'The True and Lasting Aspect of Things'

The phrase started as Yeats’ epigraph to his 1914 collection Responsibilities, attributed by the poet to an “Old Play”: “In dreams begins responsibility.” In 1937, Delmore Schwartz published his great short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” in Partisan Review and a year later it was the title story in his first book of poetry and fiction. In 1953, Peter Viereck (1916-2006), poet and idiosyncratic conservative thinker, used the phrase as the epigraph to Dream and Responsibility, a collection of four essays subtitled Four Test Cases of the Tension Between Poetry and Society. This passage is drawn from the third essay, “Art versus Propaganda”:

“Like every other citizen, the artist must be willing to ‘lay down his life for his country’ when freedom is at stake, as it is today. But let him refuse as savagely as possible to lay down—in the name of ‘responsibility’--his dream life for his country.”

 

For Viereck, “responsibility” suggests being true to self while remaining respectful of others, treating them ethically. Increasingly, politics demands the surrender of the self, its dissolution in the collective will. He asks, “What characterizes the free spirit?” and answers in a surprisingly Christian manner, refuting his era’s dominant threat, Communism, and its recently defeated threat, fascism:

 

“The earth is a freer place to breathe in, every time you love without asking or calculating in return. It is freer every time you make your drudgeries and routine still more inefficient by taking plenty of time out to experience the shock of beauty, whether in nature, poetry, music, or the fine arts.”

 

Viereck puts politics in its proper place:

 

“[I]n the long-run, whatever enriches your inner sensibility with the unguessed surprises of beauty and love, is a moral act and even a political act. It is a liberating political gesture—precisely because not intended politically. Because of its spontaneous unpredictability, it is a gesture of free individualism against the predictable, unspontaneous blueprints of statism and totalitarianism.”

 

Viereck writes prophetically, describing our age. His essay concludes with these words:

 

“Whatever expresses ethics, beauty, and love with genuine human individuality, is thereby a blow against tyrants (whether communists, fascists, or domestic American thought-controllers). For it aspires beyond the propagandistic, the expedient, and the temporary to the true and lasting aspect of things.”