The True and Only Heaven
McWilliams, Wilson Carey
that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it. In that hard singing school of Irish poets, Heaney has learned all the lessons. He was professor of poetry at Oxford for good...
...But not its source because it does not have one, which is all sources' source and origin although it is the night...
...What we are to make of the antiphonal qualification, "although it is the night," finally comes to some dark sense in conclusion to "Station Island" XI: Hear it calling out to every creature And they drink these waters, although it is dark because it is the night...
...The haw fruit becomes Diogenes's lamp lighting his quest for the honest or just man: he holds up at eye-level on its twig, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone, its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you, its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on...
...Meanwhile, the large-scale organizations and governments associated with the pursuit of growth are top-heavy schools of human debilitation, caught in a dialectic that sets domination from the top against servile irresponsibility below...
...Today, Lasch argues, that terrestrial highway is coming to a dead end as human beings face the finitude of the planet and its fragility...
...In this view, in fact, there is no luxury, strictly speaking: The idea of excess implies limits in nature, a human place in the order of things, where modemity's mainstream held that if there is any such order, it is morally nugatory, since human beings are not to obey nature but to rule...
...But in, the moral vision that Heaney speaks "when your breath plumes in the frost," seeing the thing is reflection and judgment...
...The toil of life becomes some- thing like that of refiguring what was said behind those closed gates and, despite fratricide, signing the truth of mortality...
...Reading Seamus Heaney's poems leaves you mired with the sense of Adam before a fallen world, and washed in the con- sciousness of what is justly gone...
...Wilson Carey McWillinms l[ l~ or almost three decades now, Christopher Lasch has been taking the measure of America's political soul, writing with grace and learning and relentless integrity, an academic Orwell, eccentric in the best sense, the voice of no party and for all seasons...
...This is the logic of the Enlightenment's notion of progress, which subordinated public life to private desire, shrinking the citizen into the consumer...
...Moreover, the Enlightenment's combination of individ- ualism and universalism, liberating desire in the service of humanity, implied con- tempt for the bonds of family, community...
...With the consciousness of blood, of bone, of language and religion, he can reflect on his earthly home, that muddied bog and if only for a moment give us a pure source: That eternal fountain, hidden away, I know its haven and its secrecy although it is the night...
...It is full of sorties and byways, ven- tures into economic theory, social criticism, 264: Commonweal and democratic doctrine, with brief essays, as polished as cameos, on figures as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Henry George, Georges Sorel, and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Growing out of the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of progress reflected the new conviction that human beings could and should aspire to master nature...
...Do not be afraid...
...I am repining for this living fountain Within this bread of life I see it plain although it is the night...
...He was professor of poetry at Oxford for good reason...
...And that truth he tells us perhaps comes most pointedly home in "Haw Lantern," which reads the sign of the shriveled fruit of the hawthorne tree, "a small light for small people...
...BACK TO THE FUTURE What we admire in all this, he tells us most clearly in "The Master": Deliberately he would unclasp his book of withholding a page at a time, and it was nothing arcane, just the old rules...
...THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN Progress and Its Critics Christopher Lasch Norton, $25, 591 pp...
...Insatiable desire came to be regarded as natural and welcome, the motive force of a process that made old luxuries into present neces- sities...
...His latest, The True and Only Heaven, is a grand, rambling book--or even, several books...
...Lasch takes his title from Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad," but Hawthorne him- self looked back to Bunyan, so it is appro- priate that Lasch begins by tracing his own quest for the intellectual grail: The True and Only Heaven is a Pilgrim's Progress for the late twentieth century, its theme defined by Lasch's inquiry into the idea of progress and its critics...
...Tell the truth...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 8
