Lanterns On the Levee
Highlights from: Lanterns On the Levee by William Alexander Percy (35)
who never put a lump of butter into steaming batter-bread (spoon-bread is the same thing) or lolled their tongues over pain-perdu!
I was talking to one, an old-timer, not too successful, in front of his small store a short time ago. He suddenly asked in his thick Russian accent: “Do you know Pushkin? Ah, beautiful, better than Shelley or Byron!” Why shouldn’t such a people inherit the earth, not, surely, because of their meekness, but because of a steadier fire, a tension and tenacity that make all other whites seem stodgy and unintellectual.
The American Negro is interested neither in the past nor in the future, this side of heaven. He neither remembers nor plans. The white man does little else: to him the present is the one great unreality.
A white poolroom or soda-water stand is a depressing place where leisure does not seem excellent or ribaldry amusing. But Negro convocations, legal or otherwise, are always enjoyable affairs right down to the first pistol-shot.
Once the ice-cream gave out just before my turn came. This was my first experience of the injustice of things. One is not born a Stoic.
Old orders change I know, and Mur knew, having herself lived through the death throes of one with all its wreckage of aspirations and possibilities, with bitterness to master and new hope to create. But new orders change too. Only one thing never changes—the human heart. Revolutions and ideologies may lacerate it, even break it, but they cannot change its essence. After Fascism and Communism and Capitalism and Socialism are over and forgotten as completely as slavery and the old South, that same headstrong human heart will be clamoring for the old things it wept for in Eden—love and a chance to be noble, laughter and a chance to adore something, someone, somewhere.
The color of our temperament, our chief concern, is nothing of our making. If we are pink, we can only hope that fate will not set us cheek by jowl with red. If we see the world through mauve glasses, there’s no sort of sense in wishing they were white. We may only console ourselves by noting that a certain opalescence, like sun through the misty mornings of London, is not without a loveliness denied the truer and cruder white noons of the desert.
Calling to mind with gratitude those to whom we are indebted on our journey is not only a sort of piety, but one of the few pleasures that endure without loss of luster to the end.
When your peace is without grayness, it comes seldom and does not stay long; some are still hunting for it and some are trying to find it again, but know they won’t.
I’m unhappily convinced that our exteriors have increased in importance while our interiors have deteriorated: it is a good paint job, but the lighting and sanitation are execrable. A good world, I acknowledge, an excellent world, but poor in spirit and common as hell. Vulgarity, a contagious disease like the itch, unlike it is not a disease of the surface, but eats to the marrow.
This is chilly comfort, however, to the living members of an aristocracy in the act of dying. Under the southern Valhalla the torch has been thrust, already the bastions have fallen. Watching the flames mount, we, scattered remnant of the old dispensation, smile scornfully, but grieve in our hearts. A side-show Götterdämmerung perhaps, yet who shall inherit our earth, the earth we loved? The meek? The Hagens? In either event, we accept, but we do not approve.
They knew leadership was a burden, they knew there was no such thing in the long run as public gratitude for public service, they also knew that unless the intelligent disinterested few fought for good government, government would be bad.
Anybody who was anybody must feel noblesse oblige, must concern himself with good government, must fight, however feebly or ineffectually or hopelessly, for the public weal.
eagerly:
“I guess a man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.”
To be at once intellectually honest and religious is a rack on which many have perished and on which I writhed dumbly, for I knew even then there were certain things which, like overwhelming physical pain, you must fight out alone, at the bottom of your own dark well, beyond ministration of assuagement or word of advice, incommunicado and leper-lonely. If you die it is natural; if you live you have learned pity and the strength of silence.
From him you didn’t learn a subject, but life. I suspect anyway that the important things we learn we never remember because they become part of us, we absorb them. We don’t absorb the multiplication tables (at least not the seventh and eleventh), but those things that are vitamins and calories to the spirit, the spirit seizes on and transmutes into its own strength, wholly and forgetfully. Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities, as Judge Griffin had.
But Father was not immoral, he was good. Suddenly I experienced the beginning of wisdom. Father was lonely, he never would be or could be anything else. Realizing that hurt me a lot. But I thought Father was single and unique in his loneliness: it was only the beginning of wisdom.
== Another is immortal for cleansing the world of yellow fever, but the ignorant half-breeds among whom he worked remember him now only for his gentleness, his directness without bluntness, his courtesy which robbed obedience of all humiliation==
answered:
“What is most abhorrent to the Japanese soul is obvious plan. The expected is uninteresting. Plan, of course, there must be, so subtle it is concealed, so imaginative it appears unplanned. Axes and balances, geometrical design, formal arrangement—anyone can learn these; they must be avoided if your creation is to appear not man’s but the excellent whimsy of the gods. Nothing is so tedious, so obvious, so boring to the Japanese soul as the garden of Versailles. It is a problem in mathematics. Nikko is as inconceivable as a sunset or a moth’s wing.”
It’s a grievous and a long way you travel to reach serenity and the acceptance of facts without hurt or shock. By that time you are too old to practice your wisdom and to young ears your advice might as well be uttered in Icelandic. Ripeness is all, said the wise one, and I suppose that’s all there is to it. But one isn’t ripe at nineteen. I was gourd-green, fearful, treading ledges without a Virgil.
At sight or sound of something unbearably beautiful I wanted desperately to share it, I wanted with me everyone I’d ever cared for—and someone else besides. I was sick for a home I had never seen and lonely for a hand I had never touched. So for a year I ate and walked and lived and slept with loneliness, until she was so familiar I came not to hate her but to know whatever happened in however many after years she alone would be faithful to me and, departing a little way for some brief beatific interlude, would always return. And that perhaps is the only important thing I learned that year. What must be learned at last had as well be learned early
On leaving college if we had some inkling of our own aptitudes we could plan our lives more usefully and more happily. For the unfortunate without aptitudes of course there’s no hope of direction except from wind and tide. Conceding myself to have been an extreme case of jelly-fish, yet I notice today that college graduates continue to be distressfully disoriented and, remembering, I grieve for their waste and pain. Yet down wrong turnings too there’s plentiful adventure
I know what it is! The law is common sense plus clear English!” I’ve never heard a better definition of what the law should be and isn’t. In comparison “Pop” Gray’s dictum: “The aim of the law is settlement, not justice,” seems weary and defeatist.
There was so much that we had not yet experienced and that lay ahead, particularly fiery furnaces and anvils of pain. But
Probably there is no nostalgia so long-lived and hopeless as that of the college graduate returning to his native town. He is a stranger though he is home. He is sick for a communal life that was and can never be again, a life merry with youth and unshadowed by responsibilities. He is hungry for the easy intimacies which competitive anxious living does not provide. He is unproved when proof is demanded on every side. In this alien environment, the only one he may now call his own, he is unknown, even to himself.
What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said. It often gushed up almost involuntarily like automatic writing, and the difficulty lay in keeping the hot gush continuous and unselfconscious while at the same time directing it with cold intellect into form. I could never write in cold blood. The results were intensely personal, whatever their other defects. But by some quirk I was always aware in the act of putting words to paper that what I was feeling and thinking had been felt and thought by thousands in every generation. Only that conviction would have permitted me to publish without feeling guilty of indecent exposure.
When you feel something intensely, you want to write it down—if anguish, to stanch the bleeding; if delight, to prolong the moment. When after years of pondering you feel you have discovered a new truth or an old one which suddenly for you has the excitement of a new one, you write a longish poem. To keep it free from irrelevant photographic details you set it in some long-ago time, one, of course, you love and perhaps once lived in.
An old man wet with tobacco juice and furtive-eyed summed up the result: “Wal, the bottom rail’s on top and it’s gwiner stay thar.” He wasn’t much as a human being, but as a diagnostician and prophet he was first-rate. It was my first sight of the rise of the masses, but not my last. Now we have Russia and Germany, we have the insolence of organized labor and the insolence of capital, examples both of the insolence of the parvenu; we have the rise of the masses from Mississippi east, and back again west to Mississippi. The herd is on the march, and when it stampedes, there’s blood galore and beauty is china under its hoofs.
Since then I haven’t expected that what should be would be and I haven’t believed that virtue guaranteed any reward except itself. The good die when they should live, the evil live when they should die; heroes perish and cowards escape; noble efforts do not succeed because they are noble, and wickedness is not consumed in its own nature. Looking at truth is not at first a heartening experience—it becomes so, if at all, only with time, with infinite patience, and with the luck of a little personal happiness. When I first saw defeat as the result of a man’s best efforts, I didn’t like the sight, and it struck me that someone had bungled and perhaps it wasn’t man.
I have noticed that if you afford people a chance to give, they are little less than angels; but if you afford them a chance to receive, they almost convince you somebody is right about the need of a hell. The shabby truth is that in June the Red Cross began its campaign of rehabilitation, and people began to receive—food and clothing of course, but in addition household goods, farm supplies, and money
People are divided into Leaners and Leanees: into oaks more or less sturdy and vines quite, quite clinging. I was never a Leaner, yet, although seldom mistaken for one, I find people are constantly feeling impelled to protect me
Should I therefore teach deceit, dishonor, ruthlessness, bestial force to the children in order that they survive? Better that they perish. It is sophistry to speak of two sets of virtues, there is but one: virtue is an end in itself; the survival virtues are means, not ends. Honor and honesty, compassion and truth are good even if they kill you, for they alone give life its dignity and worth. Yet probably England and France and all the good and the noble and the true of all the world will die and obscenity will triumph. Probably those that practiced virtue will be destroyed, but it is better for men to die than to call evil good, and virtue itself will never die.
We of my generation have lost one line of fortifications after another, the old South, the old ideals, the old strengths. We are now watching the followers of Jesus and Buddha and Socrates being driven from the face of the earth. But there’s time ahead, thousands of years: there is but one good life and men yearn for it and will again practice it, though of my contemporaries only the stars will see. Love and compassion, beauty and innocence will return. It is better to have breathed them an instant than to have supported iniquity a millennium. Perhaps only flames can rouse man from his apathy to his destiny.
Having gone on for half a century, you find to your surprise you have passed the crest and are going down the shady side of the mountain. It is pleasant country and not sad, though tinged with autumn and life in the air deceptively. Down the long easy slope there are no trees, but wideness everywhere and tall seeded grasses that glisten and tremble. To the right great shafts of low sunlight lie benign and quiet, reaching down and down to the tender blue smudge that must be the sea. But in front, near, though down a way, is the cypress grove to which you know you are going. Purple-shadowed, tall, and very still, you see it, but not by looking squarely. You are not afraid to look, but you are not hankering to be there yet, not quite yet. It will not fade out like the sea and the sunlight, no need to hurry.