson is one of our sanest writers. Her sensitivity to bullshit is exquisite. In “Puritans and Prigs,” another essay in The Death of Adam, she closes the circle for us:

“It appears to me that even very thoughtful people discover what terms they have made with themselves only as they live, which prohibitions are conditional, which absolute, and so on. So in this great matter of moral soundness or rigor or whatever, we are as great mysteries to ourselves as we are to one another. It should not be that way, of course. The human condition has an amazing wrongness about it.”