Even within the sliver of spacetime that’s our current, perishable like each current of the previous, an infinity of issues are happening all of sudden, menacing and sumptuous — an enormous simultaneity of which we discover solely a fleck, our consideration narrowed by evolution and exploited by the information media. However the reality stays — and this has all the time been so — that even in essentially the most tumultuous of circumstances, human beings have managed to divert their consideration and its tendrils of intention away from destruction and towards creation. A number of the biggest achievements of civilization, from arithmetic to Nina Simone, have sprung up within the darkest of instances.
That’s what C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) explores in a sermon he delivered in England on the peak of World Warfare II, later included in his 1949 assortment of addresses The Weight of Glory (public library).
Addressing an viewers of frightened younger students, uncertain of what use their mental ardour and artistic labor have in a war-torn world, Lewis presents an elixir of perspective:
The conflict creates no completely new state of affairs; it merely aggravates the everlasting human state of affairs in order that we will now not ignore it. Human life has all the time been lived on the sting of a precipice. Human tradition has all the time needed to exist beneath the shadow of one thing infinitely extra essential than itself. If males had postponed the seek for information and sweetness till they have been safe, the search would by no means have begun. We’re mistaken after we evaluate conflict with “regular life.” Life has by no means been regular. Even these intervals which we expect most tranquil, just like the nineteenth century, prove, on nearer inspection, to be filled with crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Believable causes have by no means been missing for laying aside all merely cultural actions till some imminent hazard has been averted or some crying injustice put proper. However humanity way back selected to neglect these believable causes. They needed information and sweetness now, and wouldn’t anticipate the acceptable second that by no means comes.
With an eye fixed to our particular evolutionary inheritance, he provides:
The bugs have chosen a unique line: they’ve sought first the fabric welfare and safety of the hive, and presumably they’ve their reward. Males* are completely different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, focus on the final new poem whereas advancing to the partitions of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This isn’t panache; it’s our nature.
In a splendid rebuttal of the view that tradition is an extravagance — “an inexcusable frivolity on the a part of creatures loaded with such terrible duties as we” — he presents a salve for our ahistorical rashes of panic:
We want intimate information of the previous. Not that the previous has any magic about it, however as a result of we can not research the long run, and but want one thing to set in opposition to the current, to remind us that the fundamental assumptions have been fairly completely different in numerous intervals and that a lot which appears sure to the uneducated is merely momentary vogue.
[…]
The conflict has probably not raised up a brand new enemy however solely aggravated an previous one. There are all the time loads of rivals to our work. We’re all the time falling in love or quarrelling, on the lookout for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting in poor health and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we will all the time be ready for some distraction or different to finish earlier than we will actually get right down to our work. The one individuals who obtain a lot are those that need information so badly that they search it whereas the circumstances are nonetheless unfavourable. Beneficial circumstances by no means come.
In a sentiment Albert Camus would come to echo a decade later in his insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” he provides:
By no means, in peace or conflict, commit your advantage or your happiness to the long run. Glad work is finest performed by the person who takes his long-term plans considerably calmly and works from second to second… The current is the one time during which any obligation may be performed or any grace acquired.
Complement with Toni Morrison on our creative duty in dark times and Nick Cave on the necessity of hope in a fragile world, then revisit Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.
