It is not that thin membrane between life and death that troubles me now. I’ve been pushed up against it. Friends and family have been pushed through it. I am of an age where it could appear at any moment … and I know the reality of that now in ways I could never have known it to be real before.
Instead, I have been in a long mourning period not for the deaths of others, but for all that I knew as good that more and more seems lost. Maybe this is only the lament of a man who suddenly feels himself to be old and out of sync with a world moving into realms of experience that cut with a scythe just about everywhere. There are no safe places anymore.
I do not mean safe in the sense of physical safety although one could make the argument that, at least in this country’s contemporary cultish devotion to guns and its increasingly frayed sense of civic manners, we have never been less safe. And I am not speaking of innocence, neither of a nation nor of its people. Only small children are innocent. Nations by their nature are steeped in blood. We adults by virtue of our choices are complicit in any number of awful abuses. If you think you are really innocent, consider the computer you own and are using at this moment and where its components originated and how much slave or child labor went into it, how much environmental damage, how much exploitation of the poor of the earth.
What I am referring to is the idea of a sanctuary from moral and emotional derangement and from a culture so self-divided into warring factions, each of which believe that their truths are perfect and inviolable. I am speaking of some place where one might be preserved from a cultural narcissism so pervasive that silence and retreat become that last refuge.
With the right means, one could unplug every device, move to Northwestern Maine or Niobrara County in Wyoming, the least populated county in the least populated State, go into town once a month for supplies, refuse all media except that printed on paper and live the life of an anchorite.
Without those economic means, one must plug into the infinite misery of noise that is contemporary communications. It is all becoming too much. I wonder that we aren’t all mad. On the very worst news days, as our capacity for outrage falters under the weight of so much awful behavior, and when even our simple comprehension seems stymied by factual and conspiratorial avalanches, it seems that we just might be.
