It is supposed to have shown itself by now, wisdom, I mean. I’m supposed to be flowering with it, rife with blossoms of wit and aphorisms meant to affirm that I’ve figured somethings out after 7 decades alive. Instead, I find myself thinking that my share of wisdom is here somewhere, maybe like an aquifer, and so perhaps I should look for a spring or even merely a seep where the grass is lush and high and never dries out.
What I’ve really learned is that I know next to nothing with certainty. I know that prophets and pundits are absurd – chimps throwing darts at boards covered in dozens of predictions could do as well in telling us what comes next.
I know that Camus was right about not taking the side of executioners. In Ukraine that still works. The Russians are simply awful in every way. But what of Israel and Gaza now? Hamas is a bunch of fanatics guilty of mass murder and mass rape. Netanyahu’s ministers sanction the murder of innocent West Bank Palestinians and the theft of their land by their own fanatics, and Israeli forces are almost certainly guilty of war crimes including using starvation as a weapon. What does wisdom have to say about all that?
Almost every day I try to list what I believe remains of value. I’ll remind myself that this is what I believe is true. It is one way of pushing back against the ethos of the age, a narcissistic nihilism.
I have friends who do the daily work on a personal level in seeking to make this world fractionally better – they volunteer at food banks, sponsor refugees, give comfort to dying strangers, say blessed words to the living about their beloved dead, pay the tuition of poor students to attend a good school.
I know those actions are good.
I know that cruelty is always wrong. I know that making human beings into things is always wrong. I know that ideological rigidity is a slow working poison.
I know that personal honor, that ancient word, is worth preserving.
I know that there is an abundance of beauty in the world that is worth preserving, the most beautiful of all being children.
I know that clarity of thought and expression is a value always worth pursuing.
I also know that writing all this is absurd in itself. This action is an exercise. It is me pitching my voice into the void, maybe just to hear myself speaking. That is not a cynical point of view, merely real. Maybe that is the best summation of my claim on wisdom.
