`A Harrowing Dream'

Please read the following paragraph from the sixth page of an 11-page essay:

“Humankind is an extraordinarily isolated creature, whose history must appear from any distance a harrowing dream of frustration and fear and self-contempt, itself villain, itself victim. We have no other enemy, yet we are needlessly assaulted and besieged. This state of affairs is neither recent nor local, nor does it show signs of melioration. Everywhere harm is done on ingenious pretexts, even now when every risk is insupportable. With Utopia precluded fully and finally, truce would be accomplishment enough. But that has no hold on the imagination, perhaps because it cannot be made a pretext for violence.”

I cite this excerpt because in its admirably precise, measured way it states an unpleasant truth about our species and, though published less than 20 years ago, echoes faintly with the stern prophetic voice of such 19th-century figures as Carlyle and Melville. With some writers, Emerson among them (though this passage is decidedly un-Emersonian), the reader can detach blocks of copy, savor their self-contained rigor out of context, and lose nothing in the process. This is not a criticism. As an experiment in prose logic, now read the paragraph that precedes the one just cited:

“Now, at what must be very nearly the end of history, reading these old documents, I fall to thinking how little seems to have happened. It is as true of Christendom as of humankind that its fall came so briskly on the heels of its creation as to make the two events seem like one. If a hint of divine origins has always been discoverable, the fact is owed to the continuous sense of failure, of falling short, that makes meaning float beyond the reach of language, that makes beauty slide away from every form we try to give it, that makes giant loneliness the measure of small love. The shape of what we ought to be, which we cannot fill, remains our nimbus, the best claim we have to our own loyalty.”

Even without the moorings of its home-essay, this is the work of a confident, thoughtful writer. The prose is rare, purposefully metaphoric, devoted to the task at hand, free of purple lapses. It expresses sublime understanding of the human lot without sentimentality and never pleads the depth of its own sincerity – a self-sabotaging error in so much contemporary prose. A self-assured writer with the burden of a truth to relate is coolly indifferent to readers’ reaction. Now, finally, continuing the backward journey, here is the predecessor to the last paragraph:

“I imagine primordial crones, husking and stemming the weedy staples of a tenuous life and telling old stories until they become strange and perfect. This to my mind is not at all incompatible with divine inspiration. It is no demystification to say that from the first the Bible feels steeped in human experience. So early the people of the Bible were ready to concede to one another innocence and dignity, not compromised by evil, only obscured by it. Their stories are a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways. The spirit of the stories is a revelation in itself.”

The writer addresses not merely the origin and purpose of scripture, I think, but of any significant narrative. Isn’t the human instinct to tell stories precisely that -- “a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways?” Think of Moby-Dick and Molloy, by writers, not coincidentally, steeped in the Bible. Do you know who wrote these three paragraphs?