The Fixed Point of our Spiritual Constellation: The Fault in Our Stars

“Identity is an assemblage of constellations.”

--Anna Deavere Smith, 2011

Last weekend, the Times published “New York City in Haiku”, a series of short poems from people of all ages that described certain aspects of living in America’s greatest metropolis. One submission from a 14-year-old Manhattanite reads:

Face seen across tracks,
We stare, and a train passes,
Face gone forever.

That feeling—of life lines converging for a fleeting moment only to separate once more, perhaps indefinitely—is common to all humanity, not only on the subway platforms of New York, but in towns big and small across the country and around the world.

Even these ephemeral connections are like manna to our souls. As recently detailed by behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, these interactions with “strangers” (even mere eye contact!) generally produce a more positive experience than remaining in solitude. Social beings, we are.

But as beautiful as these short-lived convergences are, they cannot replace the sentiment felt when, against seemingly all odds, life lines not only converge, but dance in parallel motion, flirting, bumping up against one another, and eventually fusing together in a double helix bond.

The protagonists of John Green’s latest book, The Fault in Our Stars (2012) (a NYT bestseller that is sure to sell a few more copies when it is released as a major motion picture on June 6—see trailer below), are lucky enough to form such a bond—lucky being an odd word to use in reference to teenagers suffering from the scourge of cancer.

Lucky they are, though, in that their shared affliction—tragic as it is—led them to one another. “Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross…there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

Those “stars” or “constellations” in our lives take many forms—friends, siblings, parents, classmates, neighbors, competitors, strangers. Amidst the many uncertainties of life, the protagonists in Fault find that the “stars” inexorably orbit (and are pulled ever so slightly towards) humanity’s “black hole”, which is to say, closer to death and oblivion.

Nevertheless, one particular star seems fixed—to be trusted even when all the other measures of direction fail. As Augustus Waters says to Hazel Grace Lancaster:

I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.

One of the magical aspects of parallel lines is that even though we know that they go on forever, never to converge, perspective plays tricks with our minds, convincing us that far on the horizon, the lines, having ever so deliberately sidled up beside one another, touch.

And maybe that’s the greatest lesson of Stars—that for all those passing glances on the subway platform, life lines going far and wide, there is an Ultimate convergence that our shared mortality forces us to confront. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the infinity of love shines brightly, beckoning us home.

Walking the Walk: The Courage to Believe in Politics

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” 

-- President Abraham Lincoln

Yesterday, the New York Times showcased the campaign of Eric Lesser, a college classmate of mine who is running for the Massachusetts State Senate in the First Hampden and Hampshire District. However, instead of viewing Eric’s efforts as emblematic of a Millennial generation inspired to serve, the Times characterized Eric as an outlier amidst a generation that has in many ways opted out of the rough and tumble life of American elective politics.

This withdrawal should concern all of us who continue to see public service (which includes politics!) as an endeavor worthy of our commitment and sacrifice, particularly because the very factors that have turned so many young people away from running for office may also turn them away from being the type of “active” citizens our nation needs to thrive.

The cynicism that now pervades American politics is all the more concerning because, for generations, belief in the American “experiment” has been something of a civic religion in a nation lacking a collective spiritualism. As historian Gordon Wood wrote,

We have even built a temple to preserve and display the great documents consecrating the founding of the American creed—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. At the National Archives in Washington, D.C., these holy texts are enshrined in massive, bronze-framed, bulletproof, moisture-controlled glass containers that have been drained of all harmful oxygen.

And yet, despite the fact that we live in a cynical age, there can be no mistaking the fact that the American People want to believe in our experiment; want to believe that our whole is much greater than the sum of our parts; want to believe that public service is an honorable path taken by honorable women and men. As the fictionalized FDR (played by Bill Murray) tells King George VI (played by Samuel West) in Hyde Park on Hudson, “We think they see all our flaws. But, that’s not what they are looking to find when they look to us. “

Rather, as Michael Jonas points out in the current issue of Commonwealth Magazine, voters are looking for “charismatic, visionary leader[s]” to challenge our assumptions and inspire belief in the possible.

We Will Finish The Race and the
Experiment Will Live On.

Those leaders don’t emerge out of the ether. They are individuals who put actions being their words and jump in the ring, all with the courage to lose. As Eric said, “If you want to be involved in politics, at a certain point you’ve got to walk the walk.”

For those of us intent on running for office, “walking the walk” includes taking it to the campaign trial—petitioning, fundraising, door-knocking, and persuading our fellow citizens not merely that we deserve their vote, but that the vote is a power worth exercising.

But even more, it means asserting the all-too-radical belief in what David Brooks calls “the nobility of politics”—that politics is a profession worthy of our energies and that making personal sacrifices for the common good is an inherent quality of good citizenship.

149 years to the day after the death of our greatest President, and a year after bombs tore through the heart of New England’s most sacred secular holiday, let’s remember how even in America’s darkest moments, We The People have rallied around our great experiment.

As Professor Allen Guelzo wrote about the Gettysburg Address:

The genius…lay not in its language or in its brevity (virtues though these were), but in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and wearied by democracy’s follies, and in the reminder that democracy’s survival rested ultimately in the hands of citizens who saw something in democracy worth dying for. We could use that reminder again today.

Today, the urgency with which we are called to belief in the democratic experiment is as strong as it has ever been.

Enon: Dimensionality, Time, and the “Awful Miracle” of Life

“Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.”

--“Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” New York Times (17 Mar. 2014)

In 2010, Paul Harding—a native of Wenham, Mass.—won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, Tinkers. It was an unlikely victory, to say the least. After years of receiving rejection letters from publishing houses—many of whom, in Harding’s words, wondered if he understood “the pace of life today”—Tinkers was published by tiny outfit Bellevue Literary Press.

This week, I picked up Harding’s second novel, Enon, for no other reason other that the fact that the novel was set in Wenham, the sister town to my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (referred to, in the novel, as Hillham). It is a funny feeling to intimately know the seemingly fictional places Harding describes (the Tea House, William Fairfield Drive, Peter Hill, the golf courses, Enon Lake, the canal) and to have taken part in many of the traditions referenced in the book (the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War Monument to the cemetery and back evoking the most visceral memories).

 

Whether you feel those nostalgic sentiments or not, Enon challenges our vision of the world as being a unitary whole, and instead insists on the multidimensionality of time and space.

“Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.”

That “other” Enon is itself, multidimensional. “[T]hat old earth…the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers.”

It’s an image that comes naturally in small, New England towns, where the weight of history is acutely felt in a way that never can be in a metropolis that is constantly reinventing itself (like New York) or a young city at the edge of a continent that remains, to this day, on the frontier (like San Francisco).

In Massachusetts, town after town greets natives and travelers alike with the same signage, proudly announcing—in understated but no uncertain terms—the town’s date of incorporation (which is almost invariably before the founding of the American Republic). Indeed, if population is the hallmark of the town lines of the Plains and the Rockies, in New England, it is history and time.

My mother often said that the afterlife is another dimension and that her loved ones communicate with her through space time in the form of birds that come to frequent our backyard feeder (I’ve asked Mom—if indeed she has the choice—to return to me in the form of the black-capped chickadee, the official bird of the Commonwealth). It’s a comforting concept, albeit one that I’ve never had the spiritual stomach to truly believe. And yet, it seems eminently believable—scientific even—in the wake of both our continued discoveries regarding the origins of the Universe and the magnetic pull of history.

For some of us, that pull is so profound that the reality of existence in our given moment seems wrong. As the protagonist of Enon describes it, the fear of falling into the “old earth” described above was that the odds seemed so impossibly slim (“one in a million or even slighter”) that one would reemerge in the right place at the right time and not be “hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped fossil.”

But if that is indeed true, then it would seemingly follow that those who do “fall” into tears in the space time continuum are, more often than not, spit out into a world far removed from their soul’s internal clock.

Despite this possibility, Enon challenges us to view the “curse,” “condemnation,” and “provocation,” of having been “conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth,” as a miraculous opportunity to be present in whatever moment you happen to find yourself, and to simply and unabashedly feel.