Letter #91: First Steps to the Grave

All Progress is a Form of Decay

Mine son.

Your last letter about splitting apart matter and spirit — putting lampshades and rocks in the “objective reality” box while beauty and love go into the “subjective and therefore not really real” box —  brings us back to Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, which you were discussing in Letter #82.

Barfield opposed the idea that words begin by describing material things and become spiritual metaphors over time. So, for instance, some experts say spiritus begins by meaning wind or breath and then comes to be a metaphor for the life force. Barfield said no. The word begins by meaning both breath and spirit because they are perceived as one inseparable thing. It’s only over time that a culture begins to separate these ideas into the objective and subjective.

Both you and I found this idea life changing, I think because it was so obvious that the original conjoined, inseparable meaning was the right one, and the separation into subjective and objective was the delusion, a kind of decadence.

But it’s a decadence not without progress, right? We lose our souls, but we gain science: antibiotics, spaceships, video games and such. So it goes. In a life that ends, all progress is also a form of decay. Even a child’s first steps are so many steps closer to the grave. And certainly, by the time you start to acquire wisdom, you are walking in the valley of the shadow. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk, forgets where it’s going, misplaces its bifocals, bumps into a Corinthian column and falls down a flight of stairs.

But while all things made by mortal man have, like mortal man, their beginnings, middles and ends, those stations are not connected by a straight line but something more like a spiral. A person or a culture or an art form may have a peak in youth and then again in middle age and then a final brilliant flame-out before the end. Old Rome was great in its republican days, and again as an empire and once again before it finally died.

So here we are, what? At a bit of a low moment surely. And, not coincidentally, a moment when the spiritual nature of reality is as little understood as it was when men sacrificed their children in the hope of bringing rain. When I hear Yuval Harari say morality is a fiction or the rock singer Stevie Nicks praise her abortion because killing her child helped her dreadful music career, I begin to believe we have sunk so low that even I might live to see the rebirth of wisdom.

It will be the old wisdom, of course — because there is no other — but it will be spoken in new ways, because the old world and its language are gone for good. I don’t think we should be afraid of that.

But I could be wrong. Maybe we should be terrified.

Love, Dad