Something kind of profound that happened to me yesterday. I can’t be too specific, for obvious reasons, but I don’t really need to be to get to the heart of it.
A friend in another state reached out recently to ask me for my help in giving advice and help to a friend of his who is suffering greatly. My friend thought that I could bring a fresh perspective to his hurting friend’s case. So joined them on a Zoom call.
The poor man! He’s in so much pain — not physical, but emotional, psychological, and spiritual. We talked for just over an hour. Given the specific nature of what the suffering man is going through, and how it corresponds in some ways with my own experiences, I see why my pal brought me in. I hope I was able to help in some way.
After we finished, I prayed for the suffering man for a while. Reflecting on his pain, I thought about how many hurting souls — mostly men, but not exclusively — have come into my life over the years, especially since my divorce. You could make the accusation that I am too confessional in my writing, and I wouldn’t disagree, though the most intimate things I’ve dealt with, I’ve never disclosed, and never will.
The up side of this, though, is that people who are carrying great burdens, especially if they are like the ones I’ve carried, and still do carry for the most part, open up to me. With each passing year, I grow ever more astonished at the loads everyday people bear on their backs. If you saw the guy I spoke with today, you would think nothing of him. Just an ordinary guy; the friend who put us in touch and shared the call with us told me this man is really successful in his profession.
But that poor soul has had a very hard life, since childhood, and is trying to keep his head above water. There are so many people like this. I say in this space from time to time how one of the truest things I’ve ever read is that familiar admonition: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” Dear God, yes.
How do people do it? Last year, I reached out to help a friend out West who is going through a rough time, and he brushed me off. Though a Christian, he’s one of those “stiff upper lip” guys who thinks it’s unmanly to dwell on one’s feelings. Just push on, and don’t think about it. Recently we reconnected, and he sounded a lot better. Turns out someone he knows convinced him to try EMDR therapy for his traumas. He hesitated, but something compelled him to give it a try. He’s now a changed man.
When he told me about it, I told him I had had a few sessions of EMDR a couple of years ago, after suffering an attack of something I didn’t understand, but which a psychiatrist friend told me was a PTSD reaction (“Yes,” said my friend, “you can get PTSD from a bad marriage and divorce.”) EMDR helped me a lot. We had a good talk after that, my Western friend and I. He’s better. A lot better.
Earlier this week, a writer friend (and reader of this newsletter) shared with me his idea for a potential book, and asked for my reaction. I read what he sent, and told him I thought it was a great idea — it was an analysis of our widely shared cultural malaise — but that I doubted it would find an audience. Why? Because at the risk of my own business model, I think people are just tired of reading about what’s wrong with the world. They need hope.
In my exchange with this writer friend, I told him that so many of you readers — people who are generous enough to subscribe — complain that I don’t offer enough hope in this space. That’s a fair call, I think, but it’s not because I lack hope. I’m a good diagnostician of our cultural and spiritual problems, I think, but it’s so very much easier to identify what’s wrong than to identify how to make it right. I feel that the best I can do is to try my best to explore the problems, their source, and their nature, so people can at least understand what we’re dealing with.
But you know, the truth is I don’t have any real solutions to the omnicrisis, and I find it hard to take seriously anybody who claims to have one. The hope I have, and the hope I try to impart through my work (mostly through my books; this newsletter is a diary of whatever I’m thinking about on a given day) is not the hope of solving the problems, but the hope of enduring them without despair or capitulation. That’s not what most people want, but given the limits we face, it’s what most of us need.
Given how melancholy I come across, and even how doomerish, it’s not difficult for me to understand why people who meet me are surprised by how more or less cheerful I am in real life. If I had to pick an epitaph for my tombstone, it would be those words from a great Auden poem — his order to **“Stagger onward rejoicing.” **
The poem is titled “Atlantis,” and I think it might be my favorite poem ever. Here it is in full; it’s advice for a traveler in the ancient world, as he is about to board the boat to take him out to sea. It’s told in the voice of a wise man giving counsel and blessing. Read it, then we’ll talk about it below:
Being set on the ideaOf getting to Atlantis,You have discovered of courseOnly the Ship of Fools isMaking the voyage this year,As gales of abnormal forceAre predicted, and that youMust therefore be ready toBehave absurdly enoughTo pass for one of The Boys,At least appearing to loveHard liquor, horseplay and noise.Should storms, as may well happen,Drive you to anchor a weekIn some old harbour-cityOf Ionia, then speakWith her witty scholars, menWho have proved there cannot beSuch a place as Atlantis:Learn their logic, but noticeHow its subtlety betraysTheir enormous simple grief;Thus they shall teach you the waysTo doubt that you may believe.If, later, you run agroundAmong the headlands of Thrace,Where with torches all night longA naked barbaric raceLeaps frenziedly to the soundOf conch and dissonant gong:On that stony savage shoreStrip off your clothes and dance, forUnless you are capableOf forgetting completelyAbout Atlantis, you willNever finish your journey.Again, should you come to gayCarthage or Corinth, take partIn their endless gaiety;And if in some bar a tart,As she strokes your hair, should say"This is Atlantis, dearie,"Listen with attentivenessTo her life-story: unlessYou become acquainted nowWith each refuge that tries toCounterfeit Atlantis, howWill you recognise the true?Assuming you beach at lastNear Atlantis, and beginThat terrible trek inlandThrough squalid woods and frozenThundras where all are soon lost;If, forsaken then, you stand,Dismissal everywhere,Stone and now, silence and air,O remember the great deadAnd honour the fate you are,Travelling and tormented,Dialectic and bizarre.Stagger onward rejoicing;And even then if, perhapsHaving actually gotTo the last col, you collapseWith all Atlantis shiningBelow you yet you cannotDescend, you should still be proudEven to have been allowedJust to peep at AtlantisIn a poetic vision:Give thanks and lie down in peace,Having seen your salvation.All the little household godsHave started crying, but sayGood-bye now, and put to sea.Farewell, my dear, farewell: mayHermes, master of the roads,And the four dwarf Kabiri,Protect and serve you always;And may the Ancient of DaysProvide for all you must doHis invisible guidance,Lifting up, dear, upon youThe light of His countenance.
In the poem, “Atlantis” is a symbol of utopia, of paradise, of heaven. How do we arrive there? Auden tells us the journey will be difficult, and full of trials and adventures. We begin our journey aboard a “Ship of Fools” — here Auden is talking about the human condition. He counsels surrender to play as a way of experiencing ego-forgetting joy amid the “gales of abnormal force” that inevitably will come, but warns not to surrender to the “hard liquor, horseplay, and noise.” You will lose your way if you do.
In the second stanza, the poet counsels consulting the wise men, and learning from them, but not to take them with too much seriousness. They too bear “enormous simple grief” over life. Their logic may be sound, but that doesn’t mean they are at peace with suffering. Nevertheless, learning to question the things that philosophers question will help you in the end towards a more durable faith.
The third stanza is again an encouragement to embrace the festive, to forget about your problems for a while. If all you think about is reaching your destination, Atlantis, you won’t get there. What Auden is saying is that developing the ability to endure the long and difficult journey to the future paradise requires being able to forget about paradise from time to time, and simply enjoy the present.
The fourth stanza is especially insightful. The tart in the bar tries to convince you that you’ve arrived in Atlantis. Obviously the corrupt old bird is wrong, says Auden, but don’t be so quick to dismiss her. Listen to her story, and try to understand why she thinks she’s found paradise there. You need to know the nature of counterfeit paradises so you’ll be able to know when you’ve reached the real one.
Stanza five is deep. It’s about the hardest going of the journey, when we are no longer gliding on the sea, but hiking over hard ground. It will seem at some point that all is lost. When that moment comes, stop and think about all the heroes that have made this journey before you, and consider that you are a fellow pilgrim, walking in their footsteps. (Note that this is not a Christian poem; Auden was making his way to Christianity when he wrote it.) You might feel all alone and “forsaken,” but that’s not really true. Be aware that there is nobility in your struggle (“honour the fate you are”), and try to take comfort in that. You are not really alone, nor does your trek lack meaning.
In the phrase “dialectic and bizarre,” the poet is saying that to be human is to be a tormented traveller living out the tension between possibility and necessity. The “dialectic” is a concept that originated with Hegel, who believed that human life and progress consisted of the process of trying to reconcile speculative striving with hard limits. When “thesis” meets “antithesis,” they produce “synthesis.” In Kierkegaard, whose Christianity helped draw Auden to the faith, life is a struggle between the Aesthetic (beauty, pleasure, entertainment) and the Ethical (order, logic, rules) — a struggle that is entailed and surpassed in the Religious mode of life. What Auden is telling us here is not to expect everything to make sense.
To travel the road of life is to be tormented by life’s contradictions; one must accept that all of us are “bizarre” in that we can’t always make sense of the disparate thoughts, desires, and events in our lives, and that that strange fact is simply part of what it means to be human. Remember, you could have stayed on at the bar in Corinth, keeping company with the tart, seduced by her siren song saying you had found Atlantis. But it would have been a lie, just as it would have been a lie to remain at the feet of the philosophers who had everything worked out in a logical system, but one that depended on denying the inescapability of suffering and grief.
“Stagger onward rejoicing,” says the poet. Why rejoice, though staggering? Because you know your journey has meaning, and that you are headed towards Atlantis. Then you face the final challenge: seeing Atlantis, but not being able to reach it. Auden advises simply being thankful you were given a chance to glimpse it, because you will have “seen your salvation.” The poet is telling us that the meaning of Atlantis is not to be found in the mythical city itself, but in the pilgrimage to its ramparts. We are given glimpses of Atlantis “in a poetic vision” — in art, poetry, religion, and the many ways that heaven manifests itself in this mortal life.
As I said, this is not an explicitly Christian poem; it ends with a beautiful pagan blessing hinting that the lights of Atlantis — of heaven — come from the shining face of the “Ancient of Days,” an Old Testament name for God. It should be very easy for you to understand this poem, spoken in the voice of an elder in the ancient Mediterranean, in a Christian way.
Auden’s poem is how I approach life, though obviously in a Christian mode. But that doesn’t differ all that much from the pagan wisdom here; mostly, my faith would manifest in “that terrible trek inland”: when it seems to the traveler that all is lost in what Psalm 23 calls “the valley of the shadow of death,” I know in my deepest heart that “Thou art with me/Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me” And I know that Atlantis — heaven — is a real place, though not a place we can enter in this life. The quest for heaven, and for unity there with the Ancient of Days, gives us direction and meaning, and helps us learn from the trials and temptations of this life, while never forgetting that nowhere on this earth is paradise, and that those who stop along the way and settle, however intelligent or companionable they may be, have failed in some way.
Auden is helping to reconcile his reader to the fact that life is not easy, and suffering is inevitable. If we think we can escape struggle, we deceive ourselves, and we might lose Atlantis if we embrace that deceit, which comes in many forms. In this life, any place or person or way of life that claims to be Atlantis is not Atlantis. We are on pilgrimage, all of us, and the journey, whatever its agonies, has ultimate meaning. The walk through the world itself changes us, and makes us ready to enter the true Atlantis. If we keep our eyes open, our minds open to God’s “invisible guidance,” and our hearts rejoicing though we stagger, we may be granted visions of grace, the sight of eternally shining Atlantis in the darkened valleys of this mortal life.
That’s how I find hope. But how do you explain that in prose? Thank God for poets, novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Thank God for priests and liturgies. Thank God for companions along the way. They all help me glimpse Atlantis. And you too, if you will let them.
Please join me in praying that my new friend, met on Zoom, will lift his suffering face from its weary fixation on this hard earth, and raise his eyes to see his salvation. I’m serious. He’s in pain, caught in snares he doesn’t fully understand, but he is seeking freedom. It’s our duty to help men and women like him. You have them in your life too, but you might not see them.
Look harder. There’s another famous saying that is perhaps clichéd, but like most clichés, true: “Evangelism is just one beggar telling another where to find bread.” That’s how life is on pilgrimage too. Loving others is just one broken soul showing other broken souls where to find healing — and staggering along with them, rejoicing and teaching them how to rejoice as well.
Sorry to get so personal, but that really got to me yesterday. A good weekend to you all. The rest of today’s newsletter continues below for subscribers.
